With the panic of COVID-19, some stories that would have ordinarily been alarming, flew relatively under the radar. Japan announced that they will run out of space to build tanks that house approximately 1.25 million tons of wastewater from their Fukishima nuclear plant by the middle of next year.
In an effort to relieve their storage issue, they have decided to begin dumping the treated water into the ocean. Seeing this as a headline was enough to cause panic. But the Japanese prime minister assured that the dump would begin in the next two years, the water would be diluted and would be continued in controlled amounts over a given period of time.
While no action has begun yet and we should still be concerned over this issue, this conversation may have uncovered another potential radioactive disaster in the near future. Ever heard of the Marshall Islands?
Located in the North Western Pacific Ocean, the Marshall Islands is a group of 29 low lying Atolls and 5 individual islands totaling to about 1225 islands, with a population of 58000 people. These islands are now an independent republic, but up until 1986, were under the jurisdiction of the United States for approximately forty years prior. During this time the United States government did what anyone would do with a couple of sparsely populated islands with beaches, bright blue waters and over 800 coral reefs…
They tested nuclear bombs there.
The Enewetak Atoll was the test site for over 40 nuclear weapons in the space of about 10 years. A bomb was also tested on the Bikini Atoll. Fun (actually incredibly morbid) fact, the island was natively referred to as Pikinni but evolved by German settlers to Bikini. And the name for the two piece swimwear is thought to have come from the name of the island. A designer thought that women in a two piece swimsuit would have been so exciting, it would be just like an atomic bomb…love the empathy there.
Anyways, around 67 bombs were tested in the region during the Cold War, and this destroyed entire islands, left craters and destroyed homes. Persons were forced to leave the radiated islands and relocate within the Marshall Islands, but were left with multiple radiation related ailments and diseases. The islands used were completely deforested and became wastelands.
And obviously a nuclear test site would leave radioactive waste, but this had been ingeniously taken care of. The crater left by the bomb was covered with 18 inch thick slabs of concrete leaving a dome over 3.1 million cubic feet of contaminated soil and debris. During the Cold War, biological weapons were also tested in Nevada and this experiment produced approximately 130 tons of contaminated soil. The soil was then shipped to from Nevada to the Runit Island and dumped into the crater. This is fondly referred to as “the tomb”.
But remember when I said before that these islands were low lying…well as it turns out, the dome appeared to be cracking. In 2019, the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres expressed concern over the risk of leaking from the dome after meeting with the Marshallese President Hilda Heine. According to an article done by the LA Times in 2019, rising sea levels are a very real threat to the dome built in the 1970s. While much of the debris was mixed into cement and encased in the dome, loose contaminated material may escape with further damage. In fact, soon after the construction of the dome, debris leaked out onto the shores of Runit Island on two occasions, each time a small chamber was constructed to contain the materials deemed to be a “red-level threat”. And no further work was done on the dome for around 50 years.
So how long do we have before untreated nuclear waste seeps into the ocean? Who knows. With sea levels rising at an alarming 3.6mm per year over the last decade, we do not know when this imminent danger will become reality. The United States as previously tried to denounce their responsibility for their destruction to the islands, even with the Marshallese politicians calling for assistance. But with a renegotiation of the terms of the Marshallese agreement with the United States coming soon in 2023, maybe something will be done to stop this critical threat.
Check out the link below for more information on the islands and maps of where the detonations took place.
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