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posted by janrinok on Monday August 08 2016, @01:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the who-gets-the-bill? dept.

Buried below the ice sheet that covers most of Greenland, there's an abandoned U.S. Army base. Camp Century had trucks, tunnels, even a nuclear reactor. Advertised as a research station, it was also a test site for deploying nuclear missiles.

The camp was abandoned almost 50 years ago, completely buried below the surface. But serious pollutants were left behind. Now a team of scientists says that as climate warming melts the ice sheet, those pollutants could spread.

When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built Camp Century in 1959, an Army film touted it as an engineering marvel — a cavernous home dug into the ice sheet, big enough for up to 200 people. Some sections were more than 100 feet deep. "On the top of the world," the film's narrator intoned, "below the surface of a giant ice cap, a city is buried. Today on the island of Greenland, as part of man's continuing efforts to master the secrets of survival in the Arctic, the United States Army has established an unprecedented nuclear powered Arctic research center."

[...] The climate computer models say the camp could be uncovered by the end of this century.

Now, that's a worst-case scenario, based on an assumption that the world's governments won't do much to further reduce greenhouse gases that cause warming. But other things are happening that could spread that waste sooner.

Source: NPR


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  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Monday August 08 2016, @05:58PM

    by frojack (1554) on Monday August 08 2016, @05:58PM (#385391) Journal

    Didn't see any mention of a leak. I suppose it might have been.

    Your own article says:

    While the power plant was designed to provide 1560 kilowatts of power, Camp Century's power needs peaked at 500 kilowatts, and gradually declined from there. During the reactors operational life, a total of 47,078 gallons of radioactive liquid waste was discharged into the icecap.

    Sounds like it might have been planned as part of the reactor removal to just DRAIN the low-level contaminated water (or whatever it was) down through the glacier.

    They used steam to melt water for the base. Seems unlikely they would have run that open-loop, because they needed steam to obtain water, which means at start up and shut down you'd not have enough water to supply coolant in an open loop plan.

    A sister reactor [bellona.org] was operational in Antarctica at about the same time. That one, built by a different company had a serious leakage problem over its life, and some soil and rock had to be excavated and shipped back to the US for burial.

    Maybe the same problem existed in Greenland, but since the water perked down through thousands of feet of ice, nobody worried about it.

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