Sea Gypsies : The Plutonium Dome (Runit Dome Marshall Islands)

[Music] [Music] holy [ __ ] look at this thing [Music] [Music] [Music] hello i'm clemens the captain of infinity we're we're here in the marshall islands it's a rather odd place to get ready for a trip to the arctic it's in the middle of the pacific about as much in the middle as one can get [Music] infinity is a big red tub of concrete sort of like a bunker that due to the miracle of water displacement somehow floats and it's all kept together by a crazy man who has been living here for the better part

of 20 odd years i would say with his kids rhian and chloe and girlfriend sage traveling all over the mostly pacific exploring places that few people ever really get to see perfect example for clem like we're talking about clem as a character so just the other day um we wanted to go for a dive and he said to me he goes tim we're going to go for a deep dive this is a an extreme deep water we're going to go down to 60 meters and we're going to look for hammerhead sharks i was like cool

no worries so he battled out there in the dinghy we jump in the water with all of our gear and then clint starts swearing and carrying on he's like tim i forgot my bloody weight belt we've come so far to get to this dive so what does he do he takes the anchor out of the dinghy takes a shackle off it deflates his bcd and then instantly descends down to 45 meters holding onto the anchor straps the anchor into his bcd and then continues on a full half an hour dive at like 50 meters what

kind of a human does that but i love him for it that's the thing like that's what i respect he's the kind of guy that like he does the craziest [ __ ] and you sit there and go how the hell can he like get through in these situations and that's kind of why i'm putting my faith in this project so much is because really it's because of him the marshall islands are very very remote we are as far as you can pretty much sail on the biggest ocean of the planet the pacific i've always

been really keen to sail very far away to you know try and escape babylon and all those madnesses of modern civilization and what do i run into a nuclear dump site in the middle of the south pacific ocean called the run it dome [Music] as you can imagine feeling is running pretty high about now and there's reason for it if everything goes according to plan we'll soon see the largest explosion ever set off on the face of the earth the test islands for mike are located at the top or the northern sector of any wetac

at all some 25 miles from perry and any we talk the two base islands of this atoll proving grounds the problem this time is especially acute because this entire area the pacific is subject to radiological fallout and this area is inhabited by some 20 000 people plus of course the ships of this task force we have entered a new epoch the epoch of the anthropocene where man is changing the very geology of the planet the astral of innovatic here in the marshall islands uh is considered the birthplace of the anthropocene as it is the first

place mankind has detonated thermal nuclear weapon hydrogen bomb you have a grandstand seat here to one of the most momentous events in the history of science in less than a minute you will see the most powerful explosion ever witnessed by human eyes the blast will come out of the horizon just about there and this is the significance of the moment this is the first full-scale test of a hydrogen device if the reaction goes we're in the thermonuclear era for the sake of all of us and for the sake of our country i know that you

join me in wishing this expedition well it is now 30 seconds to zero minus 10 seconds niner eight seven six five four three two one [Music] [Music] 14 years of hiroshima bomb every day that kind of amount of explosions all in one little at all and then some unfortunate american soldiers scooped that all up into a big into a crater hall and covered it with a foot of concrete and it's like a massive dome that's 13 inches thick made of cement and it's porous and supposedly when it's high tide there is light it's like leaking

radiation into the ocean and i think we're gonna try and go with the boat and then have some whoever wants to go with the dinghy that's where we're going [Music] i [Music] uh we know people have returned to live on any attack at all so it'll be interesting to meet those people it'd be interesting to talk to those people um i'm certain these people will be heavily uh you know impacted by by radiation but i guess it's their home you know people do anything to stay at home because otherwise you're just a refugee 1948 to

1958 43 nuclear tests were conducted on any wetak atoll most of the tests were conducted in the northeast quadrant leaving these islands the most heavily contaminated the any weta people became more insistent for return to their native land the aniwetak people are intelligent and resourceful but untrained and unskilled in the industrial arts they have the capacity as a people to assimilate the skills necessary to perform many of the cleanup tasks the objective of keeping their exposure to radiation sources on the atoll to the absolute minimum is an important consideration particularly since the aniwetak people must

live and earn their livelihood from the atoll for the remainder of their lives [Music] [Music] yeah okay and you're the acting mayor on the island yes this is in the marshall islands in the central pacific right where my finger is that's where we are far away from america right here do you go to ruin it very often or no no i'm scared you're scared okay i'm scared i don't want to put that is it very is it very radioactive there uh the radiation is rather low using the geiger meter but then it cannot in any

