A Radioactive Fire in St. Louis

Bridgeton, Missouri is a small, blue-collar community in suburban St. Louis.  The people who live there are subjects of an evacuation order developed in secret a year ago by the St. Louis County emergency management.  The reason is deadly.  For five years an underground fire has been burning in the Bridgeton Landfill.  It is now burning less than 1,000 feet from a nuclear waste dump that contains the largest amount of thorium-230 and radium-226 in the United States.  This dump is also soaked in water and when the fire and nuclear waste combine the superheated steam could jet into the heavy St. Louis air creating what the government calls a catastrophic event.

All of the usual suspects downplay the danger.  According to County Executive Steve Stenger the plan "is not an indication of any imminent danger."  Russ Knocke, spokesperson for Republic Services which owns both the Bridgeton Landfill and the West Lake Landfill (where the nuclear waste is located) said in a statement that the landfill "is safe and intensively monitored."  If you believe them, you may stop reading here.

Thorium and radium are bad actors.  They produce nuclear radiation which, unlike the energy radiated from light bulbs or microwaves, is active enough to ionize atoms.  You ionize an atom by changing the number of electrons circling the nucleus.  An ionized atom is unbalanced, unstable and roams around looking for trouble—it wants its electrons back and will steal them if necessary.  When this radiation penetrates our cells they ionized the atoms that make up our DNA.  The radiation breaks the bonds of DNA, confusing our cells and creating free radicals which kill some cells and makes others cancerous.  

How did something so dangerous come to be concentrated in an unlined landfill in the middle of a bedroom community in North St. Louis County?

The answer to that goes all the way back to the Manhattan Project.  In 1939, with the world at war, the allies discovered that Nazi Germany had learned how to split the atom.  Our best scientists, including Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, urged President Roosevelt to beat Hitler to the A-bomb.  By 1941 such a plan, code named Manhattan Project, was in the works.   Across the country businesses were put to work building separate pieces of a nuclear bomb.  In St. Louis, Mallinckrodt Chemical started refining the raw materials of fission. 

The rest is a history you know, but what do you do to clean up the mess from all of that necessary research?  To try to follow this convoluted line sounds like a macabre version of the House That Jack Built.  Mallinckrodt contracted with a licensed disposal company; the company subcontracted the disposal to someone else; the subcontractor admits illegally dumping the radioactive garbage, but only at the behest of the company that now owns both landfills.  That company blames the EPA which has had custody of the landfill since 1990, has named it a superfund site, but has done absolutely nothing (!!!) to clean it up. 

This is the same EPA that spends $75 million a year for 200 special agents and their militaristic equipment (guns, body armor, camouflage equipment, unmanned aircraft, amphibious assault ships, radar and surveillance gear) to make sure businesses are not violating any mandates.  How about EPA’s mandate to clean up Bridgeton?  This government agency, whether under a Republican or Democratic administration, has taken on a life of its own which does not include doing its job.

A St. Louis community is in imminent danger and our EPA is not keeping the faith.