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Great Lakes Rad’ Waste Dump Plan Stalled by Environment Minister

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2016

Canada’s Minister of the Environment and Climate Change, the Honorable Catherine McKenna, has issued a stinging critique of the federal Joint Review Panel’s “Assessment Report” which last year recommended that she approve the so-called “Deep Geologic Repository” proposed by the Canadian nuclear giant Ontario Power Generation (OPG) for the shore of Lake Huron.

Sent from the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency in Ottawa, Minster McKenna’s Feb. 18 letter declares that “further information and studies are required” before she can complete her formal Decision Statement regarding the proposed near-lake radioactive waste dump. Her decision had previously been due March 1, 2016, but will now be delayed indefinitely.

Elated by the postponement and by Minister McKenna’s critical demands, Michael Keegan, Chair of the Coalition for a Nuclear Free Great Lakes in Monroe, Michigan wrote, “Ding dong the DUD is dead, almost!”—referring to what critics have dubbed the “Deep Underground Dump.” The Minister’s notice could be a major setback for OPG’s plan.

In what’s been called the most counter-intuitive and irrational radioactive waste disposal scheme ever proposed, OPG wants the government to allow burial of every sort of radioactive waste short of highly radioactive waste fuel, a mere 1.2 kilometers from the shore of Lake Huron. The waste materials would be from OPG’s eight-reactor Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, on Bruce Peninsula northwest of Toronto. With five operating reactors and 3,800 employees, OPG’s Bruce complex is the world’s largest nuclear site. Japan’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa complex is bigger, but has been closed since the 2011 Fukushima catastrophe.

The dump proposal has so shocked and angered local residents, environmentalists, US neighbors and even some of their Congressional representatives, that opposition has become international in scope. Some observers speculate that Justin Trudeau, newly elected as Prime Minister in October 2015, may have played a part in the Ministry’s distinctly cautionary announcement.

As many as 40 million people rely on the Great Lakes for drinking water, and in 70 years of nuclear waste generation no government has ever considered, much less permitted, the disposal of it so close to one of the Great Lakes. OPG’s “geologic” rationale for the near-lake dump has been condemned as a subterfuge for cost-cutting, since its proposed location—right next to the company’s 2,300-acre site—would save the firm the enormous expense of high-tech packaging, high-tech transportation, and highly-engineered waste management elsewhere, either monitored above ground, or underground at a less risky, less populated location.

Minister Wants New Studies of Alternative Sites,
Potential Pollution, and Clean-up Plans

The first demand Minister McKenna made in her Feb. 18 notice to OPG was that the company conduct a study of alternative locations for the DUD that are “technically and economically feasible.” McKenna explicitly directed OPG to suggest “actual locations” that would meet required feasibility specifications, and to detail the costs and risks of “additional off-site transportation of the nuclear waste.”

Minister McKenna further demanded an “updated analysis of the cumulative environmental effects of the project”—a study that could take a considerable amount of time. Thirdly, the Minister instructed OPG to produce a new “list of mitigation commitments for each identified adverse effect.”

The Minister’s Feb. 18 notice indicated some skepticism toward OPG’s previously submitted technical documents. McKenna demanded that, “OPG shall identify outdated or redundant commitments that were previously brought forward.” Ms. McKenna gave OPG until April 18, 2016 to provide her with its timeline for submitting the additional studies and information.

Dozens of communities, environmental groups and politicians on both sides of the Canada-US border have declared their opposition to the DUD, including Toronto, Chicago, and Duluth. A petition by Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Dump had gathered 93,352 signatures by Feb. 24.

“Company” towns close to the massive reactor complex, like Huron-Kinloss, tend to endorse the plan. Its Mayor Mitch Twolan supports the idea even though he is Chair of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative, a 100-mayor group that has formally resolved against it.

Anne Eadie, Mayor of Kincardine, Ontario, the site of lengthy public hearings on the proposal, told the Owen Sound Sun Times she thinks OPG’s information is good. “We’re satisfied that the science is there,” she said.

Jutta Splettstoesser, a Kincardine resident, community organizer and vigorous critic of OPG isn’t surprised that mayors of towns in the sway of the area’s biggest employer endorse the dumping scheme. “They’re inside the bribery zone,” she says.

—JL 

 

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Fukushima Radiation Plume in Pacific Reaches West Coast 

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2015-2016
By John LaForge

Officials from Fukushima’s owners, the Tokyo Electric Power Co., have said leaks from the destroyed reactor complex with “at least” two trillion Becquerels of radioactivity poured into the Pacific between August 2013 and May 2014. Yet this nine-month period isn’t the half of it.

