Climate change is collapsing the U.S.’s nuclear waste tomb in the Marshall Islands

Ask people to think of a nuclear disaster and they’ll probably come back with the name Chernobyl. The 1986 explosion of a Soviet Union reactor that resulted in the immediate death of at least 50 people has cemented itself in modern memory, but there’s another disaster building. In the Marshall Islands, climate change is collapsing a nuclear tomb, and the United States is the one who put it there.

Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands, which is a collection of 29 coral atolls across 1,156 islands. Of course, the U.S. didn’t end with nuclear weapons. The Pentagon also dropped biological weapons on the islands.

When the U.S. was finished, it took all the waste from the islands, along with contaminated soil from a Nevada testing site, dumped it into the Runit Dome, a crater left from a nuclear detonation, and covered all of that with concrete.

View the complete November 12 article by Vanessa Taylor on the Mic website here.