San Francisco's Chief Health Officer found airborne radioactive plutonium above Bayview-Hunters Point at twice the federally safe level. A Berkeley nuclear physics professor says plutonium would need to be 500 times higher to cause clear health impacts. The main concern is the Navy's delayed disclosure of the data.
Well, this is definitely not good news. San Francisco's Chief Health Officer sent a letter to the United States Navy indicating that radioactive plutonium had been found in the air above the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood at 2x the safe concentration levels. And this comes after years and years of work to remediate the Superfund site, which is the location of one of the largest housing developments in San Francisco right now. Definitely not good news as we have residents there and hopefully thousands more in the future as more housing gets built at the site. But in good news, a professor of nuclear physics at Berkeley indicated that these levels of plutonium, while not great to see, shouldn't actually raise alarm bells. They'd actually need to be 500 times greater to cause detrimental health impacts. So it seems like really the biggest concern here is the fact that the United States Navy had this information many months ago and waited so long to tell San Francisco about it. In response, in that letter, the city requested a bunch of documentation and information about what they discovered and what they plan to do about it. Let me know what you think in the comments and follow me for more Bay Area real estate.
