GTA 5 Nuclear Waste: All 30 Locations and How to Collect Every Barrel

GTA 5 hides 30 Nuclear Waste barrels along the ocean floor of San Andreas, and finding every one nets you close to a million dollars plus a trophy most players never bother chasing. Unlike collectibles you can grab the moment you spawn, Nuclear Waste is locked behind story progress: you need to finish a specific heist and buy a specific property before the hunt even starts. Here is the exact unlock sequence, how the tracking tool works, where all 30 barrels are, and how much the full set actually pays.

The essentials:

• 30 Nuclear Waste barrels are scattered underwater around the San Andreas coastline.
• Collecting them unlocks after the story mission "The Merryweather Heist."
• You need to buy the Sonar Collections Dock ($250,000) to get access to the submarine.
• The Trackify phone app points toward the nearest uncollected barrel (direction only, not distance).
• Each barrel is worth $23,000, and finishing all 30 adds a $250,000 completion bonus, for up to $940,000 total.
• Collecting every barrel unlocks the "Waste Management" trophy/achievement.

Why Is There Nuclear Waste in the Ocean in GTA 5?

In the game's own lore, the barrels were dumped into the Pacific after a winter storm damaged a nuclear facility, and they have been sitting on the seabed around Los Santos and Blaine County ever since. It is one of the quieter callbacks to GTA 5's satire of corporate negligence: nobody in-world ever cleans it up, so it becomes your job once you own the right boat.

How to Unlock Nuclear Waste Collecting

Nuclear Waste is not available from the start of the game. Two things have to happen first:

1. Finish "The Merryweather Heist." This story mission is available to Michael, Franklin or Trevor once you are far enough into the campaign. Completing it is what flags the Sonar Collections Dock as purchasable.
2. Buy the Sonar Collections Dock. The property sits in Paleto Cove, on the northern coast, and costs $250,000. Any character with enough cash can buy it, and the submarine and the Trackify app both come with the purchase, no extra step needed.

Once you own the dock, walk down to the water and the submarine will be waiting at the pier every time you return, ready for another run.

How Do You Actually Collect the Barrels?

Take the submarine out from the dock and open Trackify on your in-game phone. The app shows a radar-style arrow pointing toward the closest uncollected barrel, but it only gives you a heading, not a distance, so the barrel could be 50 meters away or half a kilometer out. Follow the arrow, watch the seabed, and steer the sub directly over the barrel to collect it automatically. You can also leave the submarine and swim to a barrel once you can see it, which is often faster for shallow spots close to the coast.

The submarine itself is slow, and a full clean sweep of all 30 barrels realistically takes around two hours in one sitting. There is no penalty for spreading the run across multiple sessions: Trackify remembers which barrels you have already collected, so you can quit and resume without losing progress.

Where Are the 30 Nuclear Waste Locations?

All 30 barrels sit along the coastline of San Andreas, each one near a landmark you can find on the map. The table starts at the Sonar Collections Dock and works around the coast in roughly clockwise order: east along the north shore, down the east side, back west along the south and up the west coast. Trackify still points you to the nearest barrel left, which helps when one is hard to spot from the sub.

By stretch of coast, that makes ten barrels along the north shore between the dock and Mount Gordo, seven down the east side from Humane Labs to Palomino Highlands, four in the south between the plane wreck and Del Perro Pier, and nine on the west coast from Pacific Bluffs to Fort Zancudo. Stay in the water around Fort Zancudo: the base itself is restricted ground. If you are also chasing the map's other big underwater collectible, the GTA 5 submarine parts are scattered across similar coastal zones, so it is worth doing both hunts back to back in the same submarine trip.

Tips for Collecting All 30 Efficiently

• Do it in one long session if you can. The submarine's top speed is the real bottleneck, and starting and stopping wastes more time than the collecting itself.
• Work outward from the dock. Clear the north coast first since it is closest, then follow the coast around in the order of the table above.
• Swim for anything near the shore. The submarine is overkill for shallow barrels you can already see from the surface; hop out and swim to save time.
• Trust the direction, not the distance. Trackify's ping only tells you which way to go, so treat every reading as "keep going this way," not "you are close now."
• Save after big chunks of progress. A long submarine run is exactly the kind of session you do not want to redo after a crash or a bad load.

Is Nuclear Waste in GTA Online Too?

No. Nuclear Waste is exclusive to GTA 5's story mode; there is no separate Nuclear Waste collectible in GTA Online. If you are thinking of GTA Online's own submarine, that is the Kosatka, the mobile base used for the Cayo Perico Heist, and it has nothing to do with the Sonar Collections Dock. Check the Kosatka submarine guide if that is what you were actually looking for.

Nuclear Waste Rewards: How Much Money Can You Earn?

That is a meaningful payday in story mode, on top of unlocking the "Waste Management" trophy, one of the trickier entries on GTA 5's full trophy and achievement list.

Is Collecting Nuclear Waste Worth It?

For a near-million-dollar reward with no combat and no real risk beyond a slow boat ride, yes. It is one of the more forgiving collectibles in GTA 5 story mode, and it does not demand split-second timing the way some of the map's other challenges do. If you are working toward the platinum trophy or the in-game 100% completion checklist, Nuclear Waste is one of the more relaxing boxes to tick, especially since the same submarine run can double up on the shipwrecks and underwater treasures scattered across the same stretch of ocean. Buy the dock, load up Trackify, and set aside a couple of hours: the money and the trophy are both guaranteed once you find the last barrel.