McMurdo_Station.jpg
The U.S. Navy operated a nuclear power reactor at McMurdo Station in Antarctica from 1962 to 1973. The reactor was similar to the reactors on U.S. Navy vessels and it supplied electricity and desalinated water to the McMurdo Station. There were over four hundred documented safety problems at the reactor during that period of time. The last problem was a leak in a cooling unit which prompted the Navy to shut down and decommission the reactor.
The U.S. Navy decided that the soil under the decommissioned nuclear power plant had to be dug up and shipped away. The soil that was downhill from the reactor was also targeted for removal. In total, about twelve thousand cubic yards of soil was removed from around the reactor.
Big, open dump trucks full of dirt from the reactor site drove through McMurdo Station to reach the docks. The dirt was dumped at the docks and then loaded into the holds of ships with a big bucket on a crane. The dirt landed in a big pile in the middle of the hold and was shoveled around to level the pile by men without any protective gear. There were no briefings or warnings of any kind according for the men who worked on the loading. A Geiger counter was waved over the workers as they left at the end of the shift. Some of the U.S. workers who loaded the ships got cancer and died.
The window of one of the U.S. workers who died from cancer fought with the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs for decades until, in 2017, the Department acknowledged that the cancers that killed her husband were probably caused by exposure to radiation that could only have come from the period during which her deceased husband worked loading contaminated soil at McMurdo Station during the 1970s when he was stationed there. The widow says that she knows of sixty-seven former U.S. servicemen who worked at McMurdo Station and eventually got cancer.
Soldiers, scientists, contractors and administrative staff from the nearby New Zealand base were often at McMurdo. Some of them lived at the U.S. base and others visited for work and recreation. The New Zealand government says that at least six hundred New Zealanders visited the McMurdo Station between 1960 and 1980.
Some of the New Zealand soldiers who worked on loading the radioactive soil from the reactor site eventually became activists to obtain recognition and help for New Zealanders who worked on the ships. Some of the New Zealanders who worked on removing the dirt have developed cancers that the New Zealand government have concluded are related to the reactor and contaminated soil at McMurdo Station. A few notices were posted on the Internet in January of 2018 by the New Zealand Department of Health to the effect that there was a possibility that anyone who worked at McMurdo during the 1960s and 1970s might have been exposed to radiation, especially if they worked on soil removal.