Following World War II, the Unites States needed a remote area to test nuclear weapons. The Enewetak Atoll and the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands (M.I.) became the main sites of the United States Pacific Proving Grounds. The M.I.are about midway between Australia and Hawaii. They were far enough from shipping lanes and populations centers to be considered a safe place to test nuclear weapons.
The U.S. tests in the M.I. began in 1946 and in 1948 the locate population of fishermen and farmers were moved to another atoll a couple of hundred miles away. Between 1946 and 1958, there were a total of sixty seven nuclear bombs detonated on the two atolls. The explosions covered the islands with irradiated debris including some of the Plutonium-239 used in the warhead. Pu-239 has a half-life of twenty four thousand years.
At the end of the testing, the US Defence Nuclear Agency and the Department of Energy spent eight years cleaning up the contaminated soil. Unfortunately the U.S. Congress failed to allocate sufficient funds to decontaminate the islands to the point where they would be safe for human settlements. The DNA and the DOE would have preferred to dump the contaminated soil and other debris into the deep ocean but this was prohibited by international treaties. The agencies scraped the topsoil off the islands and mixed it with radioactive debris.
In 1979, over one hundred thousand tons of radioactive debris and contaminated topsoil generated by twelve years of nuclear explosions was buried in a three hundred and fifty foot crater on the northern tip of Runit Island. The nuclear waste was then covered by an eighteen inch thick cap of concrete consisting of three hundred and fifty eight concrete panels. The cap is known officially as the Runit Dome. The concrete dome over the crater was never intended to be permanent. The two hundred million dollar cleanup project was only supposed to hold the waste until a permanent solution was found.
Only half of the forty Marshal islands were cleaned up before rising costs caused the cleanup to end. Enjebi island where over half the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands had lived was never cleaned up. In 1980, the original inhabitants of Enewetak were allowed to return to their island. In 1983, the Marshall Islands signed a compact of free association with the U.S. which granted some privileges but not U.S. citizenship. Part of the deal was settling all claims past, present and future with respect to the U.S. Nuclear testing. The government of the M.I. was given responsibility for the Runit Dome waste depository.
The concrete is beginning to crack and the radioactive waste under the dome is starting to leach out into the surrounding soil. A 2013 report by the US Department of Energy found that the level of radioactivity in the soil around the burial hole was higher than the contents of the crater. The rising level of the ocean and more powerful storms and surges brought about climate change are now threatening the buried waste. There is a concern that the dome could be breached and the contents could spill out into the Pacific Ocean. Concerned scientists have pointed out the irony that the nuclear waste left behind by the U.S. tests is now being threaten by the climate change caused by carbon dioxide emitted by nations such as the U.S.
The U.S. government claims that it has no responsibility to help the M.I. deal with the Runit Dome depository. The M.I. is a very poor country and is still affected by the damage that the U.S. testing program did to their traditional livelihoods. health and environment. The international Nuclear Claims Tribunal says that the U.S. testing did at least two hundred and forty million dollars of damage to the M.I. Activists in the M.I. say that with the huge defense budget of the U.S., it could certainly afford to help the M.I. deal with the radioactive legacy of U.S. nuclear testing.
Runit Dome:
