‘Rogue Employee’ Linked to Unauthorized Radiological Cache at US Navy Shipyard
Around 200 radiological items — including samples of uranium and thorium — were found in a locked cabinet within a large complex at Hunters Point.
Authorities have found a sizeable cache of unauthorized radiological materials in a locked cabinet inside a building at the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco, apparently accumulated by a former employee of a Navy remediation subcontractor.
The Navy and the subcontractor said the suspect is an employee of RSI Entech, which was hired by the military to remediate the area.
Around 200 radiological items — including samples of uranium and thorium — were found in a locked cabinet within a large complex called Building 400A in Hunters Point in April.
The items also included liquid scintillators, a specialized laboratory instrument used for radiological analysis. Most of the items were radioactive isotopes known as “check sources” that are used to calibrate devices like a Geiger counter.
Jeff Bale, director of operations at RSI Entech, said the materials were stored there by a “rogue” employee.
Navy finds massive cache of deadly radiological material including uranium hidden in California https://t.co/qoelC03k61 pic.twitter.com/S0zYLRkGzo
— New York Post (@nypost) June 17, 2026
The radiological materials may have been brought in between roughly 2019 and 2022, when the “rogue employee” in question worked for a firm called Envirachem, which was later acquired by RSI.
Navy environmental coordinator Michael Pound said the employee did not have the authorization to have the materials in the building.
The Navy said that there has been “no health or environmental concern identified,” and the area is “designated as a radiologically controlled area pending radiological surveys.”
The materials found there are being evaluated “for proper handling and disposal.” The Navy is currently aiming to complete the evaluation and dispose of the materials.
The finding occurred during ongoing cleanup operations at the Superfund site, a federal designation for locations contaminated with hazardous substances that require long-term remediation.
The site, which is currently blocked off with fencing, was once an active shipyard from 1945 to 1974 where the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory conducted research on the effects of radiation and atomic weapons. The site was also used to decommission radioactive ships, leading to the accumulation of radionuclides contaminating the surrounding soil and water.
…Regulatory agencies, including the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the state Department of Environmental Health, were notified of the discovery by April 10. It has also been reported to the Navy Office of the Inspector General and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, a federal law enforcement agency that investigates crimes involving the Navy and Marine Corps.
The Navy is working with the regulatory agencies the contractor to ensure proper off-site disposal of the material.
While officials have emphasized that no immediate health or environmental risk has been identified, the discovery raises important questions about oversight, material control, and internal accountability during remediation activities at such a historically sensitive site.
It would be particularly informative to understand what the “rogue employee” intended to do with these materials and how they were able to accumulate them over time without detection.
Investigators will likely focus on those gaps, and it is reasonable to hope that the ongoing inquiries provide clear answers that can inform stronger controls moving forward.
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“Rogue employee” ? I missed the part about who it is and where he/she/it is from.
The Navy believe the items were brought onto the site by an unauthorized subcontractor employee of Envirachem (acquired by RSI Entech in 2023) between 2019 and 2022.
The items were discovered in April inside a locked cabinet in Building 400A at the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco.
The shipyard officially closed in 1994 and is no longer a military installation. The site is currently in the middle of a transition to a civilian neighborhood.
Rogue employee…
I’ll posit another possible angle:
That sounds like spin for the contractor and the government had jack squat for controls and oversight and they literally had people with no training or guidance at all levels. DEI firm won the bid during Biden era because they were gay enough or donated enough to the right criminal enterprise.
You can write the rest. That’s how our government has been run for the past 2 decades.
My first thought was that these sources were calibration samples, and the text bears that out. It sounds to me like a case of a civilian contractor bringing in with him the samples and equipment needed to do some aspect of his job, and simply finding an unauthorized but unused cubbyhole to store them in instead of bringing them back-and-forth to the worksite every day. The scare headline makes it sound like radioactive items someone cadged from the facility itself and squirreled away, which I suspect is an unjustified interpretation.
I thought so too. Those items are essentially harmless. I had control of several such items when I was the NBC (nuclear, biological, and chemical) warfare NCO for a combat unit in West Germany.
You may be right about him using the stuff in the cache to do his job. Alternatively, he was remediating the site, so maybe at least some of the stuff are things he found on the site and was collecting for removal/disposal. Maybe he was fired or quit before that could be done, so the items remained in his stash, where he had them safely locked away, at least.
Either way, this is not a “hair on fire” story.
Or, someone a little nutty about radioactives, and snuck a few to-be-disposed-of into his locker instead of the proper barrel.
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