Chemical Geography
[Image: Chemical weapons dumping sites in the Baltic Sea; ].
According to the :
- Between 1946 and 1970, approximately 47,800 large barrels and other containers of radioactive waste were dumped in the ocean west of San Francisco. The containers were to be dumped at three designated sites, but they litter a sea floor area of at least 1,400 km2 known as the Farallon Island Radioactive Waste Dump.
The exact location of the containers and the potential hazard the containers pose to the environment are unknown.
This is all the more reason, then, that these sites need to be mapped.
Somewhat ominously, at least from my perspective, the suggested that “the Navy dumped far more nuclear waste than it’s ever acknowledged in a major commercial fishery just 30 miles west of San Francisco.”
The Weekly then relates the story of a man named Jim Gessleman. “Part of his regular job,” we read, in reference to Gessleman’s time in the Navy between 1955 and 1959, “was to escort a barge carrying radioactive waste under the Golden Gate Bridge and out into the , we can be sure that “significant amounts of the nuclear bomb component plutonium, which has a half-life of 24,000 years, and similarly long-lived ‘mixed fission’ products,” are all floating around down there in the darkness.
And perhaps it’s all now billowing in a red tide near you…
In fact, later researchers, studying this undersea dumping ground within sight of the mansions and bank towers of San Francisco, “found plutonium, cesium, and americium – an isotope that emits about three times as much radioactivity as radium – in the fish [caught on-site]. In particular, americium and one kind of plutonium were found at levels higher than has been reported at any other site in the world” (emphasis in original).
As it now stands, however, “approximately 85 percent of the nation’s largest undersea nuclear waste dump has never been observed or tested.”
[Image: Via the for originally mentioning the Farallon Islands story].
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