In recent years, the Arctic Climate change anxietyScientists are worried Monitoring the Greenland Ice Sheet Signs of melting Fretting Too widespread Environmental DeteriorationIt wasn’t always this way.
At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, as fears of nuclear war hung over the publics of the United States and the Soviet Union, idealistic scientists and engineers saw the vast Arctic as a place of endless possibilities for creating a bold new future. Greenland emerged as the most attractive testing ground for their research.
Scientists and engineers working for or with the U.S. military came up with a flurry of daring cold-climate projects. Some were revolutionary, others more haphazard, and most were quickly abandoned. They read like the stuff of science fiction: disposing of nuclear waste by melting it into ice; transporting people, supplies, and missiles under the ice in subways (some of which might be nuclear-powered); testing hovercraft that could fly over impassable crevasses; building furniture from a mixture of frozen ice and soil; and even building a nuclear city beneath the ice sheet.
Today, many of their ideas and the fever dreams that gave birth to them areREAL: An exciting magazine for men” and dozens of unknown Army technical reports.
Karl and Bernhard Filbers, Both physicist and priestenvisioned Greenland’s ice sheet as a perfect repository for nuclear waste. Instead of all the waste, they would first reprocess spent reactor fuel to recycle the long-lived isotopes. The remaining, mostly short-lived radionuclides, would be fused into glass or ceramic and surrounded by a few inches of lead for transport. They envisioned millions of radioactive medicine balls, about 16 inches in diameter, scattered over a small area of the ice sheet (about 300 square miles), far from the shore.
The ball is radioactive, and therefore hot, melting in the ice, releasing the energy equivalent to just under two dozen 100-watt incandescent light bulbs — a reasonable leap given Carl Philbers’ expertise. Heated Ice Drill The idea was to melt the glaciers and move forward. It was hoped that by the time the ice reached the coast in thousands or tens of thousands of years, the radioactivity would have decayed. One physicist later reported that the idea was God-given. In the vision.
Of course, there are many unknowns about this plan, which sparked heated debate at scientific conferences when it was announced — for example, what would happen if the ball were crushed or caught in meltwater currents near the base of the ice sheet? Would a radioactive ball heat the ice so much that the currents would speed up at the base of the ice sheet, speeding up the ball’s journey to shore?
Logistical challenges, scientific questions, and politics marred the project: Producing millions of radioactive glass marbles was not yet practical, and Denmark, which ruled Greenland at the time, was never keen on disposing of nuclear waste on what it considered its island. Some skeptics worried that climate change would melt the ice. Still, the Philbers visited the ice sheet and published a peer-reviewed paper on it. Scientific Papers About their waste dreams.
