Five thousand miles west of Los Angeles and 500 miles north of the equator, on a far-flung spit of white coral sand in the central Pacific, a massive, aging and weathered concrete dome known as Runit Dome, bobs up and down with the tide.
A new investigation has found that the Runit Dome — a massive “tomb” in the Marshall Islands containing radioactive soil and debris from nuclear bomb tests — is at risk of busting open as climate change causes both sea levels and temperatures to rise.
During the Cold War, the United States detonated 67 nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands. It also conducted a dozen biological weapons tests in the region and shipped 130 tons of irradiated soil from a Nevada testing site there.
The U.S. then mixed all that irradiated soil and debris with concrete, dumped it into a crater created by one of the bombs, and capped the whole thing off with an 18-inch-thick concrete dome in 1980.
The climate change has already caused cracks in the nuclear tomb.
That’s led officials in the Marshall Islands to ask the U.S. government for help securing the Runit Dome’s contents — but they were told that since the dome is on land belonging to the Marshall Islands, it’s the Marshallese government’s responsibility.
Reference- The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Futurism