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, By NEIL SHEEHAN THULE AIR FORCE BASE, Greenland—“I’m tired of being a garbage collector,'’ an American nuclear health physicist said last week at this airfbase near' the top of the world. “I want to go back to my laboratory and my The scientist is a civilian con sultant to the Strategic Air Com mand operation to recover what remains of four hydrogen bombs and a giant B-52 bomber that were blasted into bits in a' crash near here almost two weeks ago. The physicist will soon get his wish, but most of the 450 Air Force and Atomic Energy Com mission nuclear specialists and assorted technicians who com prise the recovery team will not. They will continue picking up the radioactive garbage that lit ters the frozen surface of North Star Bay seven and a half miles southwest of this Arctic base where the plane slammed in flames onto the ice Jan. 21. For Operation Crested Ice (the official designation rejected by local wags in favor of Operation Dr. Freezelove) may well prove to be a long and costly effort. Millions of dollars are likely to be consumed before the count less bits .'of radioactive debris have been removed and the con tamination of the surrounding snow and ice expunged to the satisfaction of the Danish Gov ernment, which rules Greenland. The American base1 was estab lished here under a bilateral one member of a Danish scien tific team sent from Copenhagen to make an independent evalua tion of the radioactive contami .Even if it had been decided to crash a Stratofortress and its liberately, more rugged search and recovery conditions could hardly have been achieved. The temperature hovers constantly In this atmosphere, ears ex posed for 10 minutes develop': third-degree frostbite, if left entirely. Ballpoint pens do not function, certain types of paper become brittle and crumble, and flashlight and instrument bat teries go dead in a few minutes. The scene at the crash site, is like a Buck Rogers vision of the first human settlements on the dark side of the moon. At this time of the year, the perpetual Arctic' darkness is softened by only four hours of twilight be tween 10 in the morning and:2 in the afternoon. The small plywood shacks erected as warmup huts and temporary storage shelters for the bomb fragments are illumi.-: nated in the glare o£ the portablf. . searchlights. The shouts of the searchers earrying Coleman lan terns several ■ hundred yards farther out on the desolate snowcovered surface of the ice can be heard faintly against the rumble of the generators near the shacks and the occasional ap proaching roar of an incoming Under these conditions, simments and the debris from the plane becomes an enormous task. Most; of the pieces .! are mile long and a half-mile wide, * hut some remains, including the ' - engines, have been found up to two miles away. All must some- .- most bits are contaminated from ■ ■the plutonium oxidized when the clear material in the 1.1-megaton weapons detonated on impact. Plutonium metal forms the Last week Air Force! and A.E.C. technicians began tagging and 'sealing into specially in sulated steel barrels what frag ments of all four weapons have been found so far. The fragments will be flown back to the A.E.C. Pantex plant at Amarillo, Tex., where the bombs were manu factured, for disposal. The ' Air Force still did not know whether the 8-to-10-footthick ice was melted all the way through by the fire and whether some of the debris fell into the 600-foot-deep sea below. Even if this did not occur, removing radioactive contamina tion from the snow and ice to the satisfaction of the Danes is likely to entail cutting up and . hauling off hundreds of tons of Even if the plutonium from all four bombs settled into the ice and snow rather than onto the debris, American specialists, believe there would still be no health hazard to the 650 Eskimos and Danish residents and to the walruses, seals and polar bears who inhabit the vicinity of the air base, once the ice melts in July and the plutonium is di luted by the sea.