U.S. Senator Josh Hawley speaks to reporters after joining challenger Lucas Kunce in the middle of the floor of the governor's ham breakfast at the Missouri State Fair in Sedalia on Aug. 15 (Annelise Hanshaw/Missouri Independent).

U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley’s failure as a legislator is most glaringly obvious in the demise of a bill providing coverage to Missourians exposed to radiation from nuclear weapons development, former U.S Sen. Jack Danforth said Thursday.

Danforth gave his grade on Hawley’s legislative career during a Thursday tour of the state with Joplin businessman Jared Young, who created a new political party for his bid for the seat Danforth held from 1977 to 1994. Young is trying to draw disaffected Republicans, independents and moderate Democrats to his banner of the Better Party.

Danforth is a Republican who was once considered Hawley’s political mentor, having encouraged him to run for the Senate after less than a year as Missouri’s attorney general.

He later denounced Hawley for his role in objecting to the certification of President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, saying he regretted his support of Hawley and that he understands “what Dr. Frankenstein must have felt.” 

On Thursday, Danforth said Hawley’s political style as an antagonistic, camera-seeking populist is the reason the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act renewal bill failed to get to a vote before Congress recessed for the election.

That cost not only Missourians but residents of New Mexico and every other state already covered by the law, Danforth said. Advocates from Missouri and New Mexico, along with other areas where federal weapons work contaminated the land, worked for more than a year to expand the program as it neared a renewal vote.

“He became so obnoxious in his public attacks of the Republican Speaker of the House, the Republican Leader of the Senate, the Republican congressperson from that district, he came away with nothing and ended up killing the whole bill for the rest of the country,” Danforth said.

The law expired Sept. 30. Originally passed in 1990, while Danforth was in office, it provided one-time cash payments to uranium miners who worked in 11 states between 1947 and 1971 and people in parts of Nevada, Arizona and Utah exposed to fallout from nuclear bomb tests.

To obtain compensation, claimants must prove a diagnosis of particular cancers or other illnesses.

The exposure of Missourians to radioactive waste came from uranium processing in St. Louis for the World War II Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb. 

While the presence of radioactive contamination in suburban St. Louis was known for years, an investigation by The Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press revealed in 2023 that the federal government and companies handling the waste were aware of the threat to the public long before informing residents.

Two weeks after The Independent published its findings, the U.S. Senate approved an amendment from Hawley renewing the law and adding Missouri and New Mexico to the list of states where residents are eligible for compensation due to bomb waste and exposure.

The Missouri House established a new committee Thursday that will study the impact of nuclear weapons programs in the state. Its job is to hold hearings and report on any state legislation needed to assist victims.

Dawn Chapman, co-founder of Just Moms STL, which has advocated for expanding the law known as RECA, defended Hawley’s work and called Danforth’s comments “petty.”

“What I’d like is for people like Jack Danforth to shut up so that they don’t create another barrier that I have to jump over,” Chapman said.

Chapman said Hawley brought the coalition trying to expand RECA closer than it has gotten before and comments like Danforth’s undermine advocates pushing for the program’s expansion.

As the Congressional session closed in late September, Chapman was in Washington lobbying for the bill and appeared at a news conference with Hawley. At that time, she blamed House Speaker Mike Johnson for refusing to allow a vote on the bill.

She said Johnson was the “only reason these people are suffering right now in this room.”  

Chapman also questioned why Danforth didn’t expand the program to Missouri while in office or lend a hand to advocates since then.

“You’re making poisoned people work twice as hard, Mr. Danforth,” Chapman said, “because you want to take a cheap swing at somebody and play Monday morning quarterback without lifting a finger in the decade-plus I’ve been doing this.”

The Hawley campaign blamed Danforth for not obtaining relief for Missourians when he was a senator.

“Jack Danforth betrayed hardworking Missourians who were poisoned by nuclear radiation when he left them out of the original RECA law,” said Abigail Jackson, spokesperson for Hawley’s campaign. “Josh worked across the aisle to pass his RECA expansion twice in the Senate with huge bipartisan support. Josh’s proposal is currently being negotiated with House leaders. And Missouri hasn’t forgotten how Danforth failed.” 

Danforth said Hawley’s political persona isn’t likely to help get any legislation passed.

“Politics now in the U.S. Senate is largely performative,” Danforth said. “It’s not serious. Hawley is not a serious legislator. He goes to committee hearings and belittles and badgers witnesses. That gets him on the air, and then he gets on Fox News, but he does not legislate.”

People may disagree with Hawley on other matters, Chapman said, but “he’s right” on the RECA bill.

“We have a right to be emotional that our kids are sick,” she said. “And I expect my Senator and electeds to echo that emotion and passion.”

This article has been updated to clarify comments from Dawn Chapman.

A photo taken in 1960 of deteriorating steel drums containing radioactive residues near Coldwater Creek, by the Mallinckrodt-St. Louis Sites Task Force Working Group (State Historical Society of Missouri, Kay Drey Mallinckrodt Collection, 1943-2006).

Missouri lawmakers will convene a special committee to study the consequences of nuclear weapons production in the St. Louis area and recommend legislation for next year, House Speaker Dean Plocher announced Thursday. 

In a press release, Plocher said the Special Interim Committee on the Impact of U.S. Nuclear Weapon Programs on Missouri will allow “policymakers, health professionals, environmental experts and affected community members to document their concerns and develop legislative solutions.”

“Missouri has long felt the effects of nuclear weapons production, and it’s our responsibility to address the consequences head-on,” said Plocher, who represents part of St. Louis County.

The St. Louis area has struggled with the ramifications of nuclear weapons production since the development of the first atomic bomb. Workers refined uranium in downtown St. Louis as part of the Manhattan Project, which was used in the first successful nuclear chain reaction, which took place in Chicago.

But after the end of World War II, the waste from the bomb development was allowed to spread and pollute sites in St. Louis and St. Charles counties. 

Immediately after the war, the waste was transported haphazardly — with waste falling off trucks — to St. Louis County and dumped at the airport. Deteriorating barrels of radioactive waste polluted the site and leaked into Coldwater Creek. 

Heaps of radioactive material and debris were also dumped in a quarry in Weldon Spring, adjacent to the Missouri River. 

The waste was then taken to a nearby site — also along Coldwater Creek — where it remained exposed to the elements and continued to pollute the creek. It was sold so another company could extract precious metals from the waste, and the remaining radioactive material was dumped in the West Lake Landfill where it remains today.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is overseeing the cleanup of Coldwater Creek, which is expected to last until 2038. The Environmental Protection Agency is overseeing the development of a plan to remediate the West Lake Landfill.

In the meantime, generations of St. Louis-area residents have been exposed to radioactivity from Coldwater Creek and the quarry where state Rep. Tricia Byrnes has said she would sneak in and swim as a teen. 

Byrnes will chair the interim committee. In the release, she said the committee will listen to “survivors, production workers and remediation workers to understand the real-world impact on their health and financial stability.” 

“We must take a comprehensive approach to address the lasting impact of nuclear weapons production in Missouri,” Byrnes said. “The health and well-being of our residents and the environment are at stake.”

The first meeting of the committee will take place Oct. 15 at from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Spencer Creek Library in St. Peters. 

Rep. Mark Matthiesen, a Republican from O’Fallon, will serve as vice chair of the committee, and Rep. Raychel Proudie, a Ferguson Democrat, will be ranking member.

The remaining members are Republican Reps. Don Mayhew, Renee Reuter and Richard West and Democratic Reps. Aaron Crossley and Ian Mackey.

The Trinity explosion, 16 milliseconds after the atomic bomb test detonation on July 16, 1945. The viewed hemisphere’s highest point in this image is about 660 ft. (Berlyn Brixner / Los Alamos National Laboratory / Public Domain)

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson is holding up compensation for generations of Americans who developed cancer after exposure to the nation’s nuclear weapons program, several members of Congress said Tuesday. 

At a news conference in Washington, D.C, U.S. House members and Senators stood beside advocates from Missouri and tribal nations in the southwest who have — for months, or even years — cried out for help from the government as they and their loved ones suffered from cancer because of exposure to radiation.