“[W]e should be carefully monitoring the oceans after what is certainly the largest accidental release of radioactive contaminants to the oceans in history,” Dr. Ken Buesseler, researcher with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said September 27.

Instead, the US EPA halted its emergency radiation monitoring of Fukushima’s radioactive plume in May 2011, only three months after the disaster began. Japan isn’t even monitoring seawater near Fukushima, according to the September 28 Ecologist: “Japanese government and IAEA ignore radiation risks to coastal population.”

The amount of cesium in seawater that Buesseler’s researchers found off Vancouver Island is nearly six times the concentration regularly recorded in the Pacific—cesium lingers in the oceans after being deposited in fallout from nuclear bomb tests that ended in 1963. The six-fold increase in Pacific cesium is a stunner and indicates that increases have steadily been accumulating since the Fukushima disaster began pouring contaminated water into the sea in 2011. Cesium-134 concentration in the same waters was only about twice the long-standing (bomb test fallout) average in November of last year, the International Business Times reported.

Dr. Buesseler announced his latest assessment after his team found that cesium drift from Fukushima had reached North America. Further, instead of assuring the public that the radiation plume is harmless, Buesseler said, “[E]ven if they were twice as high and I was to swim there every day for an entire year, the dose I would be exposed to is a thousand times less than a single dental X-ray.”

Cesium is increasing in the levels and number of samples with measurable radioactivity from Fukushima. …levels of cesium were more than 10 million times higher in 2011 off Japan than off the US and Canada today. These levels around Fukushima were a direct threat to marine life. Within months, levels remained thousands of times higher near Japan relative to pre-disaster concentrations and this led to the closure of fisheries, which is important as there is a greater health concern with ingesting these contaminants, than say swimming in the ocean at the same levels. 
—Dr. Ken Buesseler, Nov. 11, 2015

This comparison confusingly obscures important differences between external exposure (from X-rays or swimming in contaminated seawater), and internal contamination from ingesting radioactive isotopes, say with seafood.

Dr. Chris Busby of the Low Level Radiation Campaign in England explains the distinction this way: Think of the difference between merely sitting before a warm wood fire on one hand, and popping a burning hot coal into your mouth on the other. Internal contamination can be 1,000 times more likely to cause cancer than the same exposure if it were external, especially for women and children. And because cesium-137 stays in the ecosphere for 300 years, long-term bio-accumulation and bio-concentration of cesium isotopes in the food chain (in this case the sea food chain), are the perpetually worsening consequences of what has spilled and is still pouring from Fukushima.

Bags of radioactive waste piled up at a temporary storage site in Tomioka, Fukushima Prefecture. Four years after the nuclear disaster began, a final disposal site for tainted debris it created has yet to be designated.

Today, globalized radioactive contamination of the commons by private corporations has become the financial, political and health care cost of operating nuclear power reactors. The International Business Times article noted: “The planet’s oceans already contain vast amounts of radiation, as the world’s 435 nuclear power plants routinely pump radioactive water into Earth’s oceans, albeit less dangerous isotopes than cesium.”

Fifty million Becquerels of cesium per-cubic-meter were measured off Fukushima soon after the March 2011 start of the three meltdowns; cesium-contaminated albacore and bluefin tuna were caught off the US West Coast only four months later; 300 tons of cesium-laced effluent has been pouring into the Pacific every day for the 4½ years since; the Japanese government on September 14 openly dumped 850 tons of partially filtered but tritium-contaminated water into the Pacific. This latest dumping foreshadows what it will try to do with thousands of additional tons now held in shabby storage tanks at the devastated reactor complex.

The fact that Fukushima has contaminated the entire Pacific Ocean must be viewed as cataclysmic. The ongoing introduction of its radioactive runoff may be slow-paced, and the inevitable damage to sea life and human health may take decades to register, but the “canary in the mine shaft” is the Pacific tuna population which should now be perpetually monitored for cesium.

Last November Buesseler warned, “Radioactive cesium from the Fukushima disaster is likely to keep arriving at the North American coast.”

Mayors in Fukushima OK Disposal of “Low-level” Rad-waste

Town leaders in Fukushima Prefecture December 2 accepted a government-proposed disposal plan for storing relatively low-level radioactive waste at an existing facility inside the prefecture. The federal plan calls for the Ecotech Clean Center, a privately run disposal facility in the town of Tomioka, near the destroyed Fukushima No. 1 reactor complex, to be nationalized. The center will then store about 650,000 cubic meters of radioactive garbage contaminated by the disaster.

