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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 butthurt on Tuesday August 09 2016, @07:44PM

    by butthurt (6141) on Tuesday August 09 2016, @07:44PM (#385925) Journal

    Meanwhile, there are millions of households in those countries where they use almost zero electricity.

    Those people are going to want electricity. A great deal of it will be needed if electricity is to replace fossil fuels and wood that those people--and the rest of us--use for cooking, heating, and transportation. Wood is often harvested in an unsustainable manner, so it may be inaccurate to call it "renewable."

    The world's population is still increasing, so new housing will be needed; the manufacture of cement emits a great deal of carbon dioxide.

    A U.S. government report (which only considers forms of energy that are bought and sold, and excludes cement) predicts rapid growth in renewable energy production globally through 2040. However, it also predicts increasing demand for energy. The rates at which oil and gas, and coal are burned are predicted to increase from their current levels.

    https://www.eia.gov/pressroom/releases/images/2016_01_figure2.png [eia.gov]
    https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/ieo/table9-1.cfm [eia.gov]

    Because of that, the rate at which carbon dioxide is emitted is expected to increase:

    World energy-related CO2 emissions rise from 32.2 billion metric tons in 2012 to 35.6 billion metric tons in 2020 and to 43.2 billion metric tons in 2040 in the IEO2016 Reference case–an increase of 34% over the projection period. Much of the growth in emissions is attributed to developing non-OECD nations, many of which continue to rely heavily on fossil fuels to meet the fast-paced growth of energy demand.

    --https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/ieo/exec_summ.cfm [eia.gov]

    https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/ieo/ [eia.gov]

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