Dawn Chapman, who lives near the contaminated West Lake Landfill in suburban St. Louis, said Johnson was the “only reason these people are suffering right now in this room.” 

“He can fix it,” Chapman said. “There are a lot of things in this world that you cannot fix. This one can be fixed. This one can pass.”

Fred Vallo, who endured a 37-hour bus ride from New Mexico., said his community can’t keep coming to the nation’s capital “begging” for help. He urged Johnson to visit New Mexico and see where the contamination originated for himself. 

“I’ll even take you with my own truck if you don’t believe us,” Vallo said.

Vallo and fellow advocates called on Johnson to bring the stalled Radiation Exposure Compensation Act up for a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives. The legislation has twice passed the U.S. Senate and would offer compensation to individuals suffering from certain cancers after exposure to improperly stored radioactive waste, uranium ore or bomb tests.

U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, who — along with New Mexico Democratic Sen. Ben Ray Luján — championed the legislation in the Senate, said he’d spoken with Johnson. But the House leader hadn’t committed to taking action on RECA. 

Luján encouraged advocates to pray for Johnson “to give him the strength and the wisdom to allow this legislation to the House floor, to be voted on, and to work to earn Republican and Democratic votes to get this to the President of the United States.”

Johnson’s office declined to comment.

Congress first passed RECA in the 1990s to compensate uranium miners and individuals exposed to bomb testing, known as “downwinders,” but the program only covered bomb testing victims in parts of Nevada, Arizona and Utah. 

Since the original RECA legislation passed, Hawley said, the radiation was found to have traveled further than the government originally thought. And communities that were known to be affected at the time were left out.

The expansion would offer coverage to downwinders in the remaining parts of Nevada, Arizona and Utah and expand coverage to Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico and Guam. It would also offer new coverage for residents exposed to radioactive waste in Missouri, Tennessee, Alaska and Kentucky. 

In Missouri, uranium refining and improper storage of radioactive waste has affected residents for decades. Coldwater Creek, which runs for miles through busy St. Louis suburbs, is contaminated with radioactive material, and exposure to its waters increased the risk of cancer for generations of residents — primarily children. 

Waste was haphazardly trucked from site to site in St. Louis county before being dumped at the West Lake Landfill where it remains today. 

Hawley said he was confident there was enough support in the House of Representatives to pass RECA. 

“The wait has been too long,” Hawley said, “and it has been too cruel. And there is no need to wait any longer.” 

One family still suffering the effects of the bomb is Carol Rogers’. 

Rogers, of Shiprock, New Mexico, said her father was a miner. She and her mother could see the gold-hued uranium ore falling from his clothes as they scrubbed them and wrung them out. At the time, she didn’t know helping wash her father’s clothes would cause her to develop cancer decades later. 

When she was diagnosed, Rogers said, her doctor asked if she had worked with uranium. She said she hadn’t.

“Who did?” she said he asked. 

“He said, ‘Yes, it’s uranium,’” Rogers said.

After treatment, she said, she was in remission from cancer for three or four years. It came back, affecting her eye. She’s currently undergoing radiation treatment.

“It’s painful,” Rogers said. “I have to take pain medicine almost every day, sometimes twice a day.”

Rogers said her father died of lung cancer. Her grandson was diagnosed with cancer at 19. Now 20, he’s going through testing again along with his one-year-old baby. Doctors have recommended, she said, everyone in her family get tested, even infants. 

U.S. Rep. Gabe Vasquez, a Democrat from New Mexico, said the detonation of the world’s first atomic bomb at the Trinity Test site made it look like the sun rose over New Mexico at 3 a.m. one day in July 1945. And almost 80 years later, it’s still affecting New Mexican families. 

“For too many decades, New Mexicans have suffered generational impacts,” Vasquez said, “while being gaslighted…for having intergenerational disease, cancer, gastrointestinal issues, tumors, so much more.”

An undated photo from the 1980s, of two teenagers stepping on rocks and wooden planks on Coldwater Creek. The photo is from a scrapbook kept by Sandy Delcoure, who lived on Willow Creek in Florissant and donated the scrapbook to the Kay Drey Mallinckrodt Collection (State Historical Society of Missouri, Kay Drey Mallinckrodt Collection, 1943-2006).

Federal officials plan to post warning signs along a contaminated suburban St. Louis creek where generations of children were exposed to radioactive material.

Coldwater Creek, which winds between homes and parks in St. Louis County for 14 miles before meeting the Missouri River, is plagued with nuclear waste left over from World War II. For decades, families had no idea the danger it posed to the children who played along its banks and swam in its waters. 

More than six years ago, a federal study found residents who live near the creek or regularly came in contact with its waters faced a higher risk of certain cancers. 

Still, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is cleaning up the creek, did not post signs warning visitors of its danger. 

But this fall, the Corps plans to post signs along Coldwater Creek, warning of the “low-level radioactive materials present.” In a Facebook post, the Corps’ St. Louis branch said the first of the signs will be placed in mid or late November. 

The signs, marked with an eye-catching cautionary yellow border, instruct readers not to dig near the creek but say the waste doesn’t pose a health threat as long as the ground is left undisturbed. Corps officials had previously released a draft of a warning sign with a blue banner that said there “may” be radioactive materials near. 

Dawn Chapman, who co-founded Just Moms STL to advocate for St. Louis-area families harmed by radioactive waste, said the group was happy with the new signs and thinks they’ll save lives. 

“But also, we’re so sad because we know people that are hurt that probably wouldn’t have been if they were up a long time ago,” Chapman said. 

The Missouri Coalition for the Environment, which has advocated for signs along Coldwater Creek for more than 25 years, said in a press release that the signs mark a “step in the right direction,” but don’t fully acknowledge the danger present along the creek.

The sign doesn’t acknowledge areas where contamination may be at the surface, doesn’t use the universal symbol for radioactive material and may confuse visitors by referring to the material as “low-level,” the Missouri Coalition for the Environment said. 

St. Louis has struggled with radioactive contamination since World War II. Uranium used in the development of the atomic bomb was refined in downtown St. Louis. After the war, the waste was dumped at the airport and, later, a nearby property — both along Coldwater Creek. The waste was further refined to extract valuable metals and the remaining material illegally dumped in the West Lake Landfill, where it remains today. 

The Corps is leading the cleanup of Coldwater Creek and the Environmental Protection Agency is overseeing work at the West Lake Landfill.

Last summer, The Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press found that, for decades, federal officials and companies handling the waste downplayed or failed to investigate the true danger of the material. Since the revelation, U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley and members of Congress from Missouri — along with southwestern states affected by nuclear weapons testing — have been fighting for compensation for victims of radioactive waste exposure.

To do so, Hawley and U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Luján, a Democrat from New Mexico, proposed expanding the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, originally passed in 1990 to compensate uranium miners and those who were exposed to atomic bomb testing in parts of Nevada, Utah and Arizona. 

Hawley and Luján’s bill would expand the program to remaining parts of Arizona, Nevada and Utah and provide coverage for the first time in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico and Guam, where residents were exposed to radiation from weapons tests. It would also expand coverage to those exposed in Missouri, Tennessee, Alaska and Kentucky. 

The legislation twice passed the Senate, but was never heard on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. When the House failed to pass a RECA expansion or extension in June, the legislation expired. 

Hawley said on the U.S. Senate floor last week that the legislation is being “attacked” and exposure victims labeled as “greedy and unthankful and ungrateful and undeserving of any help or recognition or thanks from this country.” 

Hawley called on members of Congress to “stand up and be counted” and support the legislation.

“We will not stop fighting,” he said. “We will not stop working until every nuclear radiation victim who has given their life and health for the support of this nation is thanked and compensated.”

Chapman said RECA advocates are returning to Washington, D.C., next week to advocate for the expansion. She said she believes Congress will act on RECA sometime in the coming months. 

“I feel very close,” Chapman said. “We feel like this could be it for us next week.”

The three major-party candidates for Missouri attorney general, from left, Will Scharf, Andrew Bailey and Elad Gross (campaign photos).

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey insists his office is working to hold the federal government accountable for the decades-old radioactive waste contamination that plagues the St. Louis area.

