alt Hacker NewsDo you all know about the Gamma Forest? In 1961 the supergeniuses at Brookhaven National Labs decided it would be a good thing to drag a 9500 Curie Cesium-137 source into the middle of a forest just to see what would happen.
What happened, of course, is that it killed everything. It sterilized the microbes in the soil to the extent that 65 years later it is still mostly a kill zone, nothing larger than small surface weeds can grow. It is clearly visible in Google Maps. The site’s surface water drains to the Peconic river. I used to canoe in there, yay!
https://maps.app.goo.gl/fhjeJF4Todp5FWAa7?g_st=ic
https://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/bulletin/files/1962/1962011...
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/brookhaven-gamma-forest
BNL, of course, sits right on top of Long Island’s drinking water aquifer, and the aquifer layer that supplies drinking water is not even from below the allegedly impermeable clay layer.
https://www.nswcawater.org/water_facts/our-long-island-aquif...
I grew up on Long Island and I expect that it will eventually kill me. My elementary school, middle school, high school, and childhood home are all located within a Superfund site that was/is/will continue to be contaminated with cadmium and hexavalent chromium. The entire island is littered with WW2 and Cold War defense industry detritus.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
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You imply that experiment contaminated drinking, and other, water. How? Are you saying the Cs¹³⁷ leaked, and at concentration above that from fallout, say? Its γ-rays don't activate materials — I've used enough of them.
It may help alleviate your concerns somewhat to know that these scientists weren’t completely irresponsible: Cesium 137 is a gamma emitter, which means that it doesn’t make things around it radioactive (unlike most fissionable elements such as Uranium or Plutonium).
This was mentioned in one of the articles you linked!
Probably a third hand story at this point but what I was told from someone that worked there for a long time is that at one point, the winch that raised the cesium source got jammed in the up position. Obviously this was a problem because no one could approach it. They brought in a marksman who somehow shot the winch or rope or whatever which dropped the source back into it's pig.
I will say that this experiment only exposed the plot of land to radiation, not contaminated it. Unless the source was broken or eroded, there would be no detectable radiation on that land once the source is sealed up.
That's not to say BNL hasn't contaminated the land, it is a Superfund site. They do a lot of medical experiments there (they invented the PET scan) but medical waste hasn't always been disposed of properly like now. They had "glass holes", a hole in the ground where you'd chuck in your contaminated labware.