“In 2011,” we read, for example, “Christophe Nedelec, a local environmentalist, broke into the fort and, using an amateur Geiger counter, found three spots with elevated levels of radiation.” Three spots-considering that no fewer than an astonishing 150 kilograms-or roughly 330 pounds-of uranium are estimated to have blown around the grounds of the fort, that’s a seemingly reassuring find. The ruins recall the post-apocalypse landscape of Pripyat, the Ukrainian town evacuated after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.įor all the controversy and narrative suspense, however, there are surprisingly few sites of detectable radioactivity. The empty housing of a vast supercomputer sits in gloom vines spill into laboratories. These days curtains flap from rows of overgrown buildings radiation symbols and other graffiti cover the security post, which is filled, weirdly, with women’s shoes. Today, the old fort is part picturesque ruin, part Tarkovsky film: The site is now being considered for demolition, the ground beneath it to be excavated as part of a new gypsum mine-however, all that construction work risks stirring up clouds of “toxic uranium dust” from an earlier generation’s detonations. The New York Times has the strange story of an abandoned and overgrown military base near Paris where “scientists blew up more than half a ton of uranium in 2,000 explosions… often outdoors, just 14 miles from the Eiffel Tower.”
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