Between 1946 and 1970, the United States dumped roughly 47,800 containers of radioactive waste into the ocean west of San Francisco — many missed the designated sites, and the drums now lie scattered across about 1,400 square kilometers of seafloor, much of it inside a national marine sanctuary

Nobody expected the barrels to last. That was no secret. Steel drums of laboratory waste, weighted with concrete and tipped off the stern of a ship twenty-five to sixty miles west of San Francisco, were only ever asked to survive the trip down. A 1981 review by the General Accounting Office set out the reasoning [...] The post Between 1946 and 1970, the United States dumped roughly 47,800 containers of radioactive waste into the ocean west of San Francisco — many missed the designated sites, and