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The question is how many of these secret radioactive waste dumps are there in or around our cities?
A government contractor buried tens of thousands of barrels of nuclear waste in two sites around St. Louis that may have caused more than 2,700 cases of cancer, a lawsuit and CBS News are alleging.
In 1947, the Manhattan Project, which created the first atom bomb, chose about 22 acres of land north of Lambert Airport in St. Louis as its dumping grounds for radioactive waste.
Hundreds of thousands of tons of it, all owned by the government, were carelessly stored outside, allowing the holding containers to rust and spill uranium and other contaminants out onto the ground.
By the time contamination became a concern in 1962, the now-defunct Atomic Energy Commission began shopping for potential buyers for the waste.
In the following years, waste spilled out and polluted neighboring property while in transit, before even more waste was illegally dumped in the West Lake Landfill.
The dump was ruled to have been contaminated with 150,000 tons of radioactive waste by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1988, but the cleanup effort was never completed.
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“Within a six-house radius, I knew four people with brain cancer, one a child, one a young professor,” resident Jenelle Wright told CBS. “And I just thought, ‘This is really odd.'”
What is truly disturbing is that Wright and others only figured out that something was wrong when they got together on Facebook to plan a school reunion. When they started reconnecting, they noticed that a lot of people they knew had developed cancer.
“If we did not have social media, if Facebook did not exist, we would never have put these pieces together,” Wright said.
Continue reading, including recent news report of a fire approaching a radioactive landfill outside St. Louis.
