(CN) - A federal judge appeared dissatisfied with both sides embroiled in the fight over the radiological cleanup of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard near San Francisco.

U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria heard arguments from the Navy and from Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice on Thursday morning over claims that the government has not followed the proper procedures for the radiological and chemical cleanup of the old shipyard. 

Greenaction, which seeks summary judgment, says the Navy's cleanup efforts violated environmental law by relying on outdated soil testing data and underestimating the scope of potential risks to human health. It says that the Navy has relied on old soil testing data in its most recent mandated five-year review of the site - published a year late - to recommend protective remedies.

To make matters worse, many of the earlier soil tests from the site were completed by Tetra Tech, which the government later sued for falsifying data.

Chhabria, a Barack Obama appointee, spent the first half of the hearing grilling Greenaction over how the Navy is expected to suggest remedies for decontamination when it did not yet have accurate test data. 

"I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around what it is you think they should have said," he said. "Right now, I'm trying to pin you down on what your argument is. I'm just not understanding what your argument is. I'm trying to give you a chance to articulate that one last time." 

Greenaction attorney Steve Castleman, of the Environmental Law Clinic at UC Berkeley, said his clients want the Navy to instead take into account new remedial tests following the faulty Tetra Tech data and redo the tests.

"The impact of that is significant, your honor," Castlman said. "If they determined that the remedial goals needed to be updated, that would impact the new testing. Instead, what they decided to do is go ahead with the new testing under the old remedial goals."

Additionally, the Navy ignored the Environmental Protection Agency's default soil remediation goals from 2023, he said.

"They didn't consider them - they didn't explain why they didn't want to consider them - they just ignored it," he said. 

The soil that exceeds certain thresholds during the testing phase is also removed from the site, he said. Now, the Navy may need to do a third test to comply with the EPA, he said.

Meanwhile, the Navy argues in a competing motion that it has followed all of the measures mandated by the EPA and that its cleanup process is above board. It contends Greenaction's demand for a do-over is flatly wrong. 

"Hauling all the soil is very, very expensive and it would be a lot of money," said David Mitchell, with the Department of Justice. "So what the Navy is doing now, and the regulatory agencies have agreed to, is to say let's find out if the site is safe before we decide to invest that money in the extra response actions."

But Chhabria grilled the feds over the delays, asking why it's taken so long to retest soil data after the Tetra Tech scandal almost 10 years ago. 

"What is going on?" Chhabria asked. "We are now in the year 2026. You had a five-year report published in 2019 that said we need to do retesting, and then you have another report five years later that says we need to do retesting. Why didn't retesting start before 2025 if we discovered in 2018 that Tetra Tech had falsified its test results?"

The questions, while outside the scope of the lawsuit, were helpful to understand the broader issue, he said.

He also pressed the government over news reports in San Francisco late last year that the Navy failed to inform the public about potentially dangerous amounts of plutonium detected in the air near the site. 

Mitchell said that the decontamination effort for the old shipyard is a massive effort that takes a long time and requires coordination between the Navy, regulatory agencies and contractors to complete. The Navy also found that the air quality issues were a false positive though that information was not relayed to the public, he told the judge. 

According to Mitchell, the soil testing at Hunters Point is on track to be completed by 2032.

"It's going to take some time, but the Navy is making good progress," he said. 

When completed, the 400-acre site will have 10,000 new homes in one of the largest redevelopment projects in the city's history. 

First established in southeastern San Francisco in 1939, the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard was home to the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory between 1946 and 1969, which led to the contamination of soil, groundwater, surface water and sediment in the San Francisco Bay. The location was slated for redevelopment in the '1990s.

The Navy is the lead agency involved in the cleanup. Greenaction filed its lawsuit in 2024.

Source: Courthouse News Service