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Scientists had underestimated the size of what became known as the “Castle Bravo” test, resulting in an explosion that was 2½ times larger than expected. Radioactive ash dropped more than 7,000 square miles from the bomb site, caking the nearby inhabited islands.
“Within hours, the atoll was covered with a fine, white, powder-like substance,” the Marshall Islands health minister would later testify, according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation. “No one knew it was radioactive fallout. The children played in the ‘snow.’ They ate it.”
From 1946 to 1958, 67 U.S. nuclear tests pulverized the tranquil reefs and islands of the central Pacific. International pressure finally halted the tests, but the damage was done — and continues to this day.
“I’ve just been with the president of the Marshall Islands [Hilda Heine], who is very worried because there is a risk of leaking of radioactive materials that are contained in a kind of coffin in the area,” Guterres said in Fiji, Agence France-Pressereported.
In 1980, a massive concrete dome — 18 inches thick and shaped like a flying saucer — was placed over the fallout debris, sealing off the material on Runit. But the $218 million project was only supposed to be temporary until a more permanent site was developed, according to the Guardian. However, no further plans were ever hatched.
Cracks have reportedly started to appear in the dome. Part of the threat is that the crater was never properly lined, meaning that rising seawater could breach the structural integrity.
“The bottom of the dome is just what was left behind by the nuclear weapons explosion,” Michael Gerrard, the chair of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, told the ABC. “It’s permeable soil. There was no effort to line it. And therefore, the seawater is inside the dome.”
A top-secret US military project from the cold war and the toxic waste it conceals, thought to have been buried forever beneath the Greenland icecap, are likely to be uncovered by rising temperatures within decades, .
Powered, remarkably, by the world’s first mobile nuclear generator and known as “the city under the ice”, the camp’s three-kilometre network of tunnels, eight metres beneath the ice, housed laboratories, a shop, a hospital, a cinema, a chapel and accommodation for as many as 200 soldiers.
In reality, the camp served as cover for something altogether different - a project so immense and so secret that not even the Danish government was informed of its existence.
“They thought it would never be exposed,” said Colgan. “Back then, in the 60s, the term global warming had not even been coined. But the climate is changing, and the question now is whether what’s down there is going to stay down there.”
The Earth is going through hell with us being here, imagine how bad things will get once we're not here to at least try to contain our mess.
originally posted by: LtFluffyCakes96
A 2013 report by the Energy Department admitted that radioactive material may have already begun to leak from the dome, but it said the health risks were "probably low".
originally posted by: TerryMcGuire
a reply to: rickymouse
Indeed. Our scientific development and lack of concern for it's negative impact on the environment has and is doing severe damage to the planet. Do you think it possible that that science has had an impact to the degree of changing climate as well?
For me it is not unreasonable to consider that the extent to which mans scientific advances (?) have reached this point.
You?
originally posted by: TerryMcGuire
a reply to: rickymouse
Certainly for all you point out. It is man misusing science that brings on our problems.
So what do we do? Curtail the science or do something to control the misuse.? Is not one of the precious freedoms people rail that are being taken from us are the freedoms to ignore the consequences of the misuse of science? And that misuse that we both recognize, is it to far a cry to think that that very misuse to the level of climate disruption?