“We are fighting to ensure that the federal government protects Missourians from the poison that the federal government injected into the streams and creeks there in eastern Missouri,” he told The Independent. 

But the two candidates vying to oust him from the office say Bailey is just the latest in a long line of Missouri officials who have failed the victims who have suffered from the effects of radioactive contamination left in the area since World War II.

Activists tried for months last summer to get Bailey’s help, and “they were met with a closed door,” Will Scharf, who is challenging Bailey in the Aug. 6 GOP primary, told The Independent. 

Both Scharf and Elad Gross, the Democrat running for attorney general, say Bailey could be doing much more.

The St. Louis region was pivotal to the development of the world’s first atomic bomb in the 1940s. Uranium refined downtown was used in experiments in Chicago as part of the Manhattan Project.

After the war, dangerous radioactive waste was dumped at the St. Louis airport right next to Coldwater Creek and contaminated the creek water and banks for miles. Generations of families moved into new suburban homes springing up along the creek without knowing the dangers it posed. A federal study shows children who played in its waters face a higher risk of cancer.

The waste sat at the airport for years before it was sold and moved to a property in Hazelwood also adjacent to the creek. A company bought it to extract valuable metals and trucked the remaining waste to the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton and dumped it illegally. It remains there today.

Officials with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are working to clean up the creek, and the Environment Protection Agency is overseeing the cleanup of the landfill. 

But after an investigation by The Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press revealed last summer that the federal government knew the waste posed a threat to St. Louis residents years before revealing that to the public, Missouri officials and activists have said the federal government should be held accountable for the damage.

Gross argued Bailey, as the state’s chief attorney, wasn’t doing enough to ensure that happens. 

“Our attorney general can sue Joe Biden for everything under the sun,” Gross said during a candidate forum last month, “but he can’t figure out how to sue him to protect Missouri families when we need him the most.”

Gross, who previously worked in the attorney general’s office, said the state should reinstate the environmental division, which was dissolved when Josh Hawley was attorney general in 2017. Bailey should have more attorneys dedicated to investigating nuclear waste and pushing the federal government for better management of the cleanup, Gross said.

If that’s not enough, Gross said, the state should sue the federal government. He pointed to Washington, where the attorney general’s office sued over the slow cleanup at the Hanford nuclear production facility and inadequate protections for workers.

The state previously sued Republic Services, which owns the West Lake Landfill, under former Attorney General Chris Koster over a subsurface smolder in the adjacent Bridgeton Landfill that emitted a foul odor and risked coming into contact with the radioactive waste. It was settled under Hawley. 

Bailey said his office has reviewed documents the news organizations used in the investigation last summer and found that they “paint a picture of the federal government poisoning Missourians.” But he thinks there are documents missing. 

His office filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the U.S. Department of Energy in March seeking further information. Madeline Sieren, a spokeswoman for Bailey, said the attorney general’s office hasn’t received a response from the Department of Energy.

Those documents, Bailey said, will help determine whether the state should sue the federal government.

Bailey said he’s also supporting Hawley, who now serves in the U.S. Senate, as he seeks compensation for St. Louis residents who have developed cancer following exposure to the radioactive contamination. Hawley sought to add Missouri — along with southwestern states exposed to bomb testing — to the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. The 35-year-old federal program, however, expired before the U.S. House of Representatives took a vote on extending and expanding it. 

Last month, Bailey wrote to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, demanding that the agency put up signs along Coldwater Creek, where there is currently no warning that radioactive contamination may be present. 

Gross’ criticism, Bailey said, was “an oversimplification and a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the attorney general’s office.” 

“I’m not withholding any tool at our disposal to ensure transparency, accountability and justice for the victims,” Bailey said. 

Gross said “writing letters is one thing.“Getting results is something entirely different.” 

Scharf called Bailey’s Freedom of Information Act request “a good start” but said he’d like to see if the state could sue the federal government or the private company that dumped waste in the West Lake Landfill.

“My strong suspicion,” Scharf said, “is that there is much more that can be done, from a legal perspective, to vindicate the rights of Missourians…who have been grievously injured by the federal action, federal inaction and the federal cover up here.”

The Independent’s Jason Hancock and Anna Spoerre contributed to this story.

A sign warns of radioactive material at the West Lake Landfill. Thousands of tons of nuclear waste from the Manhattan Project were dumped there in the 1970s (Theo Welling/Riverfront Times).

Crews working to clean up the West Lake Landfill in St. Louis County detected contamination in nearby groundwater, forcing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to investigate whether radium might have left the site.

In a periodic update to nearby communities last month, the EPA said it would add groundwater monitoring wells around the site, which sits in Bridgeton, about a mile from the banks of the Missouri River. 

The expansion, which came after contamination was detected at the edge of the landfill, will help determine whether contamination may be migrating from the site and whether it could reach the river. Radium has been detected near the site at slightly above drinking water limits, the EPA said in a statement, but the radioactive element also occurs naturally in rock formations and aquifers.

Initially, the EPA had anticipated all necessary groundwater wells would be installed by August 2022, the project manager for the groundwater remediation at West Lake, Snehal Bhagat, said in a briefing in December.

“But the detections in offsite locations required a significant expansion of the network in order to delineate exactly where the impacts are found,” Bhagat said, “so a lot more wells were put in. We’re still putting them in as we chase the edges of the impacts.”

EPA: Radioactive contamination at West Lake landfill is more widespread

The West Lake Landfill, formerly a municipal landfill, is one of several sites in the St. Louis area contaminated by decades-old nuclear waste. 

St. Louis was pivotal to the development of the world’s first atomic bomb in the 1940s. Uranium refined in downtown was used in experiments in Chicago as part of the Manhattan Project, the name given to the World War II-era nuclear weapons program. 

After the war, radioactive waste from the downtown uranium plants was trucked to the St. Louis airport, often spilling off of trucks along the way, and dumped, unprotected on the ground next to Coldwater Creek. The creek, which runs through what are now bustling suburbs, was contaminated for miles, increasing the risk of cancer for generations of children who played on its banks and in its waters.

The waste sat at the airport for years before being sold and relocated to a property in nearby Hazlewood, also adjacent to the creek. In the early 1970s, after valuable metals were extracted from the waste, it was trucked to the West Lake Landfill and dumped illegally. It remains there today.

Now, the landfill is a Superfund site subject to EPA cleanup, and in recent years, the agency has discovered the contamination is more widespread than it thought. Despite outcry from the community, the EPA, for years, relied on a decades-old radiation reading taken from a helicopter to determine where the waste was.

Now, it’s working to determine the “size and mobility of the plume.”

“To date, no conclusions have been made about the source(s) of the radium in off site groundwater because data collection is ongoing,” Kellen Ashford, a spokesman for the EPA’s regional office said in an email.

Dawn Chapman, a co-founder of Just Moms STL, a nonprofit that formed to advocate for communities near contaminated sites around St. Louis, said she was concerned that the EPA hadn’t yet identified the edges of the contamination. 

Given both the radioactive waste and the other chemical contaminants that are in the landfill, she feared it could be “one hell of a nasty plume.”

Chapman noted the parties responsible for the site — the landfill’s owner, the company that dumped the waste and the U.S. Department of Energy — are nearing the end of the process to plan the cleanup at West Lake. 

“I really would have hoped,” Chapman said, “that by now they would have found the edge.”

A sign warns of radioactive material at the West Lake Landfill. Thousands of tons of nuclear waste from the Manhattan Project were dumped there in the 1970s (Theo Welling/Riverfront Times).

A federal program to apologize and acknowledge the harms of radiation exposure is out of time, and for those looking for justice from the federal government, the window for inclusion is getting smaller.

The Radiation Exposure and Compensation Act begins to expire Friday, with the U.S. Department of Justice accepting applications postmarked June 10.

The fund was created in 1990 in response to growing lawsuits from communities around nuclear test sites, as well as from uranium miners and their families about the cancers, diseases, and other harms.

RECA pays lump sum compensations for people who lived and worked in the nuclear program and  developed cancers or diseases linked to radiation exposure. It is only limited to civilians living in specific counties in Arizona, Utah and Nevada, uranium miners, millers and transporters before 1971 and federal workers on above ground nuclear test sites.

