A network of tunnels under the snow contained everything from research facilities to a hospital, a cinema and a church — all powered by a small, portable nuclear reactor. The pollutants left behind include PCBs used in building supplies, tanks of raw sewage and low-level radioactive coolant used in the nuclear reactor that once stood there. “When the waste was deposited there nobody thought it would get out again,” William Colgan, an assistant professor in the Lassonde School of Engineering at York University in Canada, told AFP. But a study led by Colgan, published in August in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that higher temperatures could eventually result in toxic waste from the base being released into the environment.

Melting Greenland ice threatens to expose Cold War waste. (2016, September 27). Manila Times, p. A6.