November 25, 2024
How a San Francisco Navy Lab Became a Hub for Human Radiation Experiments
Rarely seen documents show a Cold War atomic research facility headquartered at Hunters Point conducted studies that exposed at least 1,073 people to potentially harmful radiation.
The legacy of that era is a continuing risk to public health.
Read Part 1 of the “Exposed” investigation by Chris Roberts.
Listen to Part 1 and Part 2 of the audio documentary by Rebecca Bowe.
In September 1956, Cpl. Eldridge Jones found himself atop a sunbaked roof at an old Army camp about an hour outside San Francisco, shoveling radioactive dirt.
Too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam, Jones never saw combat. Instead, he served in the Cold War, where the threats to his life were all American.
The previous year, Jones was one of thousands of U.S. troops directly exposed to radiation during aboveground nuclear weapons tests in the Nevada desert.
Now he was being exposed again, this time to lab-made “simulated nuclear fallout,” material that emitted some of the same ionizing radiation as the atomic bomb. The exercise at Camp Stoneman, near Pittsburg, Calif., was one of many in a years-long program conducted by a key military research facility, headquartered at a Navy shipyard in a predominantly Black working-class neighborhood in San Francisco.
A review by the San Francisco Public Press of thousands of pages of government and academic records, as well as interviews with affected servicemen, sheds new light on the operations of the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory at San Francisco’s Hunters Point Naval Shipyard.
A new series launched on Monday in collaboration with The Guardian reveals that between 1946 and 1963, lab scientists knowingly exposed at least 1,073 servicemen, dockworkers, lab employees and others to potentially harmful radiation through war games, decontamination tests and medical studies.
The analysis reveals the lab conducted at least 24 experiments that exposed humans to radiation, far more than past official reviews acknowledged. Safety reports also note dozens of accidents in which staff received doses in excess of federal health limits in effect at the time.
Researchers at the lab tracked the exposure of workers trying to clean ships irradiated by an atomic bomb test. Soldiers were ordered to crawl through fields of radioactive sand and soil. In clinical studies, radioactive substances were applied to forearms and hands, injected or administered by mouth. Top U.S. civilian and military officials preapproved all of this in writing, documents show.
The records indicate that researchers gained limited knowledge from this program and that not everyone involved had their exposure monitored. There is also no sign the lab studied the long-term health effects on people used in the experiments or in surrounding communities, either during the lab’s heyday or after it closed in 1969.
— Read all of Part 1 of the “Exposed” series. (Part 2 coming Monday, Dec. 2.)
— Listen to the “Exposed” audio documentary:
- Podcast Episode 1: A Community of Color Contends With the Navy’s Toxic Legacy
- Podcast Episode 2: Why the Navy Conducted Radiation Experiments on Humans
