After Building the Atomic Bomb, the Government Dumped Deadly Toxic Waste in a Quiet Suburb
For decades, a St. Louis community has been plagued by illnesses. They say radioactive material from the Manhattan Project in their local landfill is to blame.
I. FIRE It’s alive. That’s how the neighbors alongside the landfill describe it: as a living creature, a growling menace — the modern-day incarnation of Typhon, the monster of Greek mythology with a hundred dragon heads, cast into the underworld but still capable of unleashing volcanic powers. It has resided 240 feet down in the Missouri earth, gurgling and hissing, for the past 13 years. Republic Services, the Phoenix-based owners of the Bridgeton Landfill, where the beast resides, never uses the word fire. Company officials refer to it as a “subsurface smoldering event” or an “underground exothermic heat-generation reaction.” Surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, the smoldering mass gorges on old drywall and broken shingles discarded by construction crews decades ago, opening fissures and tunnels of ash. Sometimes those underground shafts collapse, causing the ground to settle on top of the void, to sink like a punctured air mattress, so that what was once a small mountain is now a lumpy pancake of a 52-acre field. The gurgling sound is from the vacuuming away of liquids the fire creates. Kevin Stuhlman, assistant fire chief of the Pattonville Fire Protection District, calls it “the nastiest water runoff you could possibly have.” The hissing is the sound of methane and other gases being sucked out to flares, where they’re burned off. Gas extraction wells poke up at regular intervals, making the site look like a tormented voodoo doll from high above. Much of the area is covered with a massive green tarp — a fireproof, three-layer geo-membrane liner that holds in the gases and chokes off the beast’s oxygen supply. Republic Services crews monitor the fire around the clock, like stockbrokers sweating margins on a volatile trading day: watching ground temperatures, the state of the gases and liquids, the rate at which the ground is sinking. (Republic Services did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
This data is critical because the beast must be contained. If it spreads even a couple hundred yards, it could reach another landfill, West Lake, that is home to a different kind of nightmare. West Lake harbors the origins of the Manhattan Project — 47,000 tons of radioactive waste that was, according to an investigation by the Associated Press, MuckRock, and the Missouri Independent, dumped illegally. Stuhlman grew up nearby and played in Coldwater Creek, the neighborhood hub of outdoor activity, which snaked through his backyard. He became a firefighter 20 years ago to help keep the community safe, but only after he took the job did he learn about the atomic bomb contamination. For two-thirds of his tenure, he has contended with the possibility that those twin menaces could collide — say, if the ground cracks open and fire plumes up, carrying radionuclides into the air currents above a metropolitan area of 2.8 million people. What happens if that fire reaches that radioactive waste? “No one knows,” Stuhlman says. “It’s never happened.” II. WAR On April 17, 1942, Edward Mallinckrodt Jr. sat down for lunch with a longtime friend, the esteemed physicist Arthur Holly Compton, at the Noonday Club in downtown St. Louis. These were rarefied dining quarters, but in terms of the future of humanity, no power lunch was quite like this one. The nation had entered World War II four months earlier, and reports were trickling in that Hitler’s researchers were two years ahead of the United States in the quest to develop the “ultimate weapon.” Working on behalf of the government, Compton asked Mallinckrodt, chairman of the board of Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, a local company, to take on a daunting task: extract 40 tons of purified uranium from ore freshly mined in the Belgian Congo to fuel the world’s first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear reaction. Three other firms had deemed the untested process too dangerous. But now the stakes were unambiguously high: beating Nazi Germany to the atomic bomb. Mallinckrodt quickly mobilized his company, and crews working around the clock were soon producing a ton of pure uranium daily. The eventual outcome of the Manhattan Project — the fateful flight of the Enola Gay — is forever etched in history; its ties to St. Louis, however, are lesser known. Nuclear power and weaponry remained an important innovation beyond the war’s end, and Mallinckrodt Chemical continued to enrich uranium until 1957. But officials were disinterested in the radioactive waste that the process created. In 1946, the government acquired a property of nearly 22 acres alongside Lambert–St. Louis Municipal Airport, where they shipped barrels of toxic materials. The