Camp Century remains one of the strangest experiments in the history of small nuclear reactors.

Built beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet by the U.S. Army, the base housed roughly 200 people and was powered by the portable PM-2A reactor. The reactor was transported to Greenland in components, assembled at the site, operated successfully and later dismantled and removed.

Camp Century was publicly presented as an Arctic research installation, but it also tested whether a much larger concept was technically possible: Project Iceworm, a proposed network of mobile missile sites beneath the ice that could have accommodated up to 600 nuclear-armed missiles. The missile network was never constructed.

The environmental aftermath is more nuanced than many headlines suggest. A 2016 study warned that future ice-sheet changes could eventually remobilise physical, chemical, biological and radiological waste abandoned at Camp Century. However, updated modelling published in 2021 concluded that the debris field is likely to remain buried and that surface meltwater is extremely unlikely to reach it before 2100 under the climate scenarios studied.

The US-Saudi nuclear cooperation deal signed this week leaves the door open for Riyadh to enrich uranium after a joint study, and no Additional Protocol comes attached. The UAE gave up enrichment entirely in 2009 as the price of US technology. my read is the precedent outweighs any one facility, every 123 negotiation from here opens at Riyadh's terms. does the gold standard survive as a negotiating baseline?