Greetings, Dr. Zoomie – what with Greenland being in the news recently I read something about a nuclear reactor buried in a tunnel in the ice. Is this for real? Why would they do that? And, for that matter, I heard they’d had a reactor in Antarctica too, operated by penguins or something. Really?
There are cruise ship science guides who specialize in the polar regions – they’ll work trips to South Georgia Island, Antarctica, Tierra del Fuego, and other southerly trips from October through March, then relocate to the far north to work cruises in Iceland, Greenland, Svalbard, and Franz Josef Land from April through September. Shuttling back and forth between the Arctic and Antarctic, they refer to themselves as “bi-polar.” Given that the US has built nuclear reactors in Greenland and Antarctica, “bi-polar” seems a good fit here as well.
In the first few decades after the Second World War ended the US and USSR both embarked on programs to bring nuclear energy and nuclear research throughout the world – Eisenhower called it “Atoms for Peace” – while the military developed small(ish) reactors to power nuclear-powered submarines and ships as well as small land-based reactors to power military bases. One of those reactors ended up on an Antarctic ice shelf, another was buried inside a glacier in Greenland; both have interesting stories.
In the late 1950s the US military started thinking about the next war, which they expected to be fought against the Soviet Union and its allies/client states. And even though long-range ballistic missiles were still very new, the military was still looking for ways to hide them to ensure their survival in the event war broke out. In 1959, under the pretext of polar research, the US Army Corps of Engineers began boring tunnels into a glacier in the far north of Greenland; these tunnels became Camp Century, a small city beneath tens of meters of ice from which as many as 600 nuclear-tipped missiles (this part was code-named “Project Iceworm”) could be launched against the Soviet Union and its allies in the event of a war. And, because even small cities and military bases require power, but its location in the far north made for complex and expensive logistics, the Army decided to bury a nuclear reactor under the ice as well, to power their small city/research station/missile base.
What the US had told Denmark was that they were testing Arctic construction techniques as well as working out some of the practical matters associated with operating a nuclear reactor under the ice, and they also made mention of scientific experiments. Of the reasons for building this base, both stated and unstated, most were unsuccessful; glaciers flow and the movement of the ice ruled out placing missiles beneath the ice as well as greatly complicating maintaining a long-term base in such an environment.
The scientific experiments, however, actually bore some fruit – scientists at Camp Century drilled the first ice core used to investigate stable isotopes, and work here showed that much of Greenland was likely ice-free as recently as a half-million years ago (long in human terms, not so long geologically).
Although the nuclear reactor was removed when the base was abandoned some radioactive and hazardous wastes remained; as with the base itself, the military assumed that the falling snows would bury the waste ever-more-deeply, entombing it in perpetuity. In the subsequent decades scientists have come to realize that, even so far north, the rate of snowfall has slowed and they now expect the hazardous waste may be uncovered in a century or so if current climate trends persist.
While Camp Century was designed to last a decade, it was permanently manned for only half that time; ironically, until just after the Army published a report that concluded such a camp was both feasible and practical, that nuclear power would be a useful way to power such bases, and that future such bases would benefit from the lessons learned from this experience. They failed, however, to follow through on these future bases. And, while this site continues to hold millions of gallons of wastewater and sewage as well as radioactive and hazardous wastes, these will not pose an environmental risk until sometime in the 22nd century; they can’t be ignored forever, but at least we have time to address them safely and effectively. One can hope that it will be cleaned up before being exposed by the melting and ablating ice.
At the same time the Army was installing a nuclear reactor in the Greenland ice sheet in the north, a similar reactor was being shipped to Antarctica to power the scientific station at McMurdo Sound, on the Ross Ice Shelf. In this case, the reactor was there to power a civilian scientific station, it was built on the surface, and it was formally closed down and the site remediated in 1972, following a decade of operation. But let’s back up a bit.
In the 1950s, especially after the major scientific effort during the International Geophysical Year (IGY) in 1957-1958, the US and a number of other nations had established scientific stations on the Antarctic continent, and the cost and logistical difficulties of maintaining these stations was growing. With the largest scientific station on the continent at McMurdo Sound, the American government felt that constructing a small nuclear reactor could address a few concerns simultaneously; it could produce electrical power that could, in turn, power electrical heaters, it could produce fresh water, and it could reduce the need to ship fuel oil from the other side of the world.
The PM-3A reactor was a pressurized water reactor designed to run on highly enriched uranium (HEU) with over 93% U-235, producing up to 2 MW of power and enough steam to produce 14,000 gallons of fresh water daily by desalinating seawater. The reactor achieved initial criticality and produced electrical power in 1962. Unfortunately, the reactor was plagued with problems, logging over 400 malfunctions in the roughly 3500 days between 1964 and 1973 (note that the great majority of these malfunctions were minor in nature). More significant were some leaks that led to contaminated soil and a hydrogen fire when the reactor was still going through initial testing. None of these led to dangerous radiation levels or serious amounts of environmental contamination.
Decommissioning the McMurdo Sound reactor began in 1974 and continued through 1979, largely due to the relatively short field season each year. In addition to removing the reactor plant and four cores’ worth of spent fuel, about 70 tons of radioactive waste were removed and shipped to the US for disposal in addition to about 15,000 tons of soil, crushed rock, and other waste from around the reactor plant that might have been contaminated by some of the leaks mentioned earlier.
The reactor plant was operated by personnel from the US Navy’s Nuclear Power Program, all of whom were closely monitored for radiation exposure and none of whom exceeded any regulatory dose limits during their tours of duty. As an aside, as a former Navy nuke, this isn’t surprising as the Navy was diligent about monitoring and controlling radiation exposure to their personnel.
Decommissioning was completed in 1979 and the site was released for unrestricted use.
