The Spanish town of Palomares, the site of an American aerial crash and subsequent nuclear bomb dump, will be cleaned up according to a new agreement between Secretary of State John Kerry and Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo.
According to the BBC, the deal, signed Monday, comes just a few months ahead of the 50th anniversary of the crash, which took place Jan. 17, 1966.
In the accident, at the height of the Cold War, a B-52 bomber collided with a KC-135 tanker plane during a midair refueling, killing seven of 11 crewmen, and dumping four 1.5 megaton bombs onto Palomares and the nearby sea.
None of the bombs detonated, however two of them cracked open, spilling radioactive plutonium. The seven pounds of plutonium was spread over 490 acres.
An earlier accord between the U.S. and Spain paid $350,000 for contamination tests and blood tests for Palomares residents up until 2010.
The new agreement will see the U.S. transport to Nevada 50,000 cubic meters of earth that more recent tests have determined is still contaminated.
This move will be the second such relocation. Shortly after the crash, 1,700 tons of contaminated earth was moved to South Carolina.
After the first clean-up attempt, U.S. ambassador Angier Biddle Duke and Spanish tourism minister Manuel Fraga took a public swim at the Palomares beach to prove that it was cleaned up.
According to The Guardian (UK), "The Palomares clean-up deal is seen by many as a sweetener in exchange for Spain agreeing to Washington ramping up its military presence in the country. The number of marine personnel at the base in Morón in southern Spain is to be increased from 850 to 2,200, and to 3,000 in the event of a crisis."
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