The Senate passed a bill 69-30 in March, which would broaden the program for downwinders across states and territories, increase protection for uranium workers through 1990 and increase the amount of money paid to families. That proposal would keep the program alive for another six years.

For the people and families left out of RECA, they say Congressional inaction on RECA is further injustice.

“It’s been a lot of stress, and just such an enormous disappointment,” said Tina Cordova, a founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium.

The group has long fought for inclusion of people and families who lived around the Trinity Test Site in the Jornada Del Muerto, who have never been compensated.

U.S. House speaker reverses on radiation compensation bill that excluded Missouri

Last week, Republican House leadership had a reversal on their recent RECA position, first saying they would only bring a vote to extend the current program, and then  walking the vote back later in the day.

Objections from GOP leadership start and end with concerns about the costs of expanding the program.

Since the move last week, there has been no support for RECA mentioned by House leaders, despite calls from their Missouri Republican colleagues asking for a standalone vote to keep the program.

U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, decried House Speaker Mike Johnson’s decision not to extend RECA before the deadline.

“RECA expires today because the House has done nothing,” Hawley posted on social media. “I hope when Speaker Johnson gets back from Europe he will get focused on America — and make time to meet with radiation survivors, like he promised.”

Parts of the St. Louis area have been contaminated for 75 years with radioactive waste left over from the effort to build the world’s first atomic bomb during World War II. Uranium refined in downtown St. Louis was used in the first sustained nuclear chain reaction in Chicago, a breakthrough in the Manhattan Project, the name given to the effort to develop the bomb.

After the war, waste from uranium refining efforts was trucked from St. Louis to surrounding counties and dumped near Coldwater Creek and in a quarry in Weldon Spring, polluting surface and groundwater. Remaining waste was dumped at the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton, where it remains today.

Generations of St. Louis-area families lived in homes near contaminated sites without warning from the federal government. A study by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry found exposure to the creek elevated residents’ risk of cancer. Residents of nearby communities suffer higher-than-normal rates of breast, colon, prostate, kidney and bladder cancers and leukemia. Childhood brain and nervous system cancers are also higher.

This story was originally published by Source New Mexico, a States Newsroom affiliate. 

The Independent’s Jason Hancock contributed to this story. 

A photo taken in 1960 of deteriorating steel drums containing radioactive residues near Coldwater Creek, by the Mallinckrodt-St. Louis Sites Task Force Working Group (State Historical Society of Missouri, Kay Drey Mallinckrodt Collection, 1943-2006).

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson’s office on Wednesday scrapped a proposal to extend a compensation program for victims of radiation exposure without expanding it to thousands of Americans across nine states.

In a statement that came less than four hours after Johnson’s office said a proposal to expand the program was too expensive, a spokesperson said Republican leadership had decided not to bring the bill up for a vote next week. The statement said the decision came after discussions with U.S. Rep. Ann Wagner, a Republican from the St. Louis suburbs.

Wagner said in a statement she was glad Republican leaders “listened to my concerns and those of my constituents and pulled the floor vote on this misguided proposal.” 

“We’re going to keep fighting for expansion…so Missourians impacted by radiation get the support and compensation they deserve,” Wagner said.

The existing Radiation Exposure Compensation Act expires in less than two weeks, and as the deadline nears, federal lawmakers have been caught between the need to extend the program to keep it available for people who already qualify and pressure to expand it to cancer patients from St. Louis to the Navajo Nation.

Members of Missouri’s Congressional delegation decried Johnson’s plan to extend the program without expanding it. Early Wednesday afternoon, Johnson’s spokesperson said Republican leaders were “committed to ensuring the federal government fulfills its existing obligations to Americans exposed to nuclear radiation.” 

“Unfortunately, the current Senate bill is estimated to cost $50-60 billion in new mandatory spending with no offsets and was supported by only 20 of 49 Republicans in the Senate,” the spokesperson said.

It’s unclear after leadership’s reversal whether a vote on an expanded program will be held before the law expires. 

The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, or RECA, originally passed by Congress in 1990, offers compensation to uranium miners and civilians who were downwind of nuclear bomb testing in Arizona, Utah and Nevada. It expires June 10, and for months, advocates and members of Congress — especially from Missouri and New Mexico — have been lobbying Congress to expand it.

U.S. senators have twice passed legislation that would expand RECA, but it hasn’t gone anywhere in the House of Representatives. The legislation would add the remaining parts of Arizona, Utah and Nevada to the program and bring coverage to downwinders in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico and Guam. It would also offer coverage for residents exposed to radioactive waste in Missouri, Tennessee, Alaska and Kentucky. 

Dawn Chapman, who co-founded Just Moms STL to advocate for communities affected by World War II-era nuclear waste that contaminated parts of the St. Louis area, called Johnson’s initial statement a “pitiful excuse.” 

Chapman welcomed Johnson’s change of mind and gave credit to Wagner, but she said advocates couldn’t sit an enjoy the victory because it’s unclear where the legislation will go from here.

“We went from feeling good to horrible to, I guess, good now,” she said.

Chapman and supporters of the legislation believe the $50-60 billion price tag is an overestimation, and she noted that cost is spread over five years. 

She said supporters have worked to cut the costs of the program, including narrowing the list of health conditions that would qualify for compensation. If costs were a concern, Chapman said, Johnson should have met with advocates to work on further cuts. 

Chapman said she’d return to Washington, D.C., next week, and “the least he can do is meet with us for 10 minutes.”

Johnson’s earlier position was revealed Tuesday evening on social media by U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, and sparked outrage among the state’s congressional delegation. 

U.S. Reps. Cori Bush, a Democrat from St. Louis, and Ann Wagner, a Republican from the nearby suburbs, vowed to oppose any extension of RECA that didn’t add Missouri.

On social media Wednesday afternoon, Hawley said the federal government “has not begun to meet its obligations to nuclear radiation victims.”

“(Missouri) victims have gotten zilch,” Hawley said. 

Parts of the St. Louis area have been contaminated for 75 years with radioactive waste left over from the effort to build the world’s first atomic bomb during World War II. Uranium refined in downtown St. Louis was used in the first sustained nuclear chain reaction in Chicago, a breakthrough in the Manhattan Project, the name given to the effort to develop the bomb. 

After the war, waste from uranium refining efforts was trucked from St. Louis to surrounding counties and dumped near Coldwater Creek and in a quarry in Weldon Spring, polluting surface and groundwater. Remaining waste was dumped at the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton, where it remains today. 

Generations of St. Louis-area families lived in homes near contaminated sites without warning from the federal government. A study by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry found exposure to the creek elevated residents’ risk of cancer. Residents of nearby communities suffer higher-than-normal rates of breast, colon, prostate, kidney and bladder cancers and leukemia. Childhood brain and nervous system cancers are also higher. 

This article has been updated since it was initially published with an update that House Speaker Johnson reversed course and to add new comments from Dawn Chapman.

Tammy Tesson Puhlmann, 63, who now lives in Villa Ridge, Missouri, shows photos of her son Drew as she sat in the Russell Senate Office Building on May 22. Puhlmann’s son died of cancer at age 30, and she was among 10 eastern Missouri residents speaking to lawmakers on Capitol Hill about expanding the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. (Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)

WASHINGTON — A fund to compensate Americans sickened by exposure to atomic bomb tests, uranium mining and radioactive waste expires in just under 15 days, and activists and lawmakers are scrambling to keep the fund active and open to additional victims.

A bill to reauthorize and expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, often shortened to RECA, sailed through the U.S. Senate in early March on a bipartisan 69-30 vote, but the House has yet to take it up for a vote.

Critics cite high costs, but bipartisan lawmakers and activists rallying in favor of the bill say the victims have already paid the price through medical bills and lost loved ones, and that it’s ultimately the government’s wrong to make right.

The U.S. Senate-passed legislation, championed by Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, aims to extend the program by six years and expand eligibility to several new locations, including his state of Missouri where, over decades, residents witnessed numerous rare similar cancers among neighbors in and around St. Louis.