northern reaches of St. Louis County were largely unpopulated then, consisting mostly of gently rolling farmland. The communities that were there, however, were not informed of the contents of the thousands of barrels moved to the site, and those who noticed trucks making mysterious deliveries were lied to. In 1946, the St. Louis Star-Times reported that the site had been “used secretly for several months for storage of ‘certain residue materials from the refining of uranium ores’” at Mallinckrodt. Factory officials claimed they were “not radio-active and not dangerous.” The mayor of nearby Berkeley told the newspaper: “If they say the material is not dangerous, we have to take their word for it.” II. WAR On April 17, 1942, Edward Mallinckrodt Jr. sat down for lunch with a longtime friend, the esteemed physicist Arthur Holly Compton, at the Noonday Club in downtown St. Louis. These were rarefied dining quarters, but in terms of the future of humanity, no power lunch was quite like this one. The nation had entered World War II four months earlier, and reports were trickling in that Hitler’s researchers were two years ahead of the United States in the quest to develop the “ultimate weapon.” Working on behalf of the government, Compton asked Mallinckrodt, chairman of the board of Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, a local company, to take on a daunting task: extract 40 tons of purified uranium from ore freshly mined in the Belgian Congo to fuel the world’s first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear reaction. Three other firms had deemed the untested process too dangerous. But now the stakes were unambiguously high: beating Nazi Germany to the atomic bomb. Mallinckrodt quickly mobilized his company, and crews working around the clock were soon producing a ton of pure uranium daily. The eventual outcome of the Manhattan Project — the fateful flight of the Enola Gay — is forever etched in history; its ties to St. Louis, however, are lesser known. Nuclear power and weaponry remained an important innovation beyond the war’s end, and Mallinckrodt Chemical continued to enrich uranium until 1957. But officials were disinterested in the radioactive waste that the process created. In 1946, the government acquired a property of nearly 22 acres alongside Lambert–St. Louis Municipal Airport, where they shipped barrels of toxic materials. The northern reaches of St. Louis County were largely unpopulated then, consisting mostly of gently rolling farmland. The communities that were there, however, were not informed of the contents of the thousands of barrels moved to the site, and those who noticed trucks making mysterious deliveries were lied to. In 1946, the St. Louis Star-Times reported that the site had been “used secretly for several months for storage of ‘certain residue materials from the refining of uranium ores’” at Mallinckrodt. Factory officials claimed they were “not radio-active and not dangerous.” The mayor of nearby Berkeley told the newspaper: “If they say the material is not dangerous, we have to take their word for it.”II. WAR On April 17, 1942, Edward Mallinckrodt Jr. sat down for lunch with a longtime friend, the esteemed physicist Arthur Holly Compton, at the Noonday Club in downtown St. Louis. These were rarefied dining quarters, but in terms of the future of humanity, no power lunch was quite like this one. The nation had entered World War II four months earlier, and reports were trickling in that Hitler’s researchers were two years ahead of the United States in the quest to develop the “ultimate weapon.” Working on behalf of the government, Compton asked Mallinckrodt, chairman of the board of Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, a local company, to take on a daunting task: extract 40 tons of purified uranium from ore freshly mined in the Belgian Congo to fuel the world’s first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear reaction. Three other firms had deemed the untested process too dangerous. But now the stakes were unambiguously high: beating Nazi Germany to the atomic bomb. Mallinckrodt quickly mobilized his company, and crews working around the clock were soon producing a ton of pure uranium daily. The eventual outcome of the Manhattan Project — the fateful flight of the Enola Gay — is forever etched in history; its ties to St. Louis, however, are lesser known. Nuclear power and weaponry remained an important innovation beyond the war’s end, and Mallinckrodt Chemical continued to enrich uranium until 1957. But officials were disinterested in the radioactive waste that the process created. In 1946, the government acquired a property of nearly 22 acres alongside Lambert–St. Louis Municipal Airport, where they shipped barrels of toxic materials. The northern reaches of St. Louis County were largely unpopulated then, consisting mostly of gently rolling farmland. The communities that were