Lately, the Arctic has change into a magnet for local weather change nervousness, with scientists nervously monitoring the Greenland ice sheet for indicators of melting and fretting over rampant environmental degradation. It wasn’t at all times that manner.
On the top of the Chilly Battle within the Fifties, because the worry of nuclear Armageddon hung over American and Soviet residents, idealistic scientists and engineers noticed the huge Arctic area as a spot of limitless potential for making a daring new future. Greenland emerged as probably the most tantalizing proving floor for his or her analysis.
Scientists and engineers working for and with the US navy cooked up a rash of audacious cold-region initiatives—some progressive, many spit-balled, and most shortly deserted. They had been the stuff of science fiction: disposing of nuclear waste by letting it soften by means of the ice; transferring individuals, provides, and missiles beneath the ice utilizing subways, some maybe atomic powered; testing hovercraft to zip over impassable crevasses; making furnishings from a frozen mixture of ice and soil; and even constructing a nuclear-powered metropolis beneath the ice sheet.
At present, a lot of their concepts, and the fever desires that spawned them, survive solely within the yellowed pages and covers of magazines like “REAL: the thrilling journal FOR MEN” and dozens of obscure Military technical studies.
Karl and Bernhard Philberth, each physicists and ordained monks, thought Greenland’s ice sheet the proper repository for nuclear waste. Not all of the waste—first they’d reprocess spent reactor gasoline in order that the long-lived nuclides can be recycled. The remaining, largely short-lived radionuclides can be fused into glass or ceramic and surrounded by just a few inches of lead for transport. They imagined a number of million radioactive medication balls about 16 inches in diameter scattered over a small space of the ice sheet (about 300 sq. miles) removed from the coast.
As a result of the balls had been so radioactive, and thus heat, they might soften their manner into the ice, every with the vitality of a bit lower than two dozen 100-watt incandescent mild bulbs—an affordable leap from Karl Philberth’s experience designing heated ice drills that labored by melting their manner by means of glaciers. The hope was that by the point the ice carrying the balls emerged on the coast hundreds or tens of hundreds of years later, the radioactivity would have decayed away. One of many physicists later reported that the thought was proven to him, by God, in a imaginative and prescient.
After all, the plan had loads of unknowns and led to heated dialogue at scientific conferences when it was offered—what, for instance, would occur if the balls acquired crushed or caught up in flows of meltwater close to the bottom of the ice sheet. And would the radioactive balls heat the ice a lot that the ice flowed sooner on the base, rushing the balls’ journey to the coast?
Logistical challenges, scientific doubt, and politics sunk the challenge. Producing tens of millions of radioactive glass balls wasn’t but sensible, and the Danes, who on the time managed Greenland, had been by no means eager on permitting nuclear waste disposal on what they noticed as their island. Some skeptics even nervous about local weather change melting the ice. Nonetheless, the Philberths made visits to the ice sheet and revealed peer-reviewed scientific papers about their waste dream.