Chemical plants in downtown St. Louis and Weldon Spring, Missouri, processed uranium during the nation’s WWII effort to build the first atomic bomb. Radioactive waste from the plants were stored and dumped around the area.

States Newsroom’s Missouri Independent, in collaboration with the Associated Press and MuckRock, obtained and combed through thousands of government records that revealed the government downplayed and ignored the dangers of the radioactive waste.

‘The government has done this’

Tammy Tesson Puhlmann, 63, who lived for decades in Florissant, Missouri, sat in the Russell Senate Office Building Wednesday showing photos of her son Drew — first, as a baby who was born with a rare blood disease, and then as a thin 30-year-old man just a week before he died of cancer.

“If I can prevent one mom from having to go through something like this, I would do anything,” she said through tears. “It’s the most unbearable feeling in the world to know that there is nothing you can do for your child, and to know that the government has done this.”

Puhlmann was among 10 eastern Missouri residents and state representatives who met with 10 lawmakers on Wednesday, including House Majority Leader Steve Scalise; U.S. Reps. Ann Wagner and Blaine Luetkemeyer, both Republicans of Missouri; and the state’s GOP Sens. Eric Schmitt and Hawley.

Missouri state Reps. Tricia Byrnes and Richard West, both Republicans, who represent districts just outside St. Louis, flipped through maps and photos documenting the contaminated sites, including where a uranium processing plant and byproduct dumping ground were located next to Francis Howell High School, which Byrnes attended.

“Look how close it was to all of the contamination. That high school is still there,” Byrnes said, pointing to a map.

To Byrnes’ left sat Kristin Denbow, a 1988 Francis Howell graduate who has been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, an incurable blood cancer in the bone marrow.

“We have memories of men in full containment suits walking around the grounds of our high school while we were there,” Denbow said.

‘This has been our lives’

Three generations of Susie Gaffney’s family made their homes in the suburbs of St. Louis near Coldwater Creek, unaware that radioactive waste relocated from the downtown uranium plant was leaking into the water.

Susie’s husband, Jim, grew up in a house beside the creek and not far from Jana Elementary School, which closed in 2023 because of radioactive contamination.

“Jim grew up playing in the creek, everybody did. Everybody who tells the creek stories played (there). It was awesome, it wasn’t deep. Kids fished, they made mudslides. It was a great place to live,” Gaffney said.

Jim, whose mother died of colon cancer after being diagnosed in her 40s, developed lymphoma at the age of 24.

When Susie and Jim’s son Joey was an infant, they moved to a nearby subdivision named Wedgewood, a few miles down the creek. Joey also played in the water as a child.

Joey was diagnosed at 18 with thyroid cancer and eventually underwent a thyroidectomy. Gaffney, now 66, recalls the doctors telling her, “This kid is Chernobyl.”

“‘This is what happened in Chernobyl. He has metastasized thyroid cancer. This is what happened there. He had to be exposed to radiation’ and naively I said, ‘Well, where?’ And so this has been our lives,” she said.

Joey is now 45. Jim, 68, was also diagnosed with bladder cancer and is now living with myelodysplastic syndrome, Gaffney said.

“He’s living on blood transfusions,” she said, pointing to a photo of him on a packet of papers she was handing out to lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

Below the photo of Jim was a map of the region with red dots for each cancer case.

“I just want people to tunnel in,” Gaffney said. “Pretend you’re on Google Earth, zoom all the way down and get on those front doors and picture our lifespan with health care, with depression, with anxiety, fear. Our quality of life has definitely been affected, all of us.”

Debate on Capitol Hill

The government’s nearly expired compensation program pays one-time sums of $75,000 to those who developed certain diseases after working on U.S. nuclear tests before 1963. It pays $50,000 to those who lived in select counties downwind from test explosion sites between January 1951 and October 1958, and the month of July in 1962, in Arizona, Nevada and Utah.

Uranium industry workers who were employed in 11 states from 1942 to 1971 and subsequently developed eligible illnesses qualify for $100,000.

Hawley’s bill, co-sponsored by Democratic Sen. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, would also expand to include the entirety of Arizona, Nevada and Utah, and include downwind and affected areas in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, and Guam. Additionally, the one-time compensation sums to victims or surviving family members would increase to $100,000.

If enacted, the legislation would reach areas including ZIP codes in Alaska, Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee, where communities were impacted by radioactive waste dumping, uranium processing and other related activities surrounding the testing.

The bill’s estimated cost of $50 billion to $60 billion has drawn criticism. Hawley’s office confirmed the estimate. There is not an official budget score.

On Thursday, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, asked for unanimous consent on the Senate floor for his proposed “clean extension” of the program as it exists for another two years — only covering those affected in areas of Arizona, Nevada and Utah.

Lee cited the risk of “inflating the deficit by at least $60 billion” and questioned whether enough data backs contamination in the additional areas in Hawley’s bill.

“You see, the House of Representatives has thus far declined to take up and pass Sen. Hawley’s previous bill, with some signaling concern and raising some of the concerns that I just restated,” the Utah Republican said.

Hawley objected, and Luján spoke in support of the objection.

“Study after study has shown the expanse of the nuclear radiation. Here is a study from 1997, from 2005, another from 2005, from 2023, all showing that the nuclear radiation is far beyond the contours of the original RECA bill passed in 1990,” Hawley said. “Yet my friend from Utah wants to keep doing the same old thing, leaving out in the cold hundreds of thousands of Americans. I will not consent to it.”

Lee responded, saying he understood the “impassioned pleas” from Hawley and Luján. He offered an updated version that includes Missouri and New Mexico, but leaves out other states and Guam. His office cites an unofficial budget score of $30 billion.

“There are other states in (Hawley’s) legislation pending in the House that deal with law in the Marshall Islands, Idaho, Kentucky, Ohio, Alaska, and perhaps one or two other jurisdictions. The claims of those states are not on equal footing,” Lee said.

“That is where a lot of the — not all, but a lot of the expense is accrued and a lot of concerns expressed in the House impeding its quick passage over there that might lead to it not being able to be passed at all,” he continued.

Hawley again objected, saying he “will not be party to any attempt at some halfway measure, some short stopgap bill, or some effort to sweep this under the rug.”

A spokesperson for House Speaker Mike Johnson, of Louisiana, told States Newsroom on May 15 that “The Speaker understands and appreciates Senator Hawley’s position and is working closely with interested members and stakeholders to chart a path forward for the House.”

RECA was established in 1990.

The U.S. conducted more than 1,000 atomic weapons tests from 1945 to 1992 — the first at the Trinity Test site near Alamogordo, New Mexico, where scientists detonated the Manhattan Project’s first atomic bomb prior to the U.S. dropping the weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, at the end of World War II.

As of June 2022, the government has approved more than 36,000 RECA claims for more than $2.3 billion in benefits.

Unless the fund is extended, claims have to be postmarked by June 10, 2024, according to the Department of Justice, which administers the payouts.

A sign warns of radioactive material at the West Lake Landfill. Thousands of tons of nuclear waste from the Manhattan Project were dumped there in the 1970s (Theo Welling/Riverfront Times).

A proposal to renew compensation for cancer victims who were exposed to radioactive material from the nation’s weapons development without expanding the program to Missouri and several other states amounted to a betrayal, Missouri advocates and lawmakers said Tuesday.

Members of Congress from Missouri learned late Tuesday that U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson plans to extend the federal program for two years despite pressure from communities harmed by nuclear bomb testing and waste to expand the program. 

The announcement dealt a huge blow to advocates from St. Louis, the Navajo Nation and other communities that have been left out of the program, originally created in the 1990s. The existing program covers civilians in parts of Arizona, Utah and Nevada and uranium miners. 

“I cannot believe how emotionally manipulated we feel that Speaker Johnson would sit back and allow sick and dying community members to beg him for a meeting for months — then to spend (an) hour and a half with staff only to have the door slammed in our faces!” Dawn Chapman, co-founder of Just Moms STL, said in a social media post.

Chapman was reacting to a post from U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, who said Johnson told Hawley’s office he’ll seek a bill that doesn’t cover either state. Hawley said he’ll put up roadblocks to keep any such bill from passing the Senate without a fight. 