there, however, were not informed of the contents of the thousands of barrels moved to the site, and those who noticed trucks making mysterious deliveries were lied to. In 1946, the St. Louis Star-Times reported that the site had been “used secretly for several months for storage of ‘certain residue materials from the refining of uranium ores’” at Mallinckrodt. Factory officials claimed they were “not radio-active and not dangerous.” The mayor of nearby Berkeley told the newspaper: “If they say the material is not dangerous, we have to take their word for it.”II. WAR On April 17, 1942, Edward Mallinckrodt Jr. sat down for lunch with a longtime friend, the esteemed physicist Arthur Holly Compton, at the Noonday Club in downtown St. Louis. These were rarefied dining quarters, but in terms of the future of humanity, no power lunch was quite like this one. The nation had entered World War II four months earlier, and reports were trickling in that Hitler’s researchers were two years ahead of the United States in the quest to develop the “ultimate weapon.” Working on behalf of the government, Compton asked Mallinckrodt, chairman of the board of Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, a local company, to take on a daunting task: extract 40 tons of purified uranium from ore freshly mined in the Belgian Congo to fuel the world’s first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear reaction. Three other firms had deemed the untested process too dangerous. But now the stakes were unambiguously high: beating Nazi Germany to the atomic bomb. Mallinckrodt quickly mobilized his company, and crews working around the clock were soon producing a ton of pure uranium daily. The eventual outcome of the Manhattan Project — the fateful flight of the Enola Gay — is forever etched in history; its ties to St. Louis, however, are lesser known. Nuclear power and weaponry remained an important innovation beyond the war’s end, and Mallinckrodt Chemical continued to enrich uranium until 1957. But officials were disinterested in the radioactive waste that the process created. In 1946, the government acquired a property of nearly 22 acres alongside Lambert–St. Louis Municipal Airport, where they shipped barrels of toxic materials. The northern reaches of St. Louis County were largely unpopulated then, consisting mostly of gently rolling farmland. The communities that were there, however, were not informed of the contents of the thousands of barrels moved to the site, and those who noticed trucks making mysterious deliveries were lied to. In 1946, the St. Louis Star-Times reported that the site had been “used secretly for several months for storage of ‘certain residue materials from the refining of uranium ores’” at Mallinckrodt. Factory officials claimed they were “not radio-active and not dangerous.” The mayor of nearby Berkeley told the newspaper: “If they say the material is not dangerous, we have to take their word for it.”
Although the science about the dangers of uranium was still emerging, the high stakes for public health were already apparent. In 1947, an Atomic Energy Commission panel reported that the uranium byproducts could pose “the gravest of problems” if they were thoughtlessly discarded in gradually disintegrating barrels. In the 1960s, AEC researchers found that the 121,050 tons of radioactive material near the airport contained the largest concentration of thorium-230 in the nation, and possibly the world. One scientist determined that the waste’s thorium concentration was 25,000 times greater than what would exist in nature. Thorium-230 was known to be a health hazard on par with plutonium, and with a half-life of more than 77,000 years, it would decay to radium-226 and grow “hotter” — more radioactive, and more dangerous.
As these barrels sat out in the open, developers began building homes throughout the surrounding area. The combined population in the towns of Florissant, Hazelwood, and Black Jack grew from about 4,000 in the 1950s to around 85,000 today. Virtually no one filling these suburban enclaves had any clue what the government had left behind.
Although the science about the dangers of uranium was still emerging, the high stakes for public health were already apparent. In 1947, an Atomic Energy Commission panel reported that the uranium byproducts could pose “the gravest of problems” if they were thoughtlessly discarded in gradually disintegrating barrels. In the 1960s, AEC researchers found that the 121,050 tons of radioactive material near the airport contained the largest concentration of thorium-230 in the nation, and possibly the world. One scientist determined that the waste’s thorium concentration was 25,000 times greater than what would exist in nature. Thorium-230 was known to be a health hazard on par with plutonium, and with a half-life of more than 77,000 years, it would decay to radium-226 and grow “hotter” — more radioactive, and more dangerous.