Fukushima Governor Masao Uchibori then met with Koichi Miyamoto, the mayor of Tomioka, and Yukiei Matsumoto, mayor of the town of Naraha, which accommodates a transportation route to the facility. All the residents of Tomioka, which is less than 20 kilometers from the Fukushima complex, are still living as evacuees because of high radiation levels in the town.

In spite of controversial radiation levels, the government is pushing to lift evacuation orders still in place throughout Fukushima prefecture. The federal government’s plan for overall disposal is to build final facilities in six prefectures that were contaminated with large amounts of the radioactive waste, but prefectures other than Fukushima are strongly opposed to the proposals.

According to an Environment Ministry report, “designated wastes”—contaminated with between 8,000 and 100,000 Becquerels of radioactivity per kilogram—exist in 11 other prefectures. Fukushima Prefecture’s acceptance may fuel calls for concentrating such final disposal there rather than having to overcome widespread opposition elsewhere.

Federal officials first presented their disposal plans to local governments in December 2013. This November, Tokyo unveiled “regional economic promotion measures”—called bribes by skeptics of the dumping, because they include a grant of $81 million—such as the creation of an industrial complex, and “additional safety measures.”

Sources: Japan Times & Asahi Shimbun, Dec. 3, 2015

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Radioactive Waste Ignites in Underground Nevada Dump

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2015-2016
By John LaForge 
A 40-second cellphone video captured five explosions and some of the plume of smoke and debris from the buried nuclear waste ignition near Beatty, Nevada, Oct. 18.

On Sunday, Oct. 18, an underground fire caused a string of at least five explosions in a long-closed-down low-level radioactive waste dump in the desert, 10 miles from Beatty, Nevada. The fire and explosions, which produced plumes of debris and white smoke, were caught on a 40-second cellphone video.* The Associated Press reported that debris from the dump was blown up to 190 feet by the explosions. Officials closed 140 miles of US Highway 95 for almost 24 hours because of the rad-waste explosions and fire, and because heavy flooding damaged roads in Nye County the same day.

Neighbors complained later that they were not told of the fire or why the highway, their only escape route, had been closed. Beatty resident Cindy Craig said to CBS News, “We didn’t even get told about it until the next day.” In an Oct. 20 conference call with reporters, Nevada State Fire Marshal Peter Mulvihill said, “We don’t know exactly what caught fire. We’re not exactly sure what was burning in that pit.”

Because the fire and explosions were caught on video, the US Environmental Protection Agency, the Nevada National Guard, the US Departments of Energy and Homeland Security, and even the National Nuclear Security Administration all became involved in the emergency. After some fly-over radiation testing Oct. 19, Rusty Harris-Bishop, spokesman for the EPA’s Region 9 office in San Francisco, said, “No gamma radiation has been detected at this time.” However, monitoring above the area of the fire and explosions was initiated well after plumes of smoke from the explosions had dispersed.

Nye County Sheriff Sharon Wehrly said that US 95 was reopened at 5:30 p.m. Oct. 19, after air testing found no contamination.

The state National Guard later sent a four-member team to the scene to test ground-level contamination. They reported Oct. 21 not having detected alpha or beta radiation on the ground after walking within six feet of the burned trench.

Closed for 23 years, the 80-acre dumping ground was run from 1962 until 1993 by US Ecology, earlier known as Nuclear Engineering Co. US Ecology still operates a 40-acre hazardous waste dump adjacent to the radioactive waste site. A 1997 New York Times report about an earlier nuclear waste explosion said these accidents illustrate “how even a long-shut weapons plant can hide unknown dangers, and raise questions about what lies ahead.”

The low-level radioactive waste dump, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, consists of 22 trenches up to 800 feet long and 50 feet deep, and its older trenches have radioactive waste within three feet of the surface, the Las Vegas Sun reported. The accident took place in what is called Trench 14, which is part of a stadium-sized pit that was filled with rad-waste in the 1970s, according to the Las Vegas Review Journal.

Certain radioactive materials are known to catch fire when in contact with water, so the flooding that struck prior to the fiery explosions may have caused them. Unfortunately authorities do not know what sorts of radioactive isotopes are buried in the trenches there. Nor does anyone know how much radioactive waste burned in the fire.

