Radioactive Wildlife Refuge?

Today’s Washington Post includes the obituary of Bob Hunter, one of the founders of Greenpeace. Click [HERE] (registration required). The obit describes the group’s founding as having grown out of a boat trip in the early 1970s intended to protest American nuclear tests in the Aleutian islands. It then explains:

Although they were arrested by the U.S. Coast Guard in Akutan, 600 miles from their destination, public pressure to stop the nuclear tests began to mount among political leaders and labor organizations. About two months after the nuclear test in 1971, further tests at the site were canceled and the area became a wildlife sanctuary.

No further information is provided with respect to the conversion of a nuclear test site to a wildlife sanctuary. Are my long-held assumptions shown to be mere prejudice? Can it be that nuclear detonation is really not that big a deal? Is there really some sort of national park at a location previously pounded into sub-atomic submission by thermonuclear weapons?

Indeed there is: Administered by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, it is part of the “Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge,” with a website [HERE]. As explained at the site:

In the 1960's and 70's three underground nuclear bombs were tested on the refuge island of Amchitka. Cannikan, in 1971, was the largest underground nuclear blast in U.S. history. The ecological consequences of these blasts are still being investigated.

One would think so.