A river floodplain is probably the worst place to store radioactive waste, said Robert Criss, a geology professor at Washington University.
But in fact, that’s where such waste has ended up after Mallinckrodt Chemical Works started producing uranium for atomic bombs in 1942 – right next to the Missouri River floodplain.
The waste landed only eight miles upstream from Missouri American Water Company’s intake for drinking water in Florissant that supplies all of North County. That’s also upstream from the Chain of Rocks water intake, a main supplier for St. Louis city’s water.
Dumped illegally in 1973, the waste is now buried in the West Lake landfill, west of Interstate 270 on St. Charles Rock Road. As the radioactive waste gets older, it becomes more dangerous, said representatives of Missouri Coalition for the Environment.
On Feb. 12, Alderpeople Gregory Carter (Ward 27) and Kacie Starr Triplett (Ward 6) took five aldermen and a few activists to visit the landfill site and explore future action.
“This is a problem that has been taking place since the ‘70s, but a lot of people don’t realize that this exists,” Starr Triplett said.
“The Board of Aldermen are very interested. It’s a federal issue, but what we are doing as elected leaders in the City and [St. Louis] County is raising awareness of the issues.”
The Board of Aldermen has passed Resolution 10, sponsored by Starr Triplett, requesting that Congress transfer jurisdiction over the cleanup of the site from the Environment Protection Agency to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Now it’s up to Congress to authorize the transfer of responsibility.
An atomic breakthrough
In 1942, the Mallinckrodt plant, on North Broadway near downtown St. Louis, was contracted to purify uranium to make atomic bombs. With success, Mallinckrodt continued for the next 25 years to process tons of uranium for the Manhattan Project of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and then for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Fifteen of those production years were at the downtown St. Louis location, and then another 10 years were at Weldon Spring in St. Charles County.
During that time, radioactive waste was dispersed to dozens of sites. Some waste was trucked to the St. Louis airport and dumped there. In 1970, some of the waste at the airport were trucked a mile away to Latty Avenue in Hazelwood to be kiln-dried and shipped to the Cotter Corporation in Colorado.
The Atomic Energy Commission discovered that the workers at Latty Avenue were not wearing protective clothing or even aware that the materials they were handling were radioactive. The commission demanded procedural changes.
Instead of complying, the Cotter Corporation’s contractor, B&K, shut down the project and left the massive contamination and piles of radioactive waste. When the Atomic Energy Commission learned of the contamination in 1973 and ordered the corporation to clean it up, Cotter took the waste to the West Lake Landfill, even though the landfill was not a federally-licensed facility for radioactive waste disposal.
No one to clean it up
Within about five years, the Corps of Engineers will have excavated and shipped away the radioactive wastes from other St. Louis City and County sites used during Mallinckrodt’s early uranium production years.
But West Lake Landfill is not on the list.
The EPA is responsible for the cleanup at West Lake, which is a Superfund municipal waste site, not a radioactive waste site. Unlike the Corps of Engineers, the EPA has merely covered up the waste with rocks, construction rubble and a little clay, said Kay Drey, with the Missouri Coalition for the Environment.
Currently, the radioactive waste are already in contact with the groundwater, which flows into the Missouri River, and the 1993 flood table came just feet away from reaching over the levee, said Robert Criss, a geology professor at Washington University.
“This is an area where there was slumping in the landfill or small-scale landslide that spread a bunch of material to the farmers’ fields,” Criss said.
“This is not responsible. It would not be allowed today. We should put pressure on the authorities to clean this up.”
The Cotter Corporation, which owned the waste, is based in Colorado. The people of Colorado have introduced legislation to keep the Cotter Corporation from getting addition uranium mining licenses until the company cleans up the waste it has left behind in Colorado processing plants.
Rallying the people
In Bridgeton, however, Ward 2 Council Member Linda Eaker said she is having trouble rallying the people to join the fight against the company.
“Not all the residents feel the same way about it,” Eaker said. “It’s a tricky issue. I support moving the waste, but others are afraid that if you move it, it will get in the air.”
For the past 30 years, Kay Drey has been urging the federal government to clean up all the local radioactive waste sites that were used in the Manhattan Project and other bomb production. West Lake is the only site that the federal government has no plans to move.
“You all are the most important public officials that have taken it to the public,” she said to Starr Triplett and the other aldermen. “This is the first tour to the site.”
Drey said that for the past 30 years the landfill has eroded into the adjacent properties and into the water. The radioactive waste is going to become more dangerous 100 years from now than it is today, she said.
Ward 5 Alderwoman April Ford-Griffin said, “I don’t know how you sleep at night – the people who did this,” Ford-Griffin said. “Someone at the top knows what they were doing.”