Management of the dump was transferred from US Ecology to the state of Nevada in 1993. Asked by the Review Journal if an independent investigation should be conducted to validate the integrity of the probe given that the state is conducting an investigation of an incident that happened on its own land, Department of Public Safety Director James Wright told the paper that “at this point we feel we have to get the initial findings.”

Judy Treichel, head of the nonprofit Nuclear Waste Task Force, also questioned whether Nevada state officials should be conducting the investigation. “I wonder if the state environmental department is smart, skilled and motivated to really dig through this thing,” she told the Review Journal. “The state is the property owner. The state is on the hook if there are big costs.”

Waste buried at the Beatty site does not include used fuel from nuclear reactors or nuclear weapons programs, but contaminated tools, clothing, medical and laboratory wastes and hardware such as steam generators from power reactors.

Buried Waste Theoretically and Literally Explosive

The history of self-igniting wastes is frightening, and warnings about the likelihood of further explosions are as recent as last year.

  • In February 2014, at a deep underground dump in New Mexico, a barrel of military rad-waste “burst after it arrived at the dump, releasing radioactive uranium, plutonium and americium throughout the underground facility,” according to National Public Radio. The so-called Waste Isolation Pilot Plant is an experimental project inside a deep salt deposit where the Pentagon is burying plutonium-contaminated wastes left from decades of nuclear weapons production. NPR’s March 26, 2015 story concerned the Department of Energy’s (DOE) 277-page report about the February explosion. The report says, “Experiments showed that various combinations of nitrate salt, Swheat Scoop® [cat litter], nitric acid, and oxalate self-heat at temperatures below 100°C.” The DOE report used the terms “thermal runaway” and “self-heat” rather than the word “explosion.” The underground accident contaminated 22 workers internally, spread plutonium contamination throughout the deep underground chambers, and shut down the operation. For almost two years, the DOE has been working to reopen the facility.
  • In expert hearings held in southern Ontario in Sepember 2014, Dr. Frank Greening made identical warnings about the potential explosiveness of Canadian radioactive waste if it were to be buried next to Lake Huron under plans made by Ontario Power Generation. (See p. 7)
  • In May 1997, an explosion ruptured a water line, and blew out windows and a door in the defunct Plutonium Reclamation Facility at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State, which for 40 years was the site of plutonium production for nuclear weapons. While no longer in operation, “plutonium-bearing material still remains” the DOE said at the time. Four months later the New York Times reported that the explosion “sent the lid of a big steel tank flying into the ceiling, cracking open the roof of the airtight building, and releasing a brown cloud of noxious, but not radioactive chemicals.” Eight workers, outside the building when the explosion took place, were sent for medical exams after reporting sore throats, headaches, and a metallic taste in their mouths.
    The 360-square mile Hanford Nuclear Reservation, on the bank of the Columbia River in southeast Washington State, was the site of nine plutonium production reactors during the Cold War nuclear weapons buildup and is now the one of most radioatively contaminated places in the world. Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images
  • In May 1996, a welding spark caused a waste cask explosion at Wisconsin’s Point Beach reactor on Lake Michigan. The blast of hydrogen gas was “powerful enough to up-end the three-ton lid while it was atop a storage cask filled with high-level waste.” The reactor’s owner called that accident merely a “gaseous ignition event,” but was later fined $325,000.
  • In 1995, government physicists Charles Bowman and Francesco Venneri at Los Alamos National Laboratory predicted that wastes buried at the (now-cancelled) Yucca Mountain high-level dump, 20 miles from Beatty, Neveda waste fire, might erupt in a nuclear explosion and scatter radioactivity to the winds or into groundwater, or both. Bowman and Venneri found that the explosion dangers will arise thousands of years from now—after steel waste containers dissolve and plutonium begins to disperse into surrounding rock. Former DOE geologist Jerry Szymanski said, “You’re talking about an unimaginable catastrophe. Chernobyl would be small potatoes.”
  • During the 1980s and 1990s the DOE reported that tanks holding high-level liquid radioactive waste at the Hanford Reservation and at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina could catch fire or explode from the build-up of hydrogen gas. According to the Seattle Times, twice in six months the DOE warned that 20 of 177 waste tanks could explode under certain conditions. The huge underground tanks store about 56 million gallons of the waste at Hanford. Likewise at the Savannah River Site, the Environmental Policy Institute reported in 1987 that tanks holding millions of gallons of liquid high-level wastes were at “substantial risk of exploding”—also from the combustion of either hydrogen gas or organic vapors. The chances of a tank explosion at Savannah River were reportedly as high as one in 50. Fifty-one large tanks there each hold between 750,000 and 1.3 million gallons of the unstable, thermally hot and highly radioactive liquids. At the two highly contaminated government sites, decades have been devoted to attempts at draining the tanks and solidifying the liquid wastes to prevent them from further contaminating groundwater. At Hanford alone, where 10 of 177 tanks had been emptied as of June 2013, the project has already cost $36 billion.
  • The worst known tank explosion took place at Chelyablinsk, in Russia’s Ural Mountains, the site of plutoniumproduction. On September 29, 1957 a high-level liquid-waste storage tank exploded—throwing a 160-ton lid off of the container, and spreading mainly strontium-90 across more than 64 square miles. The tank held 70 to 80 tons of highly radioactive waste, all of which was dispersed. The plume of radiation further contaminated the Techa River, fourteen lakes, and travelled at least 300 kilometers northeast from the explosion. At least 34,000 people were exposed to radiation—externally and internally—for one to three years before 10,700 were relocated from their homes. At least 200 people died from radiation sickness, and later the names of 30 small towns and a few larger ones were permanently removed from maps of the area.

