Cactus Dome
An enormous concrete structure built over a nuclear crater
Category Ghost Towns, Disaster Areas, Subterranean Sites
Between 1946 and 1962, the US military conducted 105 atmospheric nuclear tests over the "Pacific Proving Grounds," a euphemism for the Marshall Islands and several other nearby South Pacific atolls.
In the late 1970s, in an effort to clean up the radioactive debris left by those explosions, the US government dug up 111,000 cubic yards of soil from the Bikini and Rongelap atolls and deposited it on Runit Island. Its resting place would be in a 350-foot wide crater that had been created two decades earlier by an 18-kiloton nuclear test code-named Cactus.
Covering up that giant radioactive pit cost the government nearly a quarter of a billion dollars and took three years to complete. The result: an enormous, foot-and-a-half-thick, 100,000-square-foot dome consisting of 358 gigantic concrete panels. Despite signs warning off visitors, it is still possible to make landfall on Runit and stomp across the Cactus Dome. Bring a Geiger counter.
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- Address Runit Island, Marshall Islands
Comments
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Anonymous
November 5, 2009
How was the soil collected? And how was the containment dome built by workers to avoid the radioactivity? -
Anonymous
August 29, 2009
I believe the circle off the coast is another bomb crater. They did many tests there.
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Anonymous
August 8, 2009
Be aware they also did underwater testing multiple times, so it may actually be an artifact (read crater) from one of the tests.
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I believe that is a blue hole, that just happens to be nearby the dome. I saw it too, it is quite a coincidence!
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Anonymous
August 1, 2009
When I look at this on google earth there seems to be a similarly sized circle in the water off the coast near the dome. Does anybody know what this is? I assume it is something from the construction of the dome.
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Anonymous
June 23, 2009
I think you mean, "not immediately fatal". That's always been the kicker with radiation poisoning.
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Hi Josh, the half-life of Uranium-235 is 700 million years and below the concrete there is a lot of very contaminated soil, which has come in contact with nuclear fallout from numerous nuclear tests (weapons-grade U-235 and U-238). Despite the enormous size of the concrete dome, it is not very thick and won't stop all the radioactive particles, especially the gamma type. So bringing a Geiger counter when trekking in that area would be a good idea indeed. Looking at the picture above, there are however people walking on top of the dome, so the radiation is probably not fatal. :)
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Is the Cactus Dome still radioactive? How dangerous is it, actually?
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