As these barrels sat out in the open, developers began building homes throughout the surrounding area. The combined population in the towns of Florissant, Hazelwood, and Black Jack grew from about 4,000 in the 1950s to around 85,000 today. Virtually no one filling these suburban enclaves had any clue what the government had left behind.
In 2011, someone in the group stumbled upon the USACE website for what’s called the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program — a government program with an impenetrable name that was created to deal with atomic-waste nightmares. The group learned that remedial work was being done on radioactive waste in the area. “I knew there was a connection the moment we started reading about the thorium-230, uranium-235, and radium-226,” Wright says. Their paradise had been ruined, and now it was on them to do something about it.
IV. FEATHERS
To understand what happened in North St. Louis County — and what’s still happening when Coldwater Creek floods — imagine shaking out the contents of a feather pillow on a windy day. Those feathers will blow away, then land and pick up again in later gusts. Some will float along currents, settling downstream and spreading via floodwaters into the surrounding landscape.
In March 1962, the Atomic Energy Commission, seeking to rid itself of its radioactive-waste problem, offered for sale the 121,050 tons of “uranium-thorium source materials” stashed next to the airport. In 1965, a task force studying the issue recommended removing the waste and closing the site, but the AEC reached a deal with Contemporary Metals, a firm that planned to extract valuable materials, such as copper and nickel, from the residues. The company paid about $1 a ton.
In 1966, a Contemporary Metals subsidiary, Continental Mining and Milling Co., began moving the waste a half mile away to a building in Hazelwood, spilling material from trucks en route. The company went bankrupt soon after, and its lender tried and failed to auction off the residues. In 1969, the creditor sold it to the Cotter Corporation, which planned to ship the waste by rail to its uranium plant in Cañon City, Colorado. Cotter officials calculated that they could reduce shipping costs by drying the material, so they left it outside, again uncovered and exposed to the elements.
Meanwhile, Cotter used an inorganic compound called barium sulfate to recover leftover uranium from the Mallinckrodt residue. After shipping what they could extract to Colorado, Cotter officials were sitting on about 8,700 tons of barium sulfate contaminated with the several tons of uranium that remained.
To offload this slag heap of atomic dross, Cotter mixed it with about 39,000 tons of topsoil — essentially concealing the radioactive material by diluting it with dirt. In 1973, Cotter trucked the toxic residues to the West Lake Landfill in nearby Bridgeton, where various industries had been disposing of municipal solid waste and construction debris since the 1950s. Some of the Cotter waste was used to cover the landfill’s trash.
The AEC knew Cotter’s uranium residue was too radioactive to meet its standards for conventional disposal. The company was clearly in violation of rules prohibiting it from diluting the waste in topsoil to avoid disposing of it safely and legally, according to Nuked: Echoes of the Hiroshima Bomb in St. Louis, by Linda C. Morice. But the AEC was under the false impression that the nuclear waste was buried under 100 feet of municipal waste, and took no action.
In 1974, Congress replaced the AEC with two agencies, one of which — the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — was tasked with overseeing civilian uses of atomic energy. The NRC’s very reason for existence was to make sure companies like Cotter safely handled dangerous radioactive materials. Instead it cut Cotter loose, terminating its license to possess the waste — in all, 47,000 tons of soil laced with radioactive material — and returning the toxic mess to the government’s purview.
In 2011, someone in the group stumbled upon the USACE website for what’s called the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program — a government program with an impenetrable name that was created to deal with atomic-waste nightmares. The group learned that remedial work was being done on radioactive waste in the area. “I knew there was a connection the moment we started reading about the thorium-230, uranium-235, and radium-226,” Wright says. Their paradise had been ruined, and now it was on them to do something about it.
IV. FEATHERS
To understand what happened in North St. Louis County — and what’s still happening when Coldwater Creek floods — imagine shaking out the contents of a feather pillow on a windy day. Those feathers will blow away, then land and pick up again in later gusts. Some will float along currents, settling downstream and spreading via floodwaters into the surrounding landscape.
In March 1962, the Atomic Energy Commission, seeking to rid itself of its radioactive-waste problem, offered for sale the 121,050 tons of “uranium-thorium source materials” stashed next to the airport. In 1965, a task force studying the issue recommended removing the waste and closing the site, but the AEC reached a deal with Contemporary Metals, a firm that planned to extract valuable materials, such as copper and nickel, from the residues. The company paid about $1 a ton.