“Total dereliction,” Hawley said. “No member from Missouri can possibly vote for this.”

Since last summer, Hawley has been pushing for an expansion of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which was initially passed in 1990 and offered compensation to uranium miners and residents who lived downwind of nuclear bomb testing sites in certain states.

Hawley’s legislation, which has twice passed the U.S. Senate, would expand the program to “downwinders” in the remaining parts of Arizona, Utah and Nevada and bring coverage to downwinders in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico and Guam. It would also expand coverage to those exposed to radioactive waste in Missouri, Tennessee, Alaska and Kentucky. 

The existing RECA program expires June 10, and advocates and lawmakers from states hoping to be brought into the program have been urging Congress to renew and expand it.

U.S. Rep. Ann Wagner, a Republican from the St. Louis suburbs, said on social media that a RECA bill without Missouri “is dead on arrival.” 

“I will continue to fight for the expansion of RECA so Missourians are given the justice they deserve,” she said. “The House can and must take up the Senate-passed version.” 

U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, a Democrat from St. Louis, also wrote on social media that “failing to expand RECA is not a viable option.”

“Next week, Speaker Johnson plans to rip off Missourians and thousands of others who are suffering from radioactive waste dumped in our backyards by the federal government,” Bush said. 

Parts of the St. Louis area have been contaminated for 75 years with radioactive waste left over from the effort to build the world’s first atomic bomb during World War II. Uranium refined in downtown St. Louis was used in the first sustained nuclear chain reaction in Chicago, a breakthrough in the Manhattan Project, the name given to the effort to develop the bomb. 

After the war, waste from uranium refining efforts was trucked from St. Louis to surrounding counties and dumped near Coldwater Creek and in a quarry in Weldon Spring, polluting surface and groundwater. Remaining waste was dumped at the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton, where it remains today. 

Generations of St. Louis-area families lived in homes near contaminated sites without warning from the federal government. A study by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry found exposure to the creek elevated residents’ risk of cancer. Residents of nearby communities suffer higher-than-normal rates of breast, colon, prostate, kidney and bladder cancers and leukemia. Childhood brain and nervous system cancers are also higher. 

Johnson’s office did not immediately return a request for comment.

Karen Nickel, left, and Dawn Chapman flip through binders full of government documents about St. Louis County sites contaminated by nuclear waste left over from World War II. Nickel and Chapman founded Just Moms STL to advocate for the community to federal environmental and energy officials (Theo Welling/Riverfront Times).

Over the course of half a dozen trips to Washington, D.C., Dawn Chapman has become accustomed to long days of congressional meetings and questions about St. Louis’ decades-long struggle with radioactive contamination.

Chapman, co-founder of Just Moms STL, wraps her feet with duct tape to keep her shoes from giving her blisters, and she and fellow advocates pack their schedules with meetings to ask lawmakers to expand compensation for those exposed to the U.S. nuclear weapons program.

The months-long fight has drained the budget of the small nonprofit, founded about 10 years ago to advocate for communities exposed to nuclear waste in the St. Louis region.

Despite efforts by St. Louis activists, as well as communities across the southwest, Congress has yet to act. And with the federal government’s existing compensation program set to expire in two weeks, the decision has come down to the wire. 

“I definitely think we are on the winning side of this,” Chapman said in an interview with The Independent, “and I do feel hopeful. It’s just — I’m tired.”

Chapman and fellow advocates are asking Congress to expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, originally passed in 1990 to compensate uranium miners and those who were exposed to atomic bomb testing in parts of Nevada, Utah and Arizona.

But it excluded parts of the southwest, including New Mexico, where residents have developed cancer or had children with birth defects because of exposure to World War II-era bomb testing. 

It also didn’t include St. Louis communities that have struggled for decades with lingering contamination left over from efforts to develop the first atomic bomb.

The existing RECA program’s June 10 expiration date has set up a standoff between lawmakers from states already covered by the program and states, like Missouri, hoping to be included. But Chapman said she and fellow St. Louis-area activists will keep pushing even if the program isn’t expanded in the next two weeks.

“The reasons for RECA, the people that need it — they don’t disappear after June (10) regardless of what happens with this program,” she said. 

Parts of St. Louis have been contaminated for 75 years with radioactive waste left over from the effort to build the world’s first atomic bomb. Uranium refined in downtown St. Louis was used in the first sustained nuclear chain reaction in Chicago, a breakthrough in the Manhattan Project, the name given to the effort to develop the bomb.

After World War II ended, uranium was trucked from St. Louis to surrounding counties and dumped near Coldwater Creek and in a quarry in Weldon Spring, polluting surface and groundwater. Remaining waste was dumped at the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton, where it remains today.

Generations of St. Louis-area families lived in homes near contaminated sites without warning from the federal government. A study by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry found exposure to the creek elevated residents’ risk of cancer. Residents of nearby communities suffer higher-than-normal rates of breast, colon, prostate, kidney and bladder cancers and leukemia. Childhood brain and nervous system cancer are also higher. 

An investigation by The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press revealed last summer that the government and companies that handled the waste knew of the dangerous contamination for years before they informed the public. Those revelations inspired a push by U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley to expand RECA to cover those exposed to waste in St. Louis.

Hawley’s legislation, which passed the Senate again in March, would expand RECA to remaining parts of Arizona, Nevada and Utah as well as to Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico and Guam, where residents were exposed to radiation from nuclear bomb testing. It would also expand coverage to those exposed to radioactive waste in Missouri, Tennessee, Alaska and Kentucky. 

Stalled in the House

The expansion of RECA sponsored by Hawley, a Missouri Republican, has twice passed the Senate. But it’s been stuck for months in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Members of the Missouri Congressional delegation hoped it would be included in a federal appropriations bill in March and were outraged when it wasn’t included. U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, a Democrat from St. Louis, called its exclusion an “insult to our communities.”

Since then, Bush has joined advocates in a last push to get RECA expanded before it expires next month. 

Bush has written letters to each of her 434 House colleagues, calling on them to support expanding RECA, and organized a meeting between advocates and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat from New York. 

Bush said it had been frustrating that the legislation hasn’t made it through the House because “this legislation is a no-brainer.”

“We’re talking about compensating people at home who have been victims of war and continue to be victims of World War II,” she said. “The reality is that the people in St. Louis as well as across the country have been poisoned by the federal government, and the government has a responsibility to compensate those victims no matter the price tag.”

Bush said she needed colleagues to listen to victims.

“The cost has already been paid,” she said. “The cost is the human lives that have been taken because of our government’s negligence, the cost is those who are here on the Hill over and over again that are bringing stories forward saying, ‘My kids, my grandkids, me, my parents have all been sick or died.’” 

On the other side of the aisle, U.S. Rep. Ann Wagner, a Republican from the St. Louis suburbs, snagged a surprise meeting for advocates earlier this month with staff of House Speaker Mike Johnson’s office.

Wagner’s office declined an interview but said she will “continue to fight for reauthorization and expansion of RECA.”

Chapman said staff from Johnson’s office didn’t promise to bring RECA to the floor. But, she said, “what they told us is that it is absolutely on their radar.”

“They’re not ignoring it,” Chapman said. “They know it’s there. They are aware of it now and that there is a tremendous amount of Republican colleagues that are writing letters and that are reaching out to their office to have this hit the floor.”

The National Nuclear Safety Administration plans to expand its Kansas City facility, which develops and manufactures the non-nuclear components of nuclear weapons. Missouri lawmakers are hoping to approve a sales tax exemption on construction materials for the private developer building the expansion (Allison Kite/Missouri Independent).

An effort to create a program for St. Louis-area residents affected by radioactive waste nearly derailed a Missouri Senate bill backed by the Kansas City delegation to help expand a facility manufacturing components of nuclear weapons. 

But after defeating the proposed amendment pertaining to St. Louis on Tuesday, senators approved the bill on a first-round vote Wednesday with only the Kansas City provisions. It still faces a final Senate vote before it moves to the Missouri House.

The bill offers a sales tax exemption on construction material to help finance an expansion of a National Nuclear Security Administration campus, operated by Honeywell International Inc., in south Kansas City. Workers there produce non-nuclear components of nuclear weapons.

