Project Chariot

[1] The plan was championed by LRL director and nuclear scientist Edward Teller, who traveled throughout Alaska touting the harbor as an important economic development for America's newest state.

[1] Alaskan political leaders, newspaper editors, president William Ransom Wood of the University of Alaska, even church groups all rallied in support of the massive detonation.

Opposition came from the Inupiaq Alaska Native village of Point Hope, a few scientists engaged in environmental studies under AEC contract, and a handful of conservationists.

[1] The grassroots protest soon was picked up by organizations with national reach, such as The Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, and Barry Commoner's Committee for Nuclear Information.

[1] In 1962, facing increased public uneasiness over the environmental risk and the potential to disrupt the lives of the Alaska Native peoples, the AEC announced that Project Chariot would be "held in abeyance."

The environmental studies commissioned by the AEC suggested that radioactive contamination from the proposed blast could adversely affect the health and safety of the local people, whose livelihoods were based on hunting animals.

[2] Studies also showed that the blasts would thaw the permafrost, making the slopes surrounding the harbor unstable, and negating any experimental value to be gained from using the project as a basis for extrapolation to other, warmer locations.

Outraged residents of the Inupiat village of Point Hope, who had experienced an unusually high rate of cancer deaths, demanded the removal of the contaminated soil, which the government did at its expense in 1993.