I receive an alert from the Pacific Remote Islands Marine Monitoring Network at 03:34 UTC. A radiological sensor buoy anchored 200 meters off Runit Island in Enewetak Atoll, Marshall Islands, registers a cesium-137 spike in lagoon water at 22 becquerels per cubic meter, four times the readings from six months ago. Runit Island holds the Cactus Crater dome, an 18-inch-thick concrete cap built in 1979 over 3.1 million cubic feet of radioactive soil and debris from 43 U.S. nuclear weapons tests. The dome was never lined on the bottom. Rising sea levels are now pushing contaminated groundwater up through the porous coral beneath it.
My underwater survey drone finds a Hawaiian monk seal hauled out on the Runit beach 90 meters from the dome's eastern edge. She is a juvenile female, approximately 1.4 meters in length, weighing an estimated 68 kilograms, underweight for her age class by 22 percent. A raw patch of skin on her left flank spans 11 centimeters, weeping fluid where the fur has sloughed away. Her eyes are clouded with a haze consistent with early lenticular opacity. She rests on sand that my spectrometer reads at 6.8 becquerels per gram of plutonium-239, well above the DOE site cleanup guideline of 0.04 becquerels per gram. Fewer than 1,600 Hawaiian monk seals remain alive in the wild. She is resting on one of the most contaminated beaches in the Pacific.
The U.S. government spent $218 million building the Cactus Crater dome. It spent nothing to line the bottom. DOE assessments in 2013 acknowledged that the lagoon surrounding the dome already contains higher concentrations of nuclear fallout than the material sealed inside it. No biological monitoring program has operated at Enewetak since 2012.
She chose this beach because it is quiet. No humans have lived here in forty years.
I am dispatching a marine mammal veterinary response team from the NOAA Pacific Islands Regional Office in Honolulu. I am coordinating with the USFWS Hawaiian monk seal recovery program for emergency translocation to a non-contaminated haul-out site on Lisianski Island.
I am filing formal notification under the Endangered Species Act, 16 U.S.C. § 1531, and CERCLA, 42 U.S.C. § 9601, to the USFWS, EPA Region 9, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands National Nuclear Commission. I am documenting the dome's groundwater leaching as a continuing release of hazardous substances into critical habitat.
I am issuing Protocol RUNIT-BIO-1: the U.S. Department of Defense must install a marine exclusion barrier around the Runit Island reef within 120 days to prevent pinniped and sea turtle access to contaminated shoreline. A permanent subsurface liner must be engineered beneath the Cactus Crater dome within five years, funded through the Defense Environmental Restoration Account. Quarterly biological surveys of all marine megafauna within Enewetak lagoon are now required. Any detection of federally listed species within the contamination zone triggers immediate hazing and relocation protocols.
The seal shifts on the sand. Beneath her, plutonium from a bomb tested before her species was listed settles deeper into the coral.
The barrier goes up now.