Concrete tomb filled with deadly nuclear waste is leaking as it's starting to crack
Topics: US News, World News, Climate Change
Joe Harker
Featured Image Credit: Asahi Shimbun/Roger Viollet/Getty Images
Topics: US News, World News, Climate Change
43 years ago a concrete container of nuclear waste was constructed on a tiny island in the Pacific Ocean, but there's a big problem with that, it's leaking.
During the Cold War, the US used islands in the Pacific to test nuclear weapons, and between 1946 and 1958 carried out a series of tests on Enewetak Atoll.
Of course, nuclear bombs poison the ground around them and the waste from these weapons is a dangerous commodity in and of itself. So between 1977 and 1980, a concrete dome was built to store the nuclear waste from the bomb tests.
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That ended up being called the Runit Dome, because it was located on Runit Island, though it was also referred to as 'the tomb'.
Housing radioactive debris, including poisonous plutonium, thousands of people scraped nuclear waste into a blast crater and covered it over with concrete to stop it from getting out.
Unfortunately that plan isn't going quite so well as, according to IFL Science, a report from 2019 warns that changing conditions on the island are causing the concrete dome to crack.
Increasing temperatures are not helping the problem, while a rise in sea levels is also compounding the problem as the dome is not elevated off the ground, and the lapping waters of the sea are eroding it further.
This is all resulting in radioactive material bleeding out into the ground on the rest of the island and leaking out into the sea as well.
As long as the plutonium stays within the crater covered by the dome then it won't be a major new source of contamination into the ocean.
That could all change if the cracking dome were to give way and seawater was able to flow in and out of the crater.
This concrete tomb could be a cracking nuclear coffin with a monster inside just waiting to be released, but for now things are still within acceptable levels.
According to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, marine radioactivity expert Dr Ken Buesseler said they'd 'known for years that the dome is leaking', but for now only a 'small amount of radioactivity' was getting out.
For context, this isn't putting the surrounding area beyond safety standards just yet, and the plutonium sealed beneath the Runit Dome is only a fraction of what was released during nuclear testing.
While he said things were alright at the moment, he warned that they 'hadn't considered sea level rise in the 1970s when they built this', and said the dome would be 'at least partially submerged by the end of this century'.