way measure [Music] oh okay i didn't think of that ah wow that has an old-school plug oh yeah look at that all right i'm gonna do it first try um oh that is cool that neat this is a 7107 gca-08 model the 09 model was an extra hundred dollars so we uh decided to go with 08. uh it takes a while it's like going through the scan which i don't fully understand but after some time it gives you some value valuable inputs oh it just takes some time to like oh let's leave it on for

a little bit like let it cycle yeah are there little particles of plutonium all over the place there i think so yeah i think so i think so that's why uh that place actually yeah uh we were advised by the department of energy of the united states not to go there not to go there so uh us we don't want harm to come your way also oh yeah thank you you go there at your own risk yeah but we want you to know it's risky okay it's risky not a very good idea oh okay thank

you for warning us yeah we didn't think about the geiger count or not reading plutonium [Music] each of the four kinds of missiles discharged by radioactive substances has its own ballistic behavior alpha particles cannot penetrate the skin beta particles can cause surface burns if the assault is sufficiently concentrated and sustained both are able to gain entry through the eating and breathing of radioactive matter or via breaks in the skin once inside this so-called hot stuff takes up residence in various parts of the body giving off highly ionizing alpha and beta particles there's no effective method

for dislodging the stuff no known way of neutralizing or destroying it there is no method of hastening its half-life which is the time required for 50 of the substance to decay with some substances it is a matter of less than a second but if you had some plutonium inside you you wouldn't make any plans to celebrate the event plutonium's half-life is 24 000 years the bolodonium is in ronald island caledonia is the worst yeah radiating radiation once again we don't understand about the radiation right we just wait wait and see what happened will be gonna

happen for us how has it been so far like uh has there been uh some effects from the uh the radiation that looks like somebody somebody will die already genji canceled from their friend right some problem with lunch okay from hearts yeah and some they call uh what they call the other one uh maybe bone like uh chick is yellow like a we don't know what's going on this island today yeah yeah at least twice in a year or three times in a year technicians from california would come to collect some samples stool in urine

also they would collect some fish and local foods they would bring it back to california for testing people here in nevada we really don't know they really don't know what is the result of those tests for the foods what kind of fish do you catch around here uh we call rice never we've called we're gonna have a party i went called vicky you know all the pigs plenty kind type of thing we eat here is it safe to eat the fish do you think yeah i don't know which is it [Music] do you grow any

of the vegetables here yeah we don't pour them no more no more is it safe to eat any of the vegetables [Music] three island three island there was two three water bomb it's looking like blue ocean but three island wanted three throw it like a blue ocean yeah india we call crater watch through island right there and want to blow up normal island how big were the islands that were like this yeah you love the island big violent what this tremendous blast did to the atoll nobody knows the results of this tremendous power can be

shown at the atoll here is an aerial photo of the test area of the atoll before the blast and here is the same area after the blast showing the crater caused by might the outlined island in the center is former illugia lab the zero island the crater is roughly a mile in diameter and the uranus is never clean up yet run it island once covered with coconut trees is now not only littered with large amounts of debris but is also the island having the highest residual radioactivity it is the only island which the people will

be prohibited from visiting the two craters will be used for entombment of radioactive debris collected throughout the atoll entombment is a considerably cheaper means of disposal of contaminated material an ocean dumping of encapsulated modules or shipment back to the united states entombment is expected to be more acceptable to the environmental protection agency so you're left in a pretty tough situation you're right the land's contaminated the fish might be contaminated the coconuts are contaminated and tourists can't come here so american really strong country water really strong we cannot play with them do you have any words

for the united states government do you feel like they should do something about this i don't have no idea no idea concerned efforts of numerous agencies of the united states government can fulfill their hope of returning to their homeland after more than three decades [Music] radiation in general is very difficult for me to grasp very difficult to understand you know i understand poison somehow somehow poison kills things and this is not exactly like poison but somehow it is acts very similar you know but it's poison that you don't have to touch to maybe get poisoned

and maybe the way you get poisoned you might not feel anything it's not like you get sick and puke or you may but you may not know what happened to you and then all of a sudden some years later you may get really sick or maybe next week or maybe your children you don't know [Laughter] so just over the horizon here behind me uh lies inauetak atoll and runa dome and i tell you what i'm starting to get pretty nervous about the idea my father passed away from cancer a few years ago from mesothelioma as

a result of exposure to asbestos and i saw how cancer just struck him down and how it affected him for so many years and how it affected our entire family so i've been having a few strange feelings about exposing myself to such huge levels of radiation we've got a geiger counter but we don't know how to work it we've got a few uh slightly protective suits i think they're meant for painting or something and got a few dust masks as protection and that's about it so i'm just looking at you know sage and the kids