The caustic, radioactive “self-heating thermal runaway” in Beatty, Nevada is only the latest warning not to bury radioactive waste. Putting the materials that act like explosive nuclear time bombs out-of-sight and out-of-mind will not keep us safe.

For such wastes, only above-ground, monitored, hardened, retrievable storage can ever come close to protecting the environment and human health. A halt to the on-going mass production of radioactive waste is the only economical path to finding improved and sustainable means of waste management.

Sources: Associated Press, Oct. 19, 20, 21 & 26; Boston Herald, Oct. 19; Las Vegas Review-Journal, Oct. 19, 20, 21 & 22; FoxReportDaily, Oct. 20; Las Vegas Sun, Oct. 21 & 22; and CBS Las Vegas, Oct. 22, 2015

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 Canada Decides to Further Review Risks of Radioactive Waste Dump on Great Lakes Shore

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2015-2016

On November 27, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission extended the timeline to issue a decision on the proposed Deep Geologic Repository (DGR) project by 90 days from December 2, 2015 to March 1, 2016.

The proposal by Ontario Power Generation (OPG) is to construct and operate a deep underground disposal facility at the Bruce Nuclear Site, on the shore of Lake Huron on Bruce Peninsula, Ontario. The DGR would be designed to manage low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste from the operation of OPG-owned nuclear reactors at Bruce, Pickering, and Darlington, Ontario.

“We are deeply thankful to all the US Congress Members who urged that the decision be postponed, and the Honorable Catherine McKenna, the newly appointed Canadian Minister of Environment and Climate Change, for postponing the decision 90 days,” said Kevin Kamps, Radioactive Waste Watchdog at Beyond Nuclear, based in Takoma Park, Maryland, which has helped lead US grassroots resistance to the proposal.

“We urge the delegation of 32 US Senators and Representatives to follow through with securing a meeting with Prime Minister Trudeau and Environment Minister McKenna, to communicate the concerns and objections of tens of millions of US citizens regarding the risks the DGR would inflict on the Great Lakes,” Kamps said.

“We are confident that once Environment Minister McKenna reviews the 13 years of resistance to the DUD, she can do nothing other than reject OPG’s proposal as unacceptably risky to the drinking water supply for 40 million people,” Kamps added. DUD, for Deep Underground Dump, is the opposition’s term for the proposal.

In a November 18 letter to Environment Minister McKenna, a coalition of 65 US and Canadian environmental groups, including Nukewatch, urged an extension of the December 2 decision deadline. But its overriding gist was for Minister McKenna to reject the DGR proposal outright, as it is “plagued by uncertainties, unacceptably risky, unnecessary for the management of the radioactive wastes, and unaffordable from a cost-benefit perspective.”

The coalition’s letter listed the growing opposition, including 182 resolutions passed by municipalities in the US and Canada—including Chicago, Duluth, five communities in metro Detroit, and Toronto—with a combined population of nearly 23 million people. In addition, the National Association of Counties, representing 3,069 counties across the US where 255 million people reside, recently passed a resolution opposing the DGR, as has the Great Lakes Legislative Caucus (comprised of lawmakers in eight US states and two Canadian provinces).

The Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative has long been critical of the DGR as well.

The organization Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Dump has more information about the growing number of resolutions posted on its website.

