Dumping of the barrels into the Atlantic. (Credit: Greenpeace, Pierre Gleizes)Recently French and international researchers took a look at the state of the thousands of barrels of radioactive waste that were dumped into the Atlantic Ocean between 1950 and 1990, trying to ascertain the state of this waste and its effect on the ecosystem.Although a lot of fuss is made of the spent uranium fuel and high-level waste produced by light water reactors and fuel reprocessing facilities, the overwhelming majority of nuclear waste is low- and intermediate-level waste (LLW and ILW) churned out by hospitals, laboratories and various industries.Due to the sheer volume of this waste over the decades creative ways have been sought to dispose of it, which include burying in landfills and incinerating.For a while tossing such waste into the ocean was also deemed to be an excellent destination for LLW and ILW, with the latter especially encapsulated in bitumen or cement. This was the poured into the barrels that many people have come to associate with nuclear waste in general. Since the approximately 200,000 tons of such barrels and similar were tossed into the Atlantic Ocean decades ago the question was where they ended up and their state.The Radiocean mission site lists the objectives, including the mapping of the sites and identifying the elements of the ecosystems in addition to any radioisotope levels and their effect on said ecosystems. As it turns out, although the barrels have definitely degraded and their contents are slowly collapsing, the local ecosystems seem to have adapted well, treating the dump sites more as convenient shelters rather than a hazard. Some more photos can be found on the Bluesky account of [Javier Escartin].None of this should come as a surprise if you are aware of just how much radioactive material is already dissolved naturally in the oceans, with much more uranium present in seawater than can be mined on-shore. Although the introduction of isotopes that are not part of the normal thorium and uranium decay chains into the ocean is of course undesirable, it’s good to know that this rather haphazard treatment of LLW and ILW has apparently just resulted in some Atlantic Ocean floor critters ending up with an interesting reef.