In 1966, a Contemporary Metals subsidiary, Continental Mining and Milling Co., began moving the waste a half mile away to a building in Hazelwood, spilling material from trucks en route. The company went bankrupt soon after, and its lender tried and failed to auction off the residues. In 1969, the creditor sold it to the Cotter Corporation, which planned to ship the waste by rail to its uranium plant in Cañon City, Colorado. Cotter officials calculated that they could reduce shipping costs by drying the material, so they left it outside, again uncovered and exposed to the elements.
Meanwhile, Cotter used an inorganic compound called barium sulfate to recover leftover uranium from the Mallinckrodt residue. After shipping what they could extract to Colorado, Cotter officials were sitting on about 8,700 tons of barium sulfate contaminated with the several tons of uranium that remained.
To offload this slag heap of atomic dross, Cotter mixed it with about 39,000 tons of topsoil — essentially concealing the radioactive material by diluting it with dirt. In 1973, Cotter trucked the toxic residues to the West Lake Landfill in nearby Bridgeton, where various industries had been disposing of municipal solid waste and construction debris since the 1950s. Some of the Cotter waste was used to cover the landfill’s trash.
The AEC knew Cotter’s uranium residue was too radioactive to meet its standards for conventional disposal. The company was clearly in violation of rules prohibiting it from diluting the waste in topsoil to avoid disposing of it safely and legally, according to Nuked: Echoes of the Hiroshima Bomb in St. Louis, by Linda C. Morice. But the AEC was under the false impression that the nuclear waste was buried under 100 feet of municipal waste, and took no action.
In 1974, Congress replaced the AEC with two agencies, one of which — the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — was tasked with overseeing civilian uses of atomic energy. The NRC’s very reason for existence was to make sure companies like Cotter safely handled dangerous radioactive materials. Instead it cut Cotter loose, terminating its license to possess the waste — in all, 47,000 tons of soil laced with radioactive material — and returning the toxic mess to the government’s purview.
In 2011, someone in the group stumbled upon the USACE website for what’s called the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program — a government program with an impenetrable name that was created to deal with atomic-waste nightmares. The group learned that remedial work was being done on radioactive waste in the area. “I knew there was a connection the moment we started reading about the thorium-230, uranium-235, and radium-226,” Wright says. Their paradise had been ruined, and now it was on them to do something about it.
IV. FEATHERS
To understand what happened in North St. Louis County — and what’s still happening when Coldwater Creek floods — imagine shaking out the contents of a feather pillow on a windy day. Those feathers will blow away, then land and pick up again in later gusts. Some will float along currents, settling downstream and spreading via floodwaters into the surrounding landscape.
In March 1962, the Atomic Energy Commission, seeking to rid itself of its radioactive-waste problem, offered for sale the 121,050 tons of “uranium-thorium source materials” stashed next to the airport. In 1965, a task force studying the issue recommended removing the waste and closing the site, but the AEC reached a deal with Contemporary Metals, a firm that planned to extract valuable materials, such as copper and nickel, from the residues. The company paid about $1 a ton.
In 1966, a Contemporary Metals subsidiary, Continental Mining and Milling Co., began moving the waste a half mile away to a building in Hazelwood, spilling material from trucks en route. The company went bankrupt soon after, and its lender tried and failed to auction off the residues. In 1969, the creditor sold it to the Cotter Corporation, which planned to ship the waste by rail to its uranium plant in Cañon City, Colorado. Cotter officials calculated that they could reduce shipping costs by drying the material, so they left it outside, again uncovered and exposed to the elements.
Meanwhile, Cotter used an inorganic compound called barium sulfate to recover leftover uranium from the Mallinckrodt residue. After shipping what they could extract to Colorado, Cotter officials were sitting on about 8,700 tons of barium sulfate contaminated with the several tons of uranium that remained.
