US to clean up Spanish radioactive site 49 years after B-52 carrying four huge hydrogen bombs crashed
The plane was carrying four hydrogen bombs more powerful than the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Nearly 50 years after a US air force B-52 bomber carrying nuclear weapons crashed in Palomares in southeast Spain, Washington has finally agreed to clean up the radioactive contamination that resulted from the crash.
US secretary of state, John Kerry, and the Spanish foreign minister, José Manuel García-Margallo, signed an agreement in Madrid to clean up the site and "store the contaminated earth at a suitable location".
It is thought the radioactive material will be shipped to an area of Nevada already contaminated from nuclear bomb tests carried out in the 1950s.
The Palomares crash was the worst nuclear accident of its time. On 17 January 1966, at the height of the cold war, the B-52 bomber collided with a KC-135 tanker plane during mid-air refuelling off the coast of Almería, Spain, killing seven crew members.
The B-52 was carrying four hydrogen bombs more powerful than the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Two were recovered intact from the sea but the others leaked radiation into the surrounding countryside when their plutonium-filled detonators went off, strewing 3kg of highly radioactive plutonium 239 around Palomares.
Shortly after the accident, the US shipped 1,700 tonnes of contaminated earth to South Carolina, after which the incident was largely forgotten. But concern over the site was reawakened in the 1990s when tests revealed high levels of americium, an isotope of plutonium, and further tests showed that 50,000 cubic metres of earth were still contaminated. The Spanish government appropriated the land in 2003 to prevent it being used.
In a joint press conference with Kerry in Madrid, Margallo said the process would begin soon but gave no details.
The clean-up deal is seen by many as a sweetener in exchange for Spain agreeing to Washington's increased military presence in the country. The number of marine personnel at the base in Morón in southern Spain is to be increased from 850 to 2,200, and to 3,000 in the event of a crisis.
