Thousands of rotting barrels littering the ocean floor off the coast of Los Angeles may contain radioactive waste, an alarming new study has revealed.
Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara initially thought the barrels contained the toxic pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, but research published Wednesday shows that the barrels contain tritium and carbon dioxide. New discoveries suggest that it may have contained. environmental science and technology.
“This is a classic situation of bad vs. bad. It’s unfortunate that potential low-level radioactive waste is just sitting on the sea floor. “It’s even worse to be present,” said study team leader David Valentine. he told the Los Angeles Times.
“The question we’re grappling with now is how bad is it, and is it even worse?”
Scientists say it was once standard practice for hospitals, laboratories and other industrial operations to dump barrels of toxic chemicals and radioactive waste into the ocean, dating back to the 1940s.
Permits were required for companies to perform this mission, and they were only allowed in designated areas 150 miles offshore.
The total number of barrels that may have leaked radioactive chemicals into the ocean is still a mystery, but one map from the International Atomic Energy Agency shows that “more than 56,000 barrels of radioactive waste were dumped on the U.S. side just before that.” It is shown that it was dumped into the Pacific Ocean. 1945 and his 1970.
Some of the reported isotopes (such as tritium) are thought to have decayed in the past few decades, but scientists are wondering what other dangerous substances may have been secretly dumped. I don’t know yet.
“The problem with ocean dumping as a solution is that once it gets there, you can’t go back and get it out,” said Ken Besseler, senior scientist and director of the Marine Environmental Radioactivity Center at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. ” he said. Exit. “For example, these 56,000 barrels can never be recovered.”
The study uncovered an alarming dump of radioactive material in a quest to find the source of DDT contamination. DDT contamination is still traveling 3,000 feet below the surface, across a swath of ocean floor larger than the city of San Francisco.
DDT, which was banned in 1972, has been traced to a range of marine animals and has been linked to malignant tumors found in California sea lions.
It turned out that the culprit did not bother to use the barrel and dumped the toxin directly into the sea.
Although researchers have visited the ocean floor dozens of times since discovering the barrels in 2020, they still don’t know how extensive the boundaries of the landfill are.
Archived memos suggest that California Salvage, the company tasked with dumping the waste, may have taken a shortcut and poured the chemicals overboard before reaching the threshold of 150 miles offshore.
“There’s quite a bit of paper trail,” Valentine told the Times.
“This all depends on the situation, but the situation is that this company takes whatever waste people give them and it ends up pushing offshore with other liquid waste that we know they were dumping at the time. It seems to be pointing you in the right direction.”
