California scientists accidentally find nuclear fever dream in Arctic snow

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By Ariana Bindman, SFGate. 

Excerpt: A Cold War relic, Camp Century was supposed to be entombed in ice forever. NASA’s April 2024 expedition to the Greenland Ice Sheet...[was] "...looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century,” said Alex Gardner, a scientist at NASA’s California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a Nov. 25 news release. ...Part research facility, part war machine, the clandestine, underground military site once housed up to 200 soldiers and scientists who dutifully studied ice core samples during the height of the Cold War. The nuclear-powered operation, complete with an experimental subsurface railway ultimately designed to help launch 600 missiles and provide year-round accommodations for its personnel, was supposed to be entombed in snow for eternity after authorities decommissioned it in 1967. ...But the bones of “Project Iceworm” may soon reemerge, as scientists worry that global warming will exhume its toxic waste, leading to grave environmental consequences. ...U.S. officials didn’t exactly have permission to build the so-called “city under the ice.” ...During Cold War tensions, the Danes only allowed the U.S. to construct military bases in designated areas in Greenland.... But, during a cocktail party in August of 1959, Danish Minister for Foreign Affairs Jens Otto Krag was horrified to learn that the Americans were secretly digging tunnels deep in the Greenland Ice Sheet using thermal drills, according to a historical article on the era published in ScienceNordic magazine. ...the site — along with its 200,000 liters of diesel fuel, 24,000,000 liters of biological waste, and 1.2 million units of radioactive waste — was left behind, forever buried in the snow.... 

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