Category Archives: Radiation

PEER: RADIATION PROBLEMS MULTIPLY FOR SAN FRANCISCO’S HUNTERS POINT

Nearly All U.S. Navy Radiation Samples Were Falsified, Fraudulent or Unreliable

For Immediate Release: Monday, April 9, 2018
Contact: Kirsten Stade (240) 247-0296

Washington, DC — Troubles afflicting the nearly 30-year radiation cleanup of San Francisco’s Hunters Point shipyard are far worse than previously reported. Between 90 and 97% of the U.S. Navy soil samples re-examined by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are “neither reliable nor defensible,” according to an EPA review released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

The Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in the city’s southeast corner was the site of nuclear weapons research causing widespread radiological …

San Onofre Update

On December 2, 1942, the first high level nuclear waste in the world was created. Three quarters of a century later there is still no permanent repository for such waste. We created immensely dangerous stuff with no thought as to how to safely dispose of it.

Irradiated nuclear fuel is among the most toxic materials on earth. The waste has to be isolated from the human environment for about half a million years, a period longer than our existence as a species. Our government has existed for a mere 230 years. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been around for about …

Radiation Protection Standards Weakened CBG and PEER to File Suit

EARLIER THIS YEAR, DESPITE YEARS OF EFFORTS by Bridge the Gap, EPA issued new Protective Action Guides (PAGs) which dramatically weaken protection of the public from exposure to radiation. The PAGs allow the public to drink water contaminated with radioactivity at levels thousands of times higher than the Safe Drinking Water Act permits, without any action taken to protect them from
such exposures.

The PAGs also would allow long-term contamination of areas so high (the equivalent of thousands of chest X-rays a year) that EPA’s own official estimates are that every fourth person would get a cancer from the radiation, …

Santa Susana Cleanup in Danger

by CBG President
Dan Hirsch

SEVENTY YEARS AGO, A facility for testing nuclear reactors and rockets too
dangerous to be conducted near populated areas was established on the boundary of Los Angeles and Ventura Counties. Since then, the population has mushroomed, with half a million people now living within ten miles.

In 1979, Bridge the Gap brought to public attention a partial nuclear meltdown that had occurred at that Santa Susana Field Laboratory in 1959 but had been kept secret for decades. At least three other reactors suffered accidents there as well, along with numerous radioactive fires, spills, and releases. …