on this boat and thinking they're completely clueless about where we're going should they be here i don't think so we've all kind of made a decision to be here but the kids haven't they got no idea what's going on they're just following their parents around i know sage doesn't want to be here is this clem acting selfishly i don't think so he's not a very selfish person he just cares so much about the environment so much about the planet that he's willing to risk it all it's just a place where the the planet is suffering

and sick and there's radiation and who knows like what the effects will be on on us like being there and i especially don't want you know to go there with the kids i tried to plant a seed like for other people to not want to go and and it was definitely overruled so we're going there mom [Music] yeah where's papa [Music] okay i'll be there soon chloe go go see papa for a bit and don't worry endangering more than any of the rest of us you're bringing your family there yeah about that sure yeah i'm

i'm i'm i am bringing my family there i'm not bringing my family onto the dome i'll walk that path by myself so we are hoping that by you know keeping most everyone on this ship on top of the ship by not dropping the anchor into the mud by not touching even you know anything from the island definitely not bringing anything on board from the island but you know we're just hoping that that we somehow come out of it clean you know uh sage didn't want to go the children they don't know what's going on um

we won't be staying long and uh hopefully we'll have some sort of an impact that justifies what we're doing what i'm deciding to do but i'm certainly not sure of it i have lots of doubts lots of worries lots of fears but here we are we'll just do it [Music] this is a silly thing to do you know already but we're doing that [Music] yeah i wonder this is different it's different this is not the right suit [Music] holy [ __ ] look at this thing yeah i get a reading here 100. [Music] so these

birds are literally nesting right directly on the nuclear waste underneath [Music] atop a giant pile of nuclear waste we have some really interesting hydrogen bomb commemorative coins we got the cleanup coin where they just sort of you know heaped it on here we got the uh celebration of the hydrogen bomb test coin ruin it they got the name of all the big tests too and all the islands that they leveled kind of strange thing to celebrate they're really on there though [Music] the untropicine [Music] uh so [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] a lot

of us don't don't know that much about the effects of the radiation and also i can see the effects of some of the other kids their skin and i've seen a little girl's face that's got chunks of her skin are red and and have bubbles on them and it's definitely not from staff or from other infections that i've seen around the south pacific my daughter brianne has told me about like a little kid that couldn't use his his arm at all they don't look in good healthy shape you know they don't look healthy or happy

and yeah it's really really sad a part of me can can see the justification of wanting to expose what's going on to the to the world but i don't see why we have to actually physically go there so now that it's all over i have sort of an inadequate feeling there's so much more that could have been said you get a feeling even now that nothing is really over that this is a breathing spell like a lull in battle before the next attack what is new today is old hat tomorrow and of the day after

tomorrow who knows what these pacific fans may see [Music] [Applause] [Music] not a single sign here not a fence nothing nothing you'd have no idea except for that ominous dumb but one minute somehow differs from the next so it's very uh confusing i don't know if it's working it also shows the low battery sign right now you might not get all the clicks i don't know i'm not sure i'm not a scientist i don't know how a geiger counter works what's part of my training big mistake maybe we should all learn how this works quite

honestly i'm scared of death but i feel it's important that people know about what's going on on this planet right now um we are driving ourselves and the rest of life on this planet to the doom and we have barely any time left to turn it around for me uh i i keep drawing a parallel that is kind of uncomfortable to hear but in the during the second world war i'm german yeah during the second world war american families send their children their their young boys you know to to to germany try and save the

world from something evil from something that was really scary from you know something that just wasn't okay and uh and right now we have the same kind of moment in history so our actions now have to be as radical as the actions back in those days when when people just sacrificed you know their lives for their country to to save the day right now we're at the same place in history we need to sacrifice everything we have for the sake of the future and and nobody wants to look at that way nobody wants to open

their eyes and say you know what whatever it takes let's try and save the day let's turn it around we still have a chance it's not for long that we'll be able to say that this is a time bomb waiting to blow up climate change is taking its toll on the rocks right here in front of me all this is going to wash away within a couple of decades and we'll have a next nuclear catastrophe in the middle of the pacific so please take some responsibility usa government pick up your [ __ ] thank you

very much [Music] [Music] hey [Music] [Applause] this is [Applause] [Music] me [Applause] [Music] time we will be [Music] oh [Music] [Music] this is [Music] [Applause] [Applause] i love you [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you