Camp Century, a United States Army base built into the Greenland ice sheet in 1959, was publicly presented as a demonstration of Arctic engineering: a small under-ice city with its own nuclear reactor, hospital, and theater, built to show that the US could operate in the world’s most hostile environment. It was also the cover for a project unknown even to Denmark’s government at the time, and it is now buried under enough hazardous waste that melting ice is expected to expose it within decades.
The Secret Behind Camp Century
Camp Century was the visible face of Project Iceworm, a classified Army plan to bury a network of tunnels housing up to 600 mobile nuclear missiles under the Greenland ice, close enough to reach the Soviet Union. Denmark, which controlled Greenland, was not informed of Iceworm’s actual purpose; officials were told the site was a polar science station. The tunnel network, 21 passages totaling nearly 9,800 feet, was excavated and powered by a portable nuclear reactor. Within three years, ice core samples showed the glacier was deforming far faster than engineers had planned for, and the tunnels would collapse within about two years. The Army evacuated the site in 1965 and removed the reactor, and Project Iceworm was abandoned.
What Was Left Behind
The reactor came out. Most of what supported it did not. Buried in the ice at the former camp is more than 50,000 gallons of diesel fuel, an unknown but substantial quantity of PCBs, thousands of gallons of wastewater, and an unspecified amount of radioactive coolant from the reactor operation. At the time of abandonment, engineers assumed continued snowfall would bury the waste permanently under the accumulating ice sheet.
Why That Assumption Is Now in Question
A 2016 glaciological study modeling Greenland ice sheet melt patterns found that the site could begin melting out, rather than continuing to be buried, within this century. Under the study’s warming scenarios, meltwater could begin reaching the buried waste as early as 2090, releasing the diesel fuel, PCBs, and an estimated 24 million liters of untreated sewage into the surrounding meltwater system. The nuclear coolant’s fate under the same scenario was not fully quantified in the study, only flagged as present and unaddressed.
Who Is Responsible
No treaty or agreement assigns cleanup liability for hazardous material abandoned decades before the country that buried it anticipated it would resurface. International law generally holds states responsible for preventing future hazardous dumping; it is considerably less clear on retroactive liability for waste that was buried in good faith under an assumption, permanent ice cover, that has since stopped holding. The United States, Denmark, and Greenland’s home-rule government have not resolved which of them would bear cleanup costs if the site melts out on the timeline the 2016 study projected. It is the same shape of problem this site has traced in other Cold War and post-Cold War legacy-hardware cases, including the Havana Syndrome device investigation: a documented capability or liability, and no government willing to close the file on who answers for it.
Leave a Reply