Thousands of decaying barrels off Los Angeles coast may contain radioactive waste: report
Thousands of decaying barrels littering the seafloor off the Los Angeles coast may contain radioactive waste, according to an alarming new study.
Researchers at UC Santa Barbara initially thought the barrels contained the toxic pesticide Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane — but new findings suggest they could be carrying tritium and carbon-1, according to a study published Wednesday in Environmental Science & Technology.
“This is a classic situation of bad versus worse. It’s bad we have potential low-level radioactive waste just sitting there on the seafloor. It’s worse that we have DDT compounds spread across a wide area of the seafloor at concerning concentrations,” research team leader David Valentine told the Los Angeles Times.
“The question we grapple with now is how bad and how much worse.”
According to scientists, it was once standard for hospitals, labs and other industrial operations to ditch barrels of toxic chemicals and radioactive waste into the ocean dating as far back as the 1940s.
Companies needed permits to carry out the task, and were only permitted to do so in designated areas as far back as 150 miles off-shore.
The total number of barrels possibly leaking radioactive chemicals into the ocean is still a mystery — but one map from the International Atomic Energy Agency indicated that “more than 56,000 barrels of radioactive waste had been dumped into the Pacific Ocean on the U.S. side” just between 1945 and 1970.
Some of the reported isotopes — such as tritium — would have decayed over the last several decades, but scientists are still unsure what other hazardous material could have been secretly dumped.
“The problem with the oceans as a dumping solution is once it’s there, you can’t go back and get it,” Ken Buesseler, a senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and director of the Center for Marine and Environmental Radioactivity, told the outlet. “These 56,000 barrels, for example, we’re never going to get them back.”
The study uncovered the staggering radioactive dumping in its quest to find the source of the DDT pollution, which is still moving 3,000 feet under the surface across a swatch of seafloor larger than the city of San Francisco.
DDT, which was banned in 1972, has been traced to a series of marine animals and has been connected to an aggressive cancer found in California sea lions.
It turns out the culprit didn’t bother with barrels, but dumped the toxin directly into the ocean.
After dozens of trips to the seafloor since finding the barrels in 2020, researchers are still unsure how wide the boundaries of the dump site reach.
Archived notes indicate that California Salvage, the company tasked with waste dumping, may have taken shortcuts and poured the chemicals overboard before reaching the 150-mile offshore mark.
“There’s quite a bit of a paper trail,” Valentine told the Times.
“It’s all circumstantial, but the circumstances seem to point toward this company that would take whatever waste people gave them and barge it offshore … with the other liquid wastes that we know they were dumping at the time.”
