Reports

Nuclear Cleanup: The Standards Conflict, Committee to Bridge the Gap, 2004

Report 1: Hunters Point Naval Shipyard: The Nuclear Arms Race Comes Home – October 2018

Report 2: The Great Majority of Hunters Point Sites Were Never Sampled for Radioactive Contamination — And the Testing That Was Performed Was Deeply Flawed – October 2018

Report 3: Hunters Point Shipyard Cleanup Used Outdated and Grossly Non-Protective Cleanup Standards – October 2018

Report 4: FROM CLEANUP TO COVERUP: How the Navy Quietly Abandoned Commitments to Clean Up Hunters Point Naval Shipyard and is Instead Covering Up Much of the Contamination – August 2019

Companion Reports Issued with Report 4:

Plant Uptake of Radionuclides and Toxic Chemicals from Contaminated Soils Below a Shallow Soil Cover by William Bianchi, PhD, August 2019

Bioturbation, Erosion, and Seismic Activity Make Shallow Soil Covers Ineffective at Isolating Contamination by Howard Wilshire, PhD, August 2019

EPA Issues New Protective Action Guides for Radioactive Releases Extraordinarily Weakening Public Protections, Committee to Bridge the Gap, April 2013.

Proposed Relaxation of EPA Drinking Water Standards for Radioactivity, Committee to Bridge the Gap, October 2008.

Summary: In the waning days of the George W. Bush administration, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) drafted extraordinary new radiological standards for the governmental response to a wide range of radiological release events. Doug Guarino of the trade publication Inside EPA obtained a copy of the secret draft "Protective Action Guidance for Radiological Incidents," dated August 2007 and marked "Please Do Not Distribute" and "Do Not Cite or Quote." Mr. Guarino has written about the concerns the document has triggered within EPA and other state regulators.

In late 2008, it became clear to CBG that EPA was contemplating the issuance of the draft. In this report, we analyze this incredible proposal pushed by EPA leadership. CBG's report specifically focuses on the proposal to allow the public to ingest drinking water with radioactive concentrations orders of magnitude higher than EPA's longstanding radiological drinking water standards.

The Proposed Ward Valley Radioactive Waste Facility: Papers Submitted to the National Academy of Sciences Committee to Bridge the Gap and Southern California Federation of Scientists, October 12, 1994.

Summary: Comprehensive radiation monitoring data for the US Ecology LLRW site at Beatty, Nevada, published in the last few days, provide a unique opportunity to evaluate the validity of optimistic transport models that have been used to predict travel times to groundwater in the tens of millennia. The newly available data show gross alpha readings in groundwater in excess of action levels in eight different years, gross beta in violation of action levels seven years, and tritium in excess ofaction levels four years, with significantly elevated tritium (>1,000 pCi/L) but below action levels an additional four years. The data provide clear evidence that radioactive materials have migrated from the disposal trenches 10 groundwater, 300 feet beneath the surface, in a few decades. The presence of elevated gross alpha, gross beta, and Cobalt-60 in the groundwater, in addition to substantial tritium, rule out vapor-phase migration. These empirical observations of rapid radionuclide migration contrast sharply with predictions by Prudic (1994) for Beatty and Ward Valley using Chloride Mass Balance calculations.

Contamination at the Beatty, Nevada, Radioactive Waste Disposal Facility, Committee to Bridge the Gap, 1996.

Summary: In the 1990s, contaminants were discovered outside US Ecology's radioactive waste facility near Beatty, Nevada, and all the way down to groundwater. In this report, we evaluate this discovery and its relevance to the now defunct proposal to dispose of radioactive waste at Ward Valley.