—Beyond Nuclear and Nukewatch 

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St. Louis Blues

As Fire Inches toward Dump Site and Cancer Numbers Rise, Community Groups Push for Resolution of Manhattan Project Contamination
Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2015-2016
By Arianne Peterson 

Current and former residents of North St. Louis County, Missouri—where tons of radioactively contaminated Manhattan Project waste were dumped starting in the 1940s—are gaining traction in their efforts to pressure leaders to take responsibility for the widespread contamination in their communities. Local organizers have made progress recently on two related, urgent issues: 1) Clean-up of waste dumped at the West Lake Landfill site, where an underground fire in the neighboring Bridgeton landfill is inching ever closer to the radioactive materials; and 2) Achieving recognition and support for those who have developed illnesses related to the contamination in and around Coldwater Creek, which runs through North St. Louis County.

West Lake Landfill 

Concerned citizens including the group Just Moms STL and the Missouri Coalition for the Environment have successfully lobbied the state’s congressional delegation to introduce a bill (HR 4100) that would transfer remediation authority of the West Lake Landfill site—which holds over 40,000 tons of contaminated soil at surface level—from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the Army Corps of Engineers. The bill was introduced November 25 with support from Representatives Ann Wagner and William Lacy Clay and Senators Roy Blunt and Claire McCaskill.

The West Lake Landfill is just one of many sites in the St. Louis area contaminated by waste left over from uranium processing done by Mallinckrodt Chemical Works for the Manhattan Project in the 1940s. While clean-up of the other sites falls under the jurisdiction of the Army Corps of Engineers under the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP), the West Lake site formerly did not meet the program’s criteria and instead was designated an EPA Superfund site.

But residents have not been happy with the EPA’s handling of the West Lake waste, which is about 1,000 feet away from a “subsurface smoldering event” that has been burning for over four years at the neighboring Bridgeton Landfill—owned by Republic Services. In 2008, the EPA Region 7 issued a Record of Decision saying it planned to leave the waste in place and cover it with a “cap” of rock, clay, and soil. In a press release about the new legislation, Representative Clay said, “It just makes no sense to allow radioactive waste to remain buried in an unlined landfill, near residential neighborhoods, schools, a hospital, the airport and the Missouri River. It’s time to clean up West Lake Landfill.”

Sen. Blunt said, “The EPA’s unacceptable delay in implementing a solution for the West Lake landfill has destroyed its credibility, and it is time to change course.”

Dawn Chapman of Just Moms STL expressed further frustration with the EPA, saying, “It was clear in May—when head of the EPA, Gina McCarthy, refused to meet with Just Moms STL even after a bipartisan letter was written requesting such a meeting—that EPA’s main focus remained on public relations rather than on being an advocate for our children.”

Just Moms STL has higher hopes for FUSRAP, which is handling the city’s other Manhattan Project waste cleanup sites, but the group recognizes it has a long way to go before their community is made safe. Group member Karen Nickel said, “While we see this as a victory, we still have families living within one mile of this dangerous site, we still have radioactive trees offsite, and we still have an out-of-control burning Superfund site/landfill with very hazardous materials.”

Local residents certainly have cause for concern. In 2014, the EPA released an analysis of what could happen if the underground fire reaches West Lake’s radioactive waste. The study said, “since no one knows what else is mixed in with the radioactive waste, a subsurface fire could potentially react with those unknown substances, causing an explosion.” It also found that high temperatures could cause the proposed cap over the waste to crack, and/or create a buildup of pressure that would force out radioactive gasses. A fire at West Lake would also cause more liquid to build up in the landfill, which could carry contamination away from the site and into groundwater. The EPA has promised to release its plan for dealing with the situation by the end of 2016.

In September 2015, Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster released new reports supporting the state’s ongoing lawsuit against Bridgeton Landfill owner Republic Services for negligence and environmental violations related to the ongoing fire. Among the more alarming pieces of evidence added to the lawsuit, as reported by Missouri Public Radio, were:

  • Radiological and organic contamination has been detected in trees on properties neighboring the landfill;
  • Volatile organic compounds, also known as VOCs, have been found in “high concentrations” in the groundwater in wells outside the perimeter of the landfill. Those contaminants include benzene, acetone, and 2-butanone.
  • The underground “fire”—or high-temperature chemical reaction—in the Bridgeton Landfill is expanding north, toward the radioactive waste in the adjacent West Lake Landfill and has already moved beyond the gas interceptor wells in the “neck” of the landfill that are intended to stop its spread;
  • Republic Services has negligently contributed to the growth of the underground reaction by “aggressively over-extracting the gas system well outside industry best practices.”

