“That dome is the connection between the nuclear age and the climate change age,” Marshall Islands climate change activist Alson Kelen.
Vulnerable Pacific atolls are succumbing to rising sea levels caused by climate change melting the world’s ice caps and thermo-expansion of sea water. Throughout the Marshall Islands, the land lies only inches above sea level. Salt levels in wells on the inhabited islands are a problem now. Waves are also beginning to carve the atolls into pieces. Residents are grappling with the decision to leave their ancestral homes forever as a consequence.
ABC News Australia has a compelling article on the rising seas from climate change that are seeping into a US nuclear waste dump on a low lying Pacific atoll in the Marshall Islands. It is yet another story of how climate change is having unforeseen consequences for life on this planet.
In the late 1970s, Runit Island, on the remote Enewetak Atoll, was the scene of the largest nuclear clean-up in United States history.
Highly contaminated debris left over from dozens of atomic weapons tests was dumped into a 100-metre wide bomb crater on the tip of the uninhabited island.
US Army engineers sealed it up with a half-metre thick concrete cap almost the size of an Australian football ground, then left the island.
Now with sea levels rising, water has begun to penetrate the dome.
The United States detonated 43 atomic bombs around the island chain in the 1940s and 50s.
Four of Enewetak’s 40 islands were completely vaporised by the tests, with one thermonuclear blast leaving a two-kilometre-wide crater where an island had been just moments before.
Enewetak’s population had been re-located to another island in the Marshalls ahead of the tests.
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A VHS-quality video from the 1980s has appeared on YouTube to offer a rare sight: intercontinental ballistic missile warheads slamming into a remote islet at Mach 12 after traveling halfway across the Pacific Ocean. The warheads throw up debris hundreds of feet into the air and show the uncanny accuracy of America's nuclear missile deterrent. This particular warhead did not carry nuclear weapons.As part of the clean-up process, Washington set aside funds to build the dome as a temporary storage facility, and initial plans included lining the porous bottom of its crater with concrete.
But in the end, that was deemed too expensive.
“The bottom of the dome is just what was left behind by the nuclear weapons explosion,” says Michael Gerrard, the chair of Columbia University’s Earth Institute in New York.
“It’s permeable soil. There was no effort to line it. And therefore, the seawater is inside the dome.”
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“This could cause some really big problems for the rest of mankind if all that goes underwater, because it’s plutonium and cement.”
Some of the debris buried beneath the dome includes plutonium-239, a fissile isotope used in nuclear warheads which is one of the most toxic substances on earth.
It has a radioactive half-life of 24,100 years.
Cracks are visible in the dome’s surface and brackish liquid pools around its rim.
“Already the sea sometimes washes over [the dome] in a large storm,” says Columbia University’s Michael Gerrard.
“The United States Government has acknowledged that a major typhoon could break it apart and cause all of the radiation in it to disperse.”
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