Deep in the Pacific Ocean, on a secluded group of islands, is a “nuclear sarcophagus” that covers a radioactive waste pit from the time of the first atomic bomb tests. Decades after testing, the temporary solution is starting to show its age – and could cause real problems in the coming years.
Photos from open sources
Small patches of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, about halfway between Papua New Guinea and Hawaii, are more radioactive than Chernobyl. It’s all about the 67 nuclear bombs dropped by the United States on the Bikini and Enewetak atolls between 1946 and 1958.
One of these explosions ever made by the United States caused hell on Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954, with a force nearly 1,000 times greater than that of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
By the late 1970s, heaps of irradiated soil and debris from six different islands (along with tons of contaminated soil from Nevada) were transported to a giant pit on Runit Island, one of the forty islands of Eniwetak Atoll, where they were filled with concrete and enclosed in a dome.
The Runit Dome, also known as the Cactus Dome or simply the Sarcophagus, is a concrete dome 45 centimeters thick and 115 meters in diameter. On satellite images, the dome looks like an alien object against the backdrop of Runit Island.
Photos from open sources / Google Earth satellite image of a concrete dome on Runit Island (Marshall Islands).
It was a temporary solution, and decades later, he begins to show signs of old age. A 2019 investigation found that the dome is covered in cracks that are getting worse due to rising temperatures in the Pacific Ocean.
Rising sea levels also wash over the shores of Runit Island, eroding concrete and causing radioactive materials to be released into the surrounding soil and water. The situation has become so serious that UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in 2019 that he was extremely concerned about radiation entering the Pacific Ocean.
“As long as plutonium remains under the dome, it will not become a major new source of radiation in the Pacific Ocean,” marine radioactivity expert Ken Busseler of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute said in 2020.
“But a lot depends on future sea level rise and how storms and seasonal tides affect the flow of water in and out of the dome. It’s a small source at the moment, but we need to monitor it more regularly to understand what’s going on and get data directly from affected communities in the region,” Buesseler explained.
Despite the remoteness, there are thousands of people living in other parts of the Marshall Islands, and it is clear that the atomic bomb drops have had a terrifying effect on their lives. For example, cancer rates have increased significantly in some parts of the islands.
Due to the high levels of radiation in the area, many people were forced to leave. The US military withdrew troops from the region in 1986 and said it would pay for all Marshallese who needed to be relocated because of the nuclear testing program.
However, many argue that this was not enough, and the United States was unable to take full responsibility for the scale of the massacre staged here.
In 2022, in Scientific American, two Columbia University scientists studying radiation in the area argued that the US Congress needed to fund independent research on radioactive contamination in the Marshall Islands and come up with a plan to deal with the problem.
