Danger: Radioactive Cold War stash & Greenland's melting ice-sheet

Melting ice in Greenland will expose a US Cold War military base, releasing biological, chemical and radioactive waste left behind when the site was decommissioned in 1969

The mission was decommissioned in the late 1960s and the camp abandoned, leaving virtually everything behind - presumably in the belief that the meters of ice and subsequent snowfalls would ensure all remnants would remain permanently covered.

researchers at York University in Toronto, Canada, say that given current rates of ice meltage, the waste could be exposed and released within the next 75 years

highly toxic pollutants such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and radiological waste from the camp’s nuclear generator will be released when water melting through the site washes it downstream

“While Camp Century and four other contemporaneous ice sheet bases were legally established under a Danish-US treaty, the potential remobilization of their abandoned wastes, previously regarded as sequestered, represents an entirely new pathway of political dispute resulting from climate change,”

Source

First the thawing Siberian tundra releases an anthrax plague, now melting ice could potentially unleash biological, chemical and radioactive wastes into the environment.
Any climate change deniers still out there?

a reply to: trollz

Any climate change deniers still out there?

Right, lets make it a climate change argument rather than focusing on the underlying problem...the negligent business practices of the industrial/military complex..

I guess nothing changes either way...

carry on

a reply to: trollz

Well it needs to be cleaned up then.
So who is responsible?.

This reminds me of that episode in Futurama with the ball of garbage. 21st century threw it into space and said "let the future deal with it" and when it came back, the future did the same thing.

They will just cover it with concrete and let the future deal with it as is tradition

Tjoran is right. They'll label it a future superfund and bury it in concrete. The rising seas will cover it and in a few million years any residual radioactivity will be gone and the mess will be buried in rock. To bad our great grand children will get stuck with the clean-up bill.

originally posted by: Tucket
a reply to: trollz

Any climate change deniers still out there?

Right, lets make it a climate change argument rather than focusing on the underlying problem...the negligent business practices of the industrial/military complex..

I guess nothing changes either way...

carry on

Exactly!
The cold war spawned trash all over the place, but hey!
Global warming, right?

The larger question much like the US's hosing of the Navajo is the indigenous living in Greenland and how this pollution will affect them. But again, hey, out of sight out of mind right?