Page 3 contamination remained on or in the ice at that time would disappearinto the bay. It was decided to remove all of the snow inside of the blackened zone which included an area of about 60,000 nm’. With an average snow depth of 10 cm, this would produce a volume of 6000 m. Assuming that the volume ratio of packed snow to water would be about 2.5, this would produce about 6 x 10° gallons of water. After all of the aircraft debris had been removed from the ice, the snow in the blackened area was scraped into rows, picked up and transferred into sixty~seven 25,000 gallon tanks. In the area of the aircraft impact, the ice had been broken, melted, and refrozen. To assess the level of contamination in the ice, 85 core samples were taken in the fractured area. There was plutonium contamination | associated with black bands distributed in the ice which were produced by burned fuel. It was estimated that about 350 g of plutonium were contained in the roughly 2000 tons of ice. Studies showed that when samples of the ice were melted, essentially all of the plutonium contamination sank to the bottom. Another 48 core samples were taken outside the fractured area. They disclosed no contamination in or under the ice. A decision was made to let the contaminated ice melt in place for three reasons. First, even if the plutonium were to stay suspended in water, it would rapidly be reduced to non-hazardous levels by dispersion. Second, it was likely that the plutonium would settle into the sediment layer on the