Bikini Island Site of 23 Atomic Tests : ‘Nuclear Nomads’ Looking Homeward

Decades after residents of this remote coral atoll left to make way for U.S. atomic bomb tests, work has begun to clean up lingering radiation and bring the “nuclear nomads” of Bikini home to stay.

About 50 Bikini leaders and a delegation of U.S. officials gathered on the wind-swept island of Eneu recently to mark the start of the cleanup and resettlement project.

Eneu is now the only inhabited island of the approximately two dozen islands that make up the Bikini atoll. It is on the southeast tip of the island ring, about 5 miles south of the island of Bikini.

Officials say it could take 7 years before the Bikinians can safely repopulate Bikini Island, and estimates of the cleanup cost range from $130 million to $200 million.

Tomaki Juda, mayor of the Marshall Islands’ Kili Island, where many Bikinians now live, proclaimed that the ground breaking “isn’t a day of great happiness.”

“A day of great happiness for the Bikinian people will be coming back to an island that is free of radiation and which we can stay on without being afraid,” Juda said through an interpreter.

“The ceremony this afternoon marks the beginning of a great effort, but we cannot celebrate until the radioactivity has been removed from the coral soil of our home island,” said Henchi Balos, a senator representing the Bikinians and acting president of the Marshall Islands.

Juda and Balos were among 146 people who left Bikini in 1946, when U.S. officials told them the western Pacific atoll was needed for testing the atom bomb. The Americans promised to return the islanders to Bikini when tests were completed.

Between 1946 and 1958 the United States detonated 23 nuclear bombs at Bikini.

The U.S. promise was something the Bikinians wanted the delegation--including Rep. Barbara Vucanovich (R-Nev.) and congressional staff members--to remember.

“There are only a few elders left who know our traditional customs, and it will not be long until they are gone also,” Juda said. “We hope it will not be long before we can restore our traditions.”

Vucanovich, a member of the House subcommittee on energy and environment, told the Bikinians the time had come for the United States to fulfill its promise to return them home.

“These small islands have paid a great price for the freedom we have all enjoyed,” she said. “Now it’s up to us, using our scientific advances, to ensure that Bikini will once again give abundant life to those who live here.”

A small group of Bikinians returned in the early 1970s when radiation levels were thought safe. But tests in 1978 found that they were ingesting dangerous amounts of radioactive materials drawn up from the soil by food plants, and they were evacuated.

Since their exodus, the Bikinians have moved several times through the Marshalls, hence the nickname “nuclear nomads.” The largest group settled at Kili, an island 500 miles south of Bikini.

Congress appropriated $2.3 million for the cleanup and resettlement project this year. Most was earmarked for design and engineering for Bikini Island.

The problem on Bikini Island is the radioactive cesium-137 in its soil. The radioactive isotope has a half-life of about 30 years, meaning that it takes that time for half of it to decay. In another 30 years, half of the remainder will decay.

The danger from direct exposure is minute, scientists say, but without controlling or removing the cesium-137, Bikini’s soil might not produce plants safe for human consumption until sometime in the next century.

With treatment, researchers say the Bikinians could begin returning to their home island within 7 years.