How the U.S. betrayed the Marshall Islands, kindling the next nuclear disaster
Five thousand miles west of Los Angeles and 500 miles north of the equator, on a far-flung spit of white coral sand in the central Pacific, a massive, aging and weathered concrete dome bobs up and down with the tide.
Here in the Marshall Islands, Runit Dome holds more than 3.1 million cubic feet — or 35 Olympic-sized swimming pools — of U.S.-produced radioactive soil and debris, including lethal amounts of plutonium. Nowhere else has the United States saddled another country with so much of its nuclear waste, a product of its Cold War atomic testing program.
Between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated 67 nuclear bombs on, in and above the Marshall Islands — vaporizing whole islands, carving craters into its shallow lagoons and exiling hundreds of people from their homes.
U.S. authorities later cleaned up contaminated soil on Enewetak Atoll, where the United States not only detonated the bulk of its weapons tests but, as The Times has learned, also conducted a dozen biological weapons tests and dumped 130 tons of soil from an irradiated Nevada testing site. It then deposited the atoll’s most lethal debris and soil into the dome.
https://www.latimes.com/projects/marshall-islands-nuclear-testing-sea-level-rise/
= new reply since forum marked as read
only 2/3 for the way through...and I swear, the fucking Imperialism of the US is so fucking disheartening. I hate my country sometimes 
Thanks for posting! There is so much wrong here. From casual human tests (highlights mine):
U.S. government documents from the time show that officials weighed the potential hazards of radiation exposure against “the current low morale of the natives” and a “risk of an onset of indolence.” Ultimately they decided to go forward with the resettlement so researchers could study the effects of lingering radiation on human beings.
“Data of this type has never been available,” Merrill Eisenbud, a U.S official with the Atomic Energy Commission, said at a January 1956 meeting of the agency’s Biology and Medicine Committee. “While it is true that these people do not live the way that Westerners do, civilized people, it is nonetheless also true that they are more like us than the mice.”
... to ridiculously ineffective containment of radioactive waste (buried in an unlined pit that is degrading and leaks):
To an expert that says not to worry, because the situation is already horrific:
But Hamilton went on to assure them such a scenario was not cause for alarm. Enewetak lagoon is already so contaminated, he said, that any added radiation introduced by a dome failure would be virtually undetectable — in the lagoon, or in the wider ocean waters.
Much more awful details in the excellent LA Times article.
We're better than this. Or at least we should be.