State Sen. Nick Schroer — a Republican from the outer suburbs of St. Louis, where the federal government once had a uranium-processing facility — tried to add an amendment to create a tax credit for residents to have soil and water tested or remediated. 

Missouri lawmakers push tax break to expand Kansas City nuclear weapons facility

But while the Honeywell bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Greg Razer, a Kansas City Democrat, said he believed St. Louis’ radioactive waste struggle needs to be addressed, he wanted to pass the bill as it was. 

“This is too important to my community,” Razer said. “I’d rather not have hiccups along the way, especially when I’m not here, hopefully, to shepherd it through the last few weeks.” 

Razer has been nominated by Gov. Mike Parson to the State Tax Commission and will leave the legislature if he’s confirmed by the Senate. He asked Schroer to let his Honeywell legislation go through and find another bill to amend and create the St. Louis tax credit.

Razer told a Missouri Senate committee earlier this year that the National Nuclear Security Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Energy, plans to add 2.5 million square feet of new facilities and hire thousands of new employees.

To expedite the expansion, the federal government plans to acquire the facilities from a private developer who can build them more quickly. If the federal government built the facilities itself, it would not pay sales tax, so supporters of the legislation argue exempting the private developer allows it to keep its costs on par with what the federal government’s would be.

According to a fiscal analysis on Razer’s bill, the National Nuclear Security Administration plans to spend more than $3 billion on Kansas City facilities. Razer’s bill would divert almost $61 million in state revenue over 10 years, which he said the construction job creation alone would offset. Jackson County, the city of Kansas City and the Kansas City Zoo would see a combined $81 million diverted from their budgets over 10 years.

Similar legislation has passed the Missouri House and awaits action in the Senate.

Schroer’s amendment, which had not been heard by any Senate committee, is the latest in a series of efforts by state and federal lawmakers and activists to bring some form of relief to St. Louis-area residents who have lived for decades in close proximity to radioactive waste.

U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley and Reps. Cori Bush and Ann Wagner have been trying to pass legislation to expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which provides payments to people who were exposed to nuclear weapons development and developed certain cancers. It has twice passed the U.S. Senate but has yet to be taken up by the House of Representatives. 

“People in my community, St. Louis County, St. Louis City who are still impacted by this — they want to see action, they want, they need something to be done,” Schroer said Wednesday. 

Records reveal 75 years of government downplaying, ignoring risks of St. Louis radioactive waste

Schroer told his Senate colleagues  that “time is of the essence” to do something to help St. Louis residents harmed by radioactive waste, citing an investigation published last summer by The Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press documenting the area’s long history with the contamination.

“We have three weeks to address something — at least put a bandaid on it and encourage the federal government to get off their behinds and actually do the same thing of putting the people first,” Schroer said. 

Starting during World War II and for much of the Cold War, plants in St. Louis and its suburbs processed uranium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program. The waste created from those efforts was haphazardly trucked to storage sites where it sat unprotected and polluted Coldwater Creek, bringing generations of children into contact with radioactive waste when they played in the creek waters. 

A 2019 study found that residents who lived near Coldwater Creek or played in its waters faced an elevated risk of developing certain cancers.

Anecdotally, residents of the area have blamed a bevy of mysterious illnesses and autoimmune disorders on the waste. 

Coldwater Creek won’t be fully remediated until 2038. The Environmental Protection Agency is designing a cleanup efforts for the West Lake Landfill, where radioactive waste from the World War II-era refining efforts was dumped in the 1970s.

Schroer implored several Kansas City-area lawmakers to support the legislation, including Sens. Mike Cierpiot and Rick Brattin, both Republicans from the suburbs of Kansas City near the Honeywell site. 

Cierpiot said he respected the long Senate tradition of deferring to other senators on issues that solely impacted their communities, but he was uncomfortable with the fact that Schroer’s amendment hadn’t been vetted by a committee.

Brattin said he recognized that “life is so much more important than even potential jobs.”

“I’m behind you 100% of how we can fix your situation,” Brattin said, “but I appreciate you being willing to work with our situation as well.”

U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley speaks during U.S. Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland's confirmation hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill on Feb. 22, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Demetrius Freeman-Pool/Getty Images).

WASHINGTON — Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri thinks he’s found a path for stalled tax legislation that would temporarily expand the child tax credit and restore business tax breaks that are expired or have sunset under the 2017 tax law.

Hawley’s idea is to attach the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act to the tax bill to entice his party colleagues to pass it through the upper chamber — including top tax writer and radiation compensation champion Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho. The House already has passed the tax package with overwhelming bipartisan support.

“I think if they want to move the tax bill, I would say put RECA onto the tax bill and move them together. I think you can get 60 (votes) for that. I would go for it. I think other people would vote for it. It’s hard to see a path if that doesn’t happen, to be honest with you,” Hawley told States Newsroom and a small group of reporters Tuesday.

Hawley’s RECA proposal would expand the expiring compensation fund for victims of past government radiation and atomic bomb testing in the St. Louis area and the western and southwestern U.S.

Senators voted in favor of the bill in March, 69-30.

When asked by States Newsroom if the proposal — first reported by Punchbowl News —  had gained traction, Hawley said he’s “talked to multiple senators about this and where my position is.”

“Listen, I don’t control the floor. So it’s not my decision. But I’m just saying that if they want to move that bill … I can only control my own vote, but I’d vote for it,” he said.

Senate GOP opposition to tax bill

Some Senate Republicans refuse to support the tax bill over a Democratic proposal to allow taxpayers to receive the child tax credit even if they had no annual income the prior year — a “look-back” provision that they liken to expanding welfare.

Several also oppose a provision that would phase-in the credit at a faster rate, therefore increasing the amount parents could receive as a refund.

Crapo, ranking member of the Senate Committee on Finance and lead Senate Republican negotiator on the tax bill, has championed compensation for victims of government radiation exposure.

The Idaho Republican’s invited guest to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address in March was Tona Henderson, head of the Idaho Downwinders in Emmett, Idaho, a group that advocates for compensation for Idahoans affected by government nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s and 1960s.

A Senate Finance Committee spokesperson said Crapo does not have any comment about Hawley’s idea.

A staunch opponent of the tax legislation, GOP Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, said Hawley’s proposal does nothing to move his position.

“You’re talking about the tax legislation I oppose?” he said when asked by States Newsroom Tuesday if attaching RECA would change his mind. “No.”

Sen. Ron Wyden, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee and originally sponsored the tax bill, said he hasn’t yet been briefed on the proposal, which also would have to make it through the Republican-controlled House.

“But, you know, when I hear United States senators, particularly Republicans, say that they’re interested in families and small businesses, and getting a roof over people’s heads, I think that’s a good thing,” the Oregon Democrat said.

Wyden said he’s interested in “approaches that add votes, don’t subtract votes.”

What Republicans want to do — strip the bill of the look-back provision for the child tax credit — would alienate Democratic supporters of the bill, Wyden said.

“What has been offered thus far by the Senate Republicans would not get a single Democratic vote, and the sponsors of it know that.”

Worsening the national debt?

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan budget watchdog organization, panned Hawley’s proposal Tuesday afternoon, saying it has potential to turn the tax legislation “into a fiscally reckless bill by adding a layer of unpaid-for spending.”

“Despite its flaws, the House went through the important exercise of holding down their bill’s costs and ensuring it was fully offset. Throwing $50 billion of borrowing on top of it would unravel all of the progress made in that effort,” Maya MacGuineas, CRFB’s president, said in a statement.

The $78 billion bill negotiated by Wyden and Republican Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri, the lead tax writer in the House, offsets the cost by ending a pandemic-era tax break for businesses that has been riddled with fraud.

“Of course we need to make sure victims of radiation exposure are appropriately compensated. But their grandchildren shouldn’t be the ones paying the bill,” MacGuineas said later in the statement.

“We are nearing an inflection point in our nation’s history where the national debt will exceed its record as a share of the economy, interest payments on that debt will be higher than what we spend on national defense or Medicare, and a host of important priorities will test our ability to continue borrowing.”

