US finally cleans up site of Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project
Army engineers are working on the Staten Island site where radiation levels are 25 times the average
The first nuclear weapons were detonated in the New Mexico desert, but the uranium used to create them was stored on Staten Island
ERIC BRISSAUD/GETTY IMAGES
More than 80 years after the United States started the Manhattan Project, its government has started cleaning up the radioactive remnants of its race to build nuclear weapons in New York.
The Army Corps of Engineers removed traces of Robert Oppenheimer’s atomic bombs this month from the site of a warehouse that has since been demolished in Staten Island , the New York Post said.
The average radiation levels at 2393 Richmond Terrace, the site of the warehouse, about eight miles from the southernmost tip of Manhattan, were 25 times higher than usual, enough to increase the risk of cancer with regular exposure, according to the Army Corps.
The Department of Energy has known of the radiation at the site since at least 1980, but