To offload this slag heap of atomic dross, Cotter mixed it with about 39,000 tons of topsoil — essentially concealing the radioactive material by diluting it with dirt. In 1973, Cotter trucked the toxic residues to the West Lake Landfill in nearby Bridgeton, where various industries had been disposing of municipal solid waste and construction debris since the 1950s. Some of the Cotter waste was used to cover the landfill’s trash.
The AEC knew Cotter’s uranium residue was too radioactive to meet its standards for conventional disposal. The company was clearly in violation of rules prohibiting it from diluting the waste in topsoil to avoid disposing of it safely and legally, according to Nuked: Echoes of the Hiroshima Bomb in St. Louis, by Linda C. Morice. But the AEC was under the false impression that the nuclear waste was buried under 100 feet of municipal waste, and took no action.
In 1974, Congress replaced the AEC with two agencies, one of which — the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — was tasked with overseeing civilian uses of atomic energy. The NRC’s very reason for existence was to make sure companies like Cotter safely handled dangerous radioactive materials. Instead it cut Cotter loose, terminating its license to possess the waste — in all, 47,000 tons of soil laced with radioactive material — and returning the toxic mess to the government’s purview.
In 2011, someone in the group stumbled upon the USACE website for what’s called the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program — a government program with an impenetrable name that was created to deal with atomic-waste nightmares. The group learned that remedial work was being done on radioactive waste in the area. “I knew there was a connection the moment we started reading about the thorium-230, uranium-235, and radium-226,” Wright says. Their paradise had been ruined, and now it was on them to do something about it.
IV. FEATHERS
To understand what happened in North St. Louis County — and what’s still happening when Coldwater Creek floods — imagine shaking out the contents of a feather pillow on a windy day. Those feathers will blow away, then land and pick up again in later gusts. Some will float along currents, settling downstream and spreading via floodwaters into the surrounding landscape.
In March 1962, the Atomic Energy Commission, seeking to rid itself of its radioactive-waste problem, offered for sale the 121,050 tons of “uranium-thorium source materials” stashed next to the airport. In 1965, a task force studying the issue recommended removing the waste and closing the site, but the AEC reached a deal with Contemporary Metals, a firm that planned to extract valuable materials, such as copper and nickel, from the residues. The company paid about $1 a ton.
In 1966, a Contemporary Metals subsidiary, Continental Mining and Milling Co., began moving the waste a half mile away to a building in Hazelwood, spilling material from trucks en route. The company went bankrupt soon after, and its lender tried and failed to auction off the residues. In 1969, the creditor sold it to the Cotter Corporation, which planned to ship the waste by rail to its uranium plant in Cañon City, Colorado. Cotter officials calculated that they could reduce shipping costs by drying the material, so they left it outside, again uncovered and exposed to the elements.
Meanwhile, Cotter used an inorganic compound called barium sulfate to recover leftover uranium from the Mallinckrodt residue. After shipping what they could extract to Colorado, Cotter officials were sitting on about 8,700 tons of barium sulfate contaminated with the several tons of uranium that remained.
To offload this slag heap of atomic dross, Cotter mixed it with about 39,000 tons of topsoil — essentially concealing the radioactive material by diluting it with dirt. In 1973, Cotter trucked the toxic residues to the West Lake Landfill in nearby Bridgeton, where various industries had been disposing of municipal solid waste and construction debris since the 1950s. Some of the Cotter waste was used to cover the landfill’s trash.
The AEC knew Cotter’s uranium residue was too radioactive to meet its standards for conventional disposal. The company was clearly in violation of rules prohibiting it from diluting the waste in topsoil to avoid disposing of it safely and legally, according to Nuked: Echoes of the Hiroshima Bomb in St. Louis, by Linda C. Morice. But the AEC was under the false impression that the nuclear waste was buried under 100 feet of municipal waste, and took no action.
In 1974, Congress replaced the AEC with two agencies, one of which — the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — was tasked with overseeing civilian uses of atomic energy. The NRC’s very reason for existence was to make sure companies like Cotter safely handled dangerous radioactive materials. Instead it cut Cotter loose, terminating its license to possess the waste — in all, 47,000 tons of soil laced with radioactive material — and returning the toxic mess to the government’s purview.
