However, as the world would learn later on, working with radioactivity isn’t child’s play, and even today, with all the technology and information within our reach, it’s hard to reverse radioactive damage. Marie Curie’s former lab, which has been named the “Chernobyl on the Seine,” is proof of that, when almost 100 years later, its nuclear waste still remains.
Located in Arcueil, a suburb in the south of Paris, this laboratory was given to Curie by the University of Paris, so she could have a bigger place to work. Though she only worked there for about a year before her death (due to radioactive poisoning), the now-abandoned place has some of the highest registers of radioactivity in the country. Actually, the place had to be shut down by the authorities due to the risk of poisoning, since regular people live just a few steps from the laboratory.
Officially closed in 1978, Marie Curie’s former lab is now surrounded by a concrete wall to keep curious trespassers away. Furthermore, in the past decades, lots of work has been done on the area to clean the lab, though they haven’t made that much progress. According to Christian Métairie, mayor of Arcueil, the cleanup plan has costed about 10 million Euros, and though they’re “finally making progress, it’s really slow.”
Curie’s laboratory isn’t the only issue regarding radioactivity and nuclear waste. As Métairie claims, the entire country has a really severe problem of nuclear waste, and most likely, many other countries in the world do as well. But how can it be dealt with? Just to give you a general idea, radium in general has a half-life of about 1,600 years. Only in Curie’s lab, traces of a uranium isotope were found in papers, solvents, and even plants. This isotope has a half-life of 4.5 billion years!
If you think about it, during WWII and the Cold War, several countries engaged in experiments as part of their war efforts. That could mean dozens of laboratories like Curie’s in dozens of cities dealing with the same issues regarding nuclear waste that are a threat not only for humans, but that could be severely harming the environment. The idea of being exposed to a danger we can’t even see or feel, can be really worrying, and we should be more aware of it instead of only leaving it to the authorities to work on it.
Read more:
The True Story Behind The Scientist Who Handled The Chernobyl Disaster, V. Legasov
The Scientist Who Saved The Ozone Layer And Won A Nobel For It
The Man Who Survived Both Atom Bombs In World War II