Note: This story was updated to reflect the Republicans’ wider offer to Democrats.

Karen Nickel, left, and Dawn Chapman flip through binders full of government documents about St. Louis County sites contaminated by nuclear waste left over from World War II. Nickel and Chapman founded Just Moms STL to advocate for the community to federal environmental and energy officials (Theo Welling/Riverfront Times).

Legislation that would compensate victims of radioactive waste and U.S. nuclear bomb tests faces an uncertain future after it was left out of a federal appropriations bill Thursday, outraging members of Missouri’s Congressional delegation. 

But advocates for St. Louis-area residents exposed to World War II-era radioactive waste remain “extremely hopeful” as compensation remains closer than ever to passage.

“We feel like we’re going to get RECA, guys,” Dawn Chapman, co-founder of Just Moms STL, said in a live video on Facebook. “…I’m not going to just take it for granted and stop pushing. We’re going to push even harder. It’s just unfortunate how hard we have to fight up to the bitter end.”

Members of Missouri’s Congressional delegation, however, were irate that the legislation won’t be considered as part of the budget process and demanded the House take action quickly.

“This is an insult to our communities who continue to be harmed by the radioactive waste dumped and left for decades by the federal government,” U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, a Democrat representing St. Louis and north St. Louis County, said in a statement.

U.S. Rep. Ann Wagner, a Republican representing St. Louis suburbs and parts of adjacent counties, said in a statement that she was “extremely disappointed” in House and Senate leaders for not including the legislation in the budget bill released Thursday. 

The legislation — an expansion of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act — has twice passed the U.S. Senate but has yet to be taken up by the House of Representatives.

Records reveal 75 years of government downplaying, ignoring risks of St. Louis radioactive waste

Expanding the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act would extend coverage to current and former Missouri residents who were exposed to radioactive waste left over from the Manhattan Project, the name given to the effort to develop the world’s first atomic bomb.

The St. Louis metro has struggled for decades with a radioactive waste problem. Material from uranium-refining efforts were trucked from downtown to surrounding counties after World War II where it polluted Coldwater Creek and a quarry and groundwater in Weldon Spring. Remaining waste was dumped at the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton, where it still remains.

Generations of St. Louis-area families lived in homes surrounded by radioactive waste without warning from the federal government. An investigation this summer by The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and the Associated Press found the government and companies that handled the waste knew of the dangerous contamination decades before they informed the public.

“The federal government wronged our communities — and they now have an obligation to make it right,” Bush said. 

RECA was first passed in the 1990s and covered some western states where residents — or “downwinders” — were exposed to radiation from atomic bomb tests during World War II. But several states, including New Mexico, where the first bombs were tested, were left out. The existing program is also set to expire this summer. 

Right now, downwinders are covered in parts of Nevada, Utah and Arizona. The expansion would reauthorize the program in those areas and expand coverage to the rest of those states. It would offer coverage for the first time to downwinders in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico and Guam and individuals exposed to radioactive waste in Missouri, Tennessee, Alaska and Kentucky.

Advocates for RECA’s expansion had hoped it would be included in budget legislation Congress must pass by Friday night to avoid a partial government shutdown. But the language wasn’t in the bill unveiled Thursday morning. 

Wagner in a speech on the House floor called on House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, to bring the bill up for a vote. 

“These innocent victims of the U.S. nuclear weapons program are relying on Congress for restitution,” Wagner said. “I am outraged.” 

Bush also spoke on the House floor, saying it was “past time that this body gets its priorities straight.”

“To this day, many of my constituents are sick and dying because of their exposure (to nuclear waste),” Bush said. “World War II is still killing people in my district.”

In a statement released to St. Louis Public Radio, Johnson praised Wagner, calling her a “relentless fighter for over a decade on nuclear waste issues” and said he looked forward to working with her “as we chart a path together for the House to move forward with evaluating and acting on a reauthorization measure.

U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican who has championed expanding RECA and twice guided it through the Senate, called that a “total failure” in a social media post.

“Politicians have talked like this for decades,” Hawley said of Johnson’s statement. “While doing nothing. The time to talk is over. The time to ACT is now.”

Legislation sponsored by Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri extends the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which is set to expire, and expands it to cover individuals who were exposed to the radioactive waste that remains scattered across the St. Louis region (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images).

The U.S. Senate on Thursday voted again in favor of legislation that would compensate those who developed cancer following exposure to World War II-era radioactive waste in St. Louis. 

The legislation, sponsored by Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, extends the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which is set to expire, and expands it to cover individuals who were exposed to the radioactive waste that remains scattered across the St. Louis region. 

It would also expand coverage to those who were exposed to atomic bomb testing in the southwest. 

“The United States Senate has the opportunity to do its part — its small part — to continue to make this nation what it could be, what we promised it will be, and to put right things that have been wrong,” Hawley said just before senators voted 69-30 in favor of his bill.

The legislation, which is backed by President Joe Biden, would represent a federal recognition of — and apology for — St. Louis’ decades-long struggle with radioactive waste. 

The St. Louis area was instrumental to the Manhattan Project, the name given to the World War II-era effort to build the world’s first atomic bomb. Mallinckrodt Chemical Works refined uranium in downtown St. Louis during the war that was used in the first sustained nuclear chain reaction in Chicago, a key breakthrough in the bomb’s development. 

After the war, radioactive waste from Mallinckrodt’s downtown facilities was trucked to St. Louis County — falling into the road along the way — and dumped at the airport. The material, which was left open to the elements, contaminated Coldwater Creek, which flows by the airport and through the county’s busy suburban neighborhoods. 

The material was sold and moved to another site next to Coldwater Creek where it continued to pollute the water. Eventually, the material that couldn’t be further refined to extract valuable metals was illegally dumped at the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton, where it remains today. 

“We have not done right by those good people,” Hawley said. “We have turned our back on them.”

Hawley added: “The government exposed them over a period of decades to nuclear radiation and waste, and in almost every case, did nothing about it — in many cases, lied to them about it.” 

The Senate last summer voted 61-37 in favor of Hawley’s update to the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. But the expansion was included as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act and stripped out by a conference committee of senators and representatives.

Hawley has criticized Senate Republican leaders, particularly Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, for allowing the expansion to be removed from the defense bill. 

McConnell voted in favor of the bill senators passed Thursday, which was a standalone expansion of RECA. It still needs approval by the House of Representatives. 

The White House announced its endorsement of the legislation Wednesday evening, saying in a statement that the administration looks forward to working with legislators to ensure funding for the program. 

“The president believes we have a solemn obligation to address toxic exposure, especially among those who have been placed in harm’s way by the government’s actions,” the statement says. 

Joining Hawley in sponsoring the legislation were Missouri’s junior Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Republican, and Sen. Ben Ray Luján, a New Mexico Democrat.

Luján urged senators to support the legislation, noting that when the Senate attempted to expand RECA last summer, the movie Oppenheimer — about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb” — was hitting theaters.

The movie, Luján said, left out the important stories of the families who lived near the site where the Manhattan Project tested atomic bombs and suffered cancers and other diseases. 

“Generations of families wiped out by lung, stomach, prostate, thyroid, skin, breast and tongue cancer didn’t get the glossy Hollywood treatment, and the United States Congress has not made any significant progress in correcting these injustices since 2000,” Luján said. 

He added: “Shame on us.”

Hawley said on a conference call Monday that the standalone RECA expansion bill was expected to cost only about one-third as much as the version senators approved last summer. The legislation still covers the same geographic areas, he said. 

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has not released an independent analysis of the new legislation. It estimated the previous version would have cost $147 billion.

The standalone RECA legislation would offer coverage for individuals who were exposed to radioactive waste in Missouri, Tennessee, Alaska or Kentucky and were diagnosed with multiple myeloma, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and cancer of the thyroid, breast, esophagus, stomach, pharynx, small intestine, pancreas, bile ducts, gallbladder, salivary gland, urinary bladder, brain, colon, ovary, bone, kidney or lung. It covers liver cancer as long as the patient doesn’t have cirrhosis or hepatitis B. 

Surviving spouses and children could also seek compensation if the individual exposed to the radioactive waste has died.