Newly public documents show how America’s push for the atomic bomb helped saddle St. Louis with an enduring radioactive waste problem.
Susie Gaffney poses for a photo along Coldwater Creek near where she used to live, April 7, 2023, in Florissant, Mo.
Dawn Chapman of the activist group Just Moms STL — a group pushing for cleanup and federal buyouts in an area near the airport — said the region “saved our country” with its work on the nuclear program but paid a terrible cost.St. Louis was part of a geographically scattered national effort to build a nuclear bomb that was tested in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Much of the work in the St. Louis area involved uranium, where Mallinckrodt Chemical Co.
Alison Carrick, co-director of “The First Secret City,” a documentary about the region’s nuclear history, said after the war some companies thought that byproducts of the radioactive material could be sold.In 1966, the Atomic Energy Commission demolished and buried buildings at the airport site. Continental Mining and Milling Co. moved the waste to 9200 Latty Ave. in nearby Bridgeton, piling it in a heap, the commission said at the time. Radioactive barrels lay outside the fence.
The AEC, historically responsible for the nation’s nuclear weapons program, was abolished in the 1970s, in no small part because of public criticism of its handling of nuclear safety. The Department of Energy is now responsible for overseeing the country’s nuclear weapons and waste. The department has publicly detailed the environmental damage earlier waste mismanagement caused to people and the environment.
The vice president “immediately submitted that most of what the inspector was talking about was not understood,” the memo stated. “He went on to explain that he had taken over as Executive Vice President of CMM as a protection of the money invested by a number of individuals.”It wasn’t just in St. Louis. At the arid Los Alamos site in New Mexico where weapons were developed, for example, waste was thrown into nearby canyons.
Brock’s prodding led the government to begin offering up to $400,000 to those who worked at nuclear facilities across the country who developed certain cancers, or their survivors. Over the past two decades, the government has paid out $23 billion.While nuclear workers had direct exposure, people who live near contamination sites worry about uncertainty. Many who grew up in the area weren’t told about the risks for decades.
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