laststandonzombieisland

We’ve talked before about Camp Century, an underground Atomic powered city built just 800 miles south of the North Pole, 100 miles north of Thule AB in Greenland in 1959.

Powered by a PM-2A nuclear reactor, Camp Century was the first of the US Army’s portable reactors to actually produce power. Except for downtime for routine maintenance and repairs, the reactor operated for thirty-three months.

By 1966 the camp was abandoned and in a follow-up visit in 1969, it was found wrecked by shifting polar ice.  Today its thought to be just so much steel girders and piping hidden under icefloes.

Now it seems the hazardous waste though buried inside the frozen tomb of the abandoned base could emerge by the end of the century, according to a new, peer-reviewed study published last week in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

The melting seems likely to bring modern-day environmental and political headache.

“While Camp Century and four other contemporaneous ice sheet bases were legally established under a Danish-U.S. treaty, the potential remobilization of their abandoned wastes, previously regarded as sequestered, represents an entirely new pathway of political dispute resulting from climate change.”