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(27,509 posts)
Fri Feb 12, 2016, 03:57 PM Feb 2016

West Lake story: An underground fire, radioactive waste, and governmental failure

http://thebulletin.org/west-lake-story-underground-fire-radioactive-waste-and-governmental-failure9160

11 February 2016

West Lake story: An underground fire, radioactive waste, and governmental failure

Robert Alvarez

On July 16, 1973, 28 years to the day after the first nuclear weapon was exploded at Alamogordo, New Mexico, a line of dump trucks containing the detritus from the uranium used to make plutonium for the test bomb showed up at the West Lake landfill in Bridgeton, Missouri. Assuming the trucks were loaded with clean fill, the landfill superintendent waved them through without charging a dumping fee. A truck driver said later that he and others used the black stuff in their home gardens. By October several thousand shipments were illegally dumped at the landfill in north St. Louis County, in violation of federal standards; they contained an estimated 43,000 tons of radioactive uranium processing wastes and contaminated soil.

Now under the national news media spotlight, a landfill adjoined to the West Lake dump has experienced a growing underground fire for the past five years. The fire is estimated to be about 1,000 feet from the radioactive material. Consultants for Missouri Attorney General Kris Koster indicated in November 2015 that, in the worst case, the fire could reach the radioactive material in a matter of a few months. An official for the Republic Corporation, which owns the landfill, contends the fire is moving away from the wastes.

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Emergency responders in the neighboring state of Illinois are being warned to prepare to deal with potentially contaminated evacuees. Children in four school districts near the landfill have brought letters home advising parents that children would either be evacuated or sheltered in place, should the fire reach the radioactive wastes.

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The Mallinckrodt wastes don't just pose the potential danger of the spread of radioactivity by fire; chronic low-level exposure of nearby residents to radioactivity is also of concern. After two years of collecting and analyzing hundreds of soil and dust samples over a 75-square-mile area, my colleagues—environmental scientist Marco Kaltofen at Worchester Polytechnic Institute and researcher Lucas Hixson—and I recently reported in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity that contamination from the wastes has likely migrated off site.

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No strangers to advanced statistical tools, within two years, Wright, an accountant, and Schanzenbach, an economics professor at Northwestern University, documented 700 cases of cancers and immune system diseases within a four-square-mile area. Some of these cancers have a one-in-a-million chance of occurring. In a 2014 epidemiological survey of residents living near Cold Water Creek, the Missouri Department of Health found statistically significant higher rates of leukemia and several other cancers known to be related to radiation exposure. Other potentially radiogenic cancers were found to be lower than expected. The authors cited “the lack of information on potential public exposures” as an important factor requiring further investigation. Wright and Schanzenbach updated their survey and reported in August 2015 that the number of diseases, including rare cancers, had increased to 2,725 cases. More recently, the US Centers for Disease Control has begun to visit the area, for another study

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It’s not far-fetched to conclude that there are parallels between the West Lake waste problem—created and exacerbated by decades of negligence and denial by the US nuclear weapons program and the agencies responsible for protecting people from its harmful legacy—and the disaster in Flint, Michigan, where citizens have been poisoned by lead-laced drinking water, and their public officials have been slow to respond. In fact, on January 27, the editorial board of the St. Louis Post Dispatch explicitly pointed out those parallels, concluding that “too often, people without power and clout don’t count with government officials. A parallel situation exists here with Bridgeton’s West Lake landfill... After seeing what happened in Flint, it comes as no surprise that they doubt government’s will to find a permanent solution.”

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