Greenland / Press release n°3
With small modular reactor projects flourishing in Europe and in the United States, it is time to recount the story of Camp Century in Greenland, where a small modular reactor built in the mid-20th century poses a health and environmental threat in the 21th century and beyond. This is the story of a fiasco and a scandal.
The construction of Camp Century began in June 1959, 24 hours a day, taking advantage of the polar day, 204 km south of Thule Air Base. 150 men from the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) were at work. Officially, the aim was to design a small comfortable community under the ice cap dedicated to climate research. Camp Century was part of the Atoms for Peace programme, which sought to remove all traces of the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But military and civil nuclear power are in league or connected, and behind the architectural and scientific project loomed the Iceworm project. Camp Century was also an experimental base for studying the functionality of a ballistic missile launch pad under the ice cap to the Soviet Union.
During the excavation of the subglacial base using Peter Snow-Millers, giant snowploughs from Switzerland, the site was powered by diesel generators. The workforce lived above ground in specially designed containers equipped to protect them as best as possible from low temperatures, 200 km/h gusts of wind, humidity, and fires.
In total, 21 tunnels were dug out, all branching perpendicular to a “Main Street” that ran approximately 335 meters in length. The 55-hectare “palace of ice” consisted of living quarters, a library, working and recreation facilities, a theatre, and a church. Sewage was dumped into pits, with the assumption that it would freeze into the cryosphere and disappear forever from human sight and smell.
Tunnel construction
Photo U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
In October 1960, the PM-2A (Portable Medium Power) demountable nuclear reactor, conceived by the American Locomotive Company (ALCO), began generating electricity. This 2-megawatt pressurised water reactor had been taken across the ice sheet in pieces from Thule and assembled at Camp Century. With 20 kg of uranium-235 enriched to 93%, the PM-2A could power the camp for 2 years, replacing the annual consumption of 1.5 million litres of fuel oil by generators. Atomic technology was considered radically cutting-edge and reassuring. The safety precautions imposed on the technicians responsible for inserting fuel rods into the reactor core were almost non-existent.
Unpacking of fuel elements prior to insertion into the reactor control rods
Photo National Geographic/Robert Moore, Vol. 121, n° 5, May 1962
Camp Century was closed in a hurry during the summer of 1963. The frames of the tunnels were warping and collapsing under the pressure of ice and surface snow. Initially, the revolutionary city was estimated to have a lifespan of 10 years.
“During summer 1964, workers disassembled the nuclear power plant, removed it from the camp, and sent it back to the USA. The Danish Atomic Energy Commission supervised the operation. which, except for the discovery of considerably higher than expected levels of residual radiation around the primary unit, seemed to have proceeded as planned. Per the agreement between the Americans and the Danish Atomic Energy Commission, all solid waste was removed from Greenland and disposed of in accordance with Danish regulations, that is, placed in concrete casks and dumped into designed locations in the ocean or deposited in designated burial grounds in the USA.” (Exploring Greenland: Cold War Science and Technology on Ice, editors: Ronald E. Doel, Kristine C. Harper and Matthias Heymann, 2016)
Despite repeated requests made by Robin des Bois (Robin Hood) in 2009 to the American and Danish authorities as part of its inventory of polluted sites in Greenland, it has not been possible to locate the sites where the waste was “oceanized”. Denmark is not listed as one of the countries that officially dumped radioactive waste in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans between 1946 and 1996.
From 1967 onwards, Camp Century was completely abandoned, as if forgotten.
The legacy of this short-lived adventure has serious consequences for the future. According to a study by researchers from Canada, Switzerland, the United States and Denmark published in Geophysical Research Letters in August 2016, 200,000 litres of diesel fuel, 240,000 litres of wastewater, reactor coolant, and 9,200 tonnes of solid waste from dismantled structures, tunnels, rails and maintenance workshops were left behind. According to the authors, chemical waste is the most worrying, particularly PCBs (PolyChlorinated Biphenyls, known under the trade name Pyralene), which are particularly suitable for use in the Arctic. Due to their high thermal resistance and low flammability, they were used in air bases and radar stations to prevent fires. Transformers contained insulating oils saturated with PCBs, and some paints contained 5% PCBs. PCBs are endocrine disruptors, carcinogenic, persistent, and bioaccumulative. They use the same transfer pathways in living organisms as PFAS. In 2016, the mass of solid waste from Camp Century was around 36 metres deep and the mass of liquid waste around 65 metres. According to the authors, global warming could lead to the annual net-melt of the ice cap by 2090. Sooner or later, the past irresponsibility will result in the remobilisation of waste temporarily sequestered in the ice, creating an additional burden on the environment and on animal and human populations.
The “toxic soup'” is slowly moving towards Melville Bay, around 100 km south of Camp Century.
A new Camp Century?
On August 12, 2025, as part of the revival of the nuclear industry in the United States, the US Department of Energy (DOE) selected a dozen experimental projects, three of which will have to demonstrate their feasibility by July 4, 2026 at the latest, in time for the 250th anniversary of USA independence. Deep Fission’s project is among the nominees. Liz Muller, CEO of Deep Fission and the director of the Great Plains Industrial Park (formerly the Kansas Army Ammunition Plant) in Labette County, Kansas, which covers nearly 3,000 hectares, are enthusiastic. Inspired by sealed geothermal wells, it involves burying a 15-megawatt pressurised water reactor at least 1 km underground, which would produce the energy needed to power data centers and other energy-intensive human activities across the Great Plains Industrial Park.
Deep Fission emphasises the project’s financial prudence, its safety and the modest cost of waste management. “The reactors could be sealed underground after their lifespan of two to seven years has passed.” “It is safer for the environment because the radioactive material never surfaces.”
This assertive and simplistic rhetoric doesn’t allay the concerns of protesters who are worried about radioactive contamination of groundwater serving as reservoirs for human consumption and agricultural activities.
About Greenland, see also:
Polar Star n°2, 2750 polluted sites in the Arctic – 2009, December 15, 2009
58 years ago, plutonium-239 belonging to the US Air Force crashed into Greenland. Greenland / Press release n°1, January 20, 2026
Top-secret relic. Greenland / Press release n°2, February 2, 2026
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