The state’s suit was filed in 2013 and is scheduled for trial in March 2016. It seeks penalties, actual damages, and punitive damages from Republic Services for the company’s allegedly unlawful conduct.

Those who live near the landfills currently complain of headaches, nosebleeds, and horrible smells coming from the burning area. An unrelated brush fire at West Lake on October 24, and an 11,000-gallon sewage spill at Bridgeton October 27, only served to heighten local concerns about the management of the situation. St. Louis County officials, intending to reassure the public, released an emergency contingency plan in October outlining what to do if the fire reaches the waste. The plan only aggravated some residents’ concerns. Student activist Elaine Emmerich said, “There’s an official 104-page evacuation plan, but no one really knows what could happen [if the fire reaches the radioactive waste], since it all comes down to complete chance about which direction the winds are blowing that day.”

This meme, posted in 2013 on the Missouri Coalition for the Environment website, depicts the West Lake Landfill Manhattan Project waste dump site using the round radiation symbol in a series of maps. Each shows a potential disaster that threaten to disperse the more than 40,000 tons of radioactively contaminated soil that are stored at surface level in the unlined dump site.

The proposal to transfer control of West Lake from the EPA to FUSRAP [within the Department of Defense] does not alter the site’s Superfund status and does not transfer the liability of those potentially responsible for the damages. Based on the site’s history, the question of liability may boil down to a finger-pointing match between nuclear utility giant Exelon and the Department of Energy (DOE). Exelon holds the liability for the former Cotter Corporation, which hired the contractor that originally dumped the waste. The DOE retains liability for its predecessor the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which released Cotter Corp. from its license to hold the material despite knowing that it was dumped without authorization.

The radioactive material at West Lake includes 8,700 tons of barium sulfate left over from the Belgian Congo Pitch Blend uranium ore—after Mallinckrodt C.W. extracted its uranium for the Manhattan Project. Starting in 1946, 133,000 tons of these byproducts were dumped at the St. Louis Airport site. In 1962, the AEC auctioned off 125,000 tons of the Airport waste to private companies. Cotter Corp. acquired some of the material and shipped much of it back to its home state of Colorado, leaving 8,700 tons of barium sulfate—which contained several tons of uranium—at a site on Latty Avenue, near the Airport. In 1973, Cotter Corp. mixed this material with 40,000 tons of topsoil from the Latty Avenue site and hauled it in dump trucks to West Lake, telling the landfill operator they were bringing “clean fill” that could be used to cover other refuse.

In 1974, Cotter Corp. told the AEC that it was disposing of the material in a landfill. According to AEC records, the agency recommended citing Cotter for disobeying the intent of its regulations. However, later that same year, the AEC released Cotter from the license it held for the Latty Avenue materials. A month later, the AEC was dissolved, and its duties were assigned to the newly formed Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The idea of taking action against the unauthorized dumping at West Lake apparently got lost in the transition.

Doug Clemens, chair of the community advisory group associated with the EPA cleanup, feels the DOE is shirking its responsibility for the West Lake waste. “This was permitted by the federal government and created by the federal government under a weapons program,” he said. “It’s their waste and they’re responsible for it.” The DOE had specifically excluded West Lake from the FUSRAP charged with cleaning up Manhattan Project sites, possibly because the material was owned by a private company. A 1993 DOE memo stated that the agency “remains firm in its position that it is not admitting liability for the West Lake Landfill contamination”; a 1992 memo called the West Lake dumping “a license violation” that “would not have been authorized if licensing approval had been sought.”

Kay Drey, who has researched the weapons waste in St. Louis since the 1970s and is a board member at Beyond Nuclear, feels the US government has both a moral and fiscal responsibility for cleaning up the waste produced by its weapons program. “To me, it’s very clear that this was a federal responsibility,” she told St. Louis Today. “Unfortunately, the Atomic Energy Commission and the NRC didn’t follow through and pay attention to what was at Latty Avenue and then dumped at West Lake Landfill.”

Coldwater Creek Contamination 

The same uranium processing waste generated by Mallinckrodt Chemical Works for atomic bomb production that was dumped at West Lake was dumped in many other sites as well, and residents who were exposed to radiation in the 1970s and 1980s—many of whom came in regular contact with Coldwater Creek, a tributary of the Missouri River—are now facing an alarming number of rare illnesses.

