The otherworldly scene of the radioactive West Lake landfill in North St. Louis County, Missouri. Toxic fumes flare off into the surrounding neighborhood. Documented cancer-clusters have raised the call for the site’s clean-up.Uploaded by Kqueirolomce to Wikimedia / Creative Commons licenseIn a bipartisan letter made public today, U.S. Senators Roy Blunt and Claire McCaskill of Missouri have called attention to the West Lake landfill which contains tens of thousands of tons of radioactive material generated during the top-secret Manhattan Project of World War II. The site has never been included in the appropriate Federal clean-up program and the bipartisan congressional delegation have called for a reevaluation of its status.Addressed to Ernest Moniz, a nuclear physicist and head of the U.S. Department of Energy, the statement touches on what’s emerging as a civil rights issue based on environmental justice—the fact that out of numerous radiologically contaminated sites in North St. Louis County, only one site has been excluded from the Federal program tasked with cleaning-up nuclear weapons-related waste.Located in Bridgeton, Mo., the site that’s been left behind is the West Lake landfill, which also happens to rest dangerously next to an underground fire burning at an adjacent site—the Bridgeton landfill.After McCaskill and Blunt’s letter was made public, a spokesperson for Exelon Corporation provided new revelations to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that “there’s some evidence that there could be other waste streams there.”Sadly, this new information may confirm the worst fears of nearby residents—it may indicate that the Bridgeton landfill also contains radioactive substances, which, it would seem, are now on fire. “…new concerns have been raised by a PRP (potentially responsible party) that non-Cotter affiliated material may be present at the West Lake and Bridgeton sites.”—Sen. McCaskill, Sen. Blunt, Rep. Clay, and Rep. Wagner in a letter to the DoE regarding the dangers of unknown radioactive material at the West Lake landfillExelon inherited the liability of the private company (Cotter) that illegally dumped the radioactive waste at the West Lake site and is most likely the party mentioned by the Missouri congressional delegation’s letter: “…new concerns have been raised by a PRP (potentially responsible party) that non-Cotter affiliated material may be present at the West Lake and Bridgeton sites.”The new information from Exelon only confirms data included in a 2013 white paper, The West Lake Landfill: A Radioactive Legacy of the Nuclear Arms Race by Robert Alvarez, Senior Scholar for the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington D.C. Alvarez’s paper details the fact that many more tons of contaminated material sourced from the Latty Avenue site made its way to West Lake under the deceptive rubric “clean-fill.” The evidence of more dense contaminants was later confirmed by soil samples taken at West Lake which show the presence of Uranium and Thorium—common “daughter products” associated with nuclear weapons development. “The situation here is one of the most graphic illustrations of the enduring costs paid by an American community for its participation in the cold war.”The radioactive material littered across North St. Louis County all stems from the war effort during World War II to build the first nuclear weapons before Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan could develop or acquire the technology. St. Louis played a pivotal role in the defense of our nation and ever since has been paying an insidious price.As the New York Times reported 25 years ago, “The situation here is one of the most graphic illustrations of the enduring costs paid by an American community for its participation in the cold war. For 24 years, St. Louis was a vital link in the chain of production for atomic weapons because of a chemical process that the Mallinckrodt Chemical Works developed for purifying large quantities of uranium. The company, one of the city’s oldest industrial concerns, produced the uranium used at the University of Chicago on Dec. 2, 1942, to sustain the world’s first nuclear chain reaction and for the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.”For various reasons including corporate malfeasance, national security and secrecy, and a general misunderstanding of many of the health dangers involved, the nuclear waste from WWII and early Cold War years was dumped at numerous sites in North St. Louis County and at a nearby Mallinckrodt production facility located at Weldon Spring, Mo. which was listed as a Superfund site in 1987.“The DoE came to St. Louis in 1990 and determined that the radioactive downtown Mallinckrodt site, radioactive airport site, and radioactive Hazelwood Latty Avenue site qualified under FUSRAP,” explained Heather Navarro, Executive Director of the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, at a press conference today hosted by the Franciscan Sisters of Mary.FUSRA
Sorgente: New revelations shake-up EPA jurisdiction of St. Louis radioactive site – National Progressive | Examiner.com