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The radioactive wastes at West Lake Landfill, in the Missouri River floodplain, should be cleaned up, not covered up. The landfill is upstream from drinking water intakes for North St. Louis County and the City of St. Louis. The wastes can and should be safely excavated under a temporary structure (a negative pressure building that filters the air) and moved to a licensed radioactive waste disposal facility, away from water and away from people.
The uranium wastes were generated in the 1940s and 50s for the production of nuclear weapons by the Mallinckrodt Chemical Works (MCW). All the other St. Louis sites with MCW radioactive wastes have been cleaned up or are currently being cleaned up by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. All are being cleaned up except West Lake’s twelve radioactive acres.
Decisions about West Lake are currently being made by the US Environmental Protection Agency because the landfill is a Superfund Site, and because the radioactive wastes were illegally dumped there. The EPA, Region 7, issued a Record of Decision in May 2008, dictating that the wastes are to be left at West Lake, with only a cap of rocks, clay and construction rubble on top.
Your help is needed now to ask Congress to transfer control of the West Lake radioactive waste piles from the EPA to the Corps.
Please urge at least one of your elected officials—your mayor, Congress members, St. Louis County Council member—and/or the media, to seek the transfer of the cleanup from the EPA to the Corps.
1. These are hot wastes. Much of the ore that was processed at the Mallinckrodt Chemical Works came from the Belgian Congo. This ore contains an extremely high percentage of pure uranium and is therefore extremely radioactively hot.
2. And the wastes are long-lasting. Some of the West Lake uranium residues will continue giving off dangerous radioactive particles and rays virtually forever. Uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.5 billion years; uranium-235 = 704 million years; protactinium-231 = 32,760 years; actinium-227 = 21,772 years; thorium-230 = 75,380 years.
3. Floodplains are not for radioactive wastes. To quote from Dr. Robert Criss, a professor in the Washington University Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences: “The West Lake Landfill is located in a geomorphic floodplain. A floodplain is a place where a river floods commonly. Levees fail. Several levees in St. Louis County have failed in the last fifteen years. It’s preposterous to claim that levees don’t fail.”
Who is to pay to inspect and repair the cap for 1,000 years and beyond—throughout the hazardous life of these materials? Who is to oversee the migration of the wastes as they erode from the bottom of the radioactive piles into the groundwater, and on into the river? Who is to provide alternative drinking water if the cap fails? Or if the levee fails?
4. Major St. Louis drinking water intakes are downstream from West Lake. Some of the radioactive wastes are at least 20 feet below the surface, and are already in contact with the fluctuating water table. Water from the West Lake site flows into the Missouri River only eight miles upstream from the North County drinking water plant in Florissant and also upstream from the City of St. Louis’s Chain of Rocks water intake.
Even a cap “to minimize biointrusion and erosion potential” would not isolate the wastes from the fluctuating water table below, particularly river water that flows under or penetrates the levee.
5. The St. Louis public and elected officials have little time to protest the EPA’s decision. The public’s response to this decision must be made now before the trucks start traveling on top of the MCW wastes—quite probably accelerating the vertical and horizontal dispersal of the radioactive materials. Also, once the rocks and rubble are dumped on top, they too will become contaminated and—along with the radioactive wastes—may someday have to be removed from the floodplain. That is what happened with the rock and wire gabion wall that had been installed at the radioactive St. Louis Airport Storage Site along Coldwater Creek, and then had to be dismantled and shipped away because it had become contaminated.
You can still try to help stop this truly absurd, unsafe non-solution. The mistakes of the past should not be allowed to contaminate the future.
For information: Kat Logan Smith, Executive Director, Missouri Coalition for the Environment, 314-727-0600
Kay Drey – 515 West Point Ave., St. Louis 63130, 314-725-7676
PLEASE WRITE TO ONE OR MORE OF THE FOLLOWING MEMBERS OF CONGRESS, and/or the media, and others. Thank you.
1. US Senator Christopher “Kit” Bond
2. US Senator Claire McCaskill
3. US Representative Wm. Lacy Clay
4. US Representative Russ Carnahan
5. US Representative Todd Akin
We and the Missouri River thank you.
West Lake Landfill Information and Resources
Previous info on West Lake Landfill
1982 West Lake Landfill NRC Radiological Survey (3.03 MB PDF)
1988 West Lake Landfill NRC Study (1.17 MB PDF)
Site Map from 2006 EPA Proposed Plan (1.21 MB PDF)
West Lake Comment Letter 12/19/2006 (159 KB PDF)
West Lake Landfill EPA Proposed Plan (1.33 MB PDF)
West Lake Landfill Feasability Study (25.53 MB PDF)
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