After years of organizing efforts to put pressure on government officials to take responsibility for the devastating effects thought to stem from residents’ exposure, activists with Coldwater Creek Facts have succeeded in involving the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) in studying their case. In the agency’s first meeting with community members December 2, officials reassured them that their investigation would not be influenced by other government agencies that may seek to avoid responsibility for the problem. Erin Evans, an ADSTR environmental health specialist, told residents, “We are an independent, non-regulatory agency. I get my pressure from you.” She also said, “Hopefully this helps us say these illnesses that we’re seeing in this community may have been caused by this environmental contamination.”

2015 map of illnesses suffered by current and former residents who lived near Coldwater Creek. From www.coldwatercreekfacts.com.

In 2011, current and former residents of the area who grew up near the Creek in the 1970s and 1980s began to notice a high incidence of rare cancers among their relatively young peer group. They started a Facebook group called “Coldwater Creek—Just the Facts Please” to reach out to others who were experiencing similar health issues and begin gathering data. Four years later, the group has over 12,000 members and has documented 2,725 cases of cancers and autoimmune diseases. Forty-five of these are cases of appendix cancer, which is staggering considering the regular incidence of this disease is less than one in 100,000.

A 2013 study by the Missouri Department of Health effectively dismissed the group’s concerns, attributing the high cancer rates to lifestyle factors like smoking and poor diet. After pointing out the flaws of the study, which only considered the diseases diagnosed among those who lived near the Creek from 1996 to 2004—after cleanup efforts were well underway—and failed to consider the major portion of the population that had moved away from the area since their exposure.

Members of the group hope the ATSDR study—which is expected to take 18 to 24 months—will bring them closer to gaining some federal support for those suffering from the effects of contamination resulting from the government’s atomic bomb production. The group is pushing the federal government to recognize their “Downwinder” status under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) for those suffering from radiation exposure stemming from the government’s Manhattan Project. RECA, administered by the Department of Justice, entitles those it recognizes as having contracted certain diseases after exposure to up to $100,000 in damages.

Organizers are also working to educate health care professionals in the area on the effects of residents’ exposure and how to best serve this unique population. On November 30, St. Louis County Public Health Director Faisal Khan responded to community concerns and published a blog post addressing area physicians, sharing recommendations for action and educational resources.

While they keep pressure on federal, state, and local authorities, group members continue to advocate for and support each other through their Facebook page, which contains four years’ worth of devastating stories from those who are sick themselves and/or have lost loved ones to cancer and other diseases. A comment posted by Facebook user Julie Winters on October 22 is a typical post for the page: “My sister died at age 30 from liver cancer. My Mother at 55 from ovarian cancer. My Father age 58 from lung cancer. And last, I had triple negative breast cancer at 45. The stupid creek ran behind our house and I use to catch tadpoles as a kid…….until they suddenly all disappeared. Hmmmm. What do you all think??? Insane!!”

The Coldwater Creek contamination is recognized under FUSRAP, and the Army Corps of Engineers is working to clean up the sources of its contamination. Meanwhile, many current residents living near both the Creek and the West Lake Landfill are struggling to figure out how to move their families away from the radiation given the reality that no one is likely to want to buy or live in their homes. Though both groups are engaged in a fight for their lives, they recognize that their struggles stem from a much bigger problem: the criminal negligence of the federal governments nuclear weapons program. As Facebook user Scott Koeneman posted on the Coldwater Creek page December 2: “All I know is this: West Lake Landfill, and Coldwater Creek, both have, or had, the exact same waste buried in it that my grandfather worked on during the Manhattan Project & the Cold War at Mallinckrodt. It’s the same waste that killed him, and it’s the same waste that is killing you.”

Sources: St. Louis Public Radio, Mar. 31, 2014, Sept. 3 & Nov. 3, 2015; Missouri Attorney General Press Release, Sept. 3; Quartz, Oct. 29; STL Today, Nov. 2; Student Life (WashU), Nov. 9; Byron DeLear Interview on Antidote (YouTube), Nov. 9; KDSK News, Nov. 10; PoliticalNews, Nov. 25; Washington Univ. Institute for Public Health Blog, Nov. 30; St. Louis American, Dec. 3; AP, Dec. 4; US Dept. of Justice RECA Website, Dec. 4, 2015

Editor’s Note: Nukewatch has reported on both the Coldwater Creek contamination and the West Lake dump site regularly in the Quarterly since 2013. We are encouraged by the recent progress made by these citizens’ groups as well as the increased media coverage their struggle is now receiving.

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