US atomic waste dump in Marshall Islands to be investigated

Then I guess it was a "happy accident" and the US got lucky that the Marshallese got exposed to radiation and we had the chance to conduct experiments on them without their informed consent.

It would be like someone wanting to test the effects of electrocution and placing a live wire on the street. Someone "accidentally" steps on it and you can conduct your experiments on the victim. But it wasn't intentional since you didn't tell the victim to go step on the live wire.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "intentional". Did they douse Marshallese directly? Did they blow up the nukes hoping some of the radiation landed on some unsuspecting Marshallese so that they can see the effects and conduct experiments? To me both are intentional, though some could argue only the former is intentional.

ABC Australia visited this island in 2017, and created a photo essay with some very clear images of its current state and its precarious location.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-27/the-dome-runit-island...

A quote from the article in my earlier comment;

    Some of the debris buried beneath the dome includes
    plutonium-239, a fissile isotope used in nuclear
    warheads which is one of the most toxic substances
    on earth. It has a radioactive half-life of 24,100
    years.

Part of the problem in determining that is that there is a history of reports saying that it wasn't a problem anymore.

> The last nuclear test in the Marshall Islands was conducted over fifty years ago, and through the passage of time and cleanup efforts by DOE, radiation doses in the RMI have been steadily declining. Today, the greatest source of radiation being absorbed by all persons living in the world, including the RMI, is from natural sources. - U.S. National Cancer Institute, 2010

There have been some reports in the past that disagreed with the narrative that the radiation was quickly disappearing, but they have been traditionally shot down quickly:

> ...determined that no further corroboration of the measurements and assessments of the radiological conditions at Bikini Atoll is necessary. The data that have been collected are of sufficient quality to allow an appropriate evaluation to be performed. - International Atomic Energy Agency, 1997

However, a modern study by Columbia University [0], published this year, found not just flaws in the way previous studies were done (they avoided sediment analysis), but a disturbingly high amount of radiation in places that were previously deemed to be "safe". Well above the legal limits put in place by agreements between the US and the Marshall Islands.

[0] https://news.columbia.edu/news/marshall-islands-nuclear-radi...

Generally speaking, the longer the half-life, the less dangerous (in terms of radioactivity) something is. Also, pl239 primarily emits alpha particles, which are stopped by clothing and don't penetrate skin. Maybe a real physicist can chime in, but I don't think there's much risk of standing around subcritical quantities of the stuff.

The chemical toxicity is a different matter though.