Secret nuclear site exposed by warming

Toxic waste left under the Greenland ice cap by a topsecret Cold War US military project is likely to become exposed by rising temperatures within decades, reports The Guardian. Camp Century, a two-mile network of tunnels, was officially built in 1959 – when Greenland was part of Denmark – to test “Arctic construction methods”. In reality, this was a cover for the camp’s real purpose (kept secret even from the Danish government) – which was to test the feasibility of building a 2,000-mile-long network of nuclear launch sites under the Greenland ice sheet, housing 600 ballistic missiles trained on Moscow and its satellite states – a project known as Iceworm.

But the project was never completed. The constantly moving ice created too unstable an environment, and, in 1967, the tunnels – which contained a church, a theatre and a shop – were abandoned. On departure, the soldiers removed the reaction chamber and nuclear generator. However, they left its remaining infrastructure, and a vast amount of waste, including an estimated 200,000 litres of diesel fuel and unknown amounts of radioactive coolant, and toxic organic pollutants such as PCBS. All this, they assumed, would be “preserved for eternity” by the perpetually accumulating snow and ice. In fact, according to a new report, the cap will start shrinking within decades, and by 2090 the exposure will become “irreversible”. Then the question of who is responsible for the clearup will become pressing, according to the scientists – presenting “an entirely new form of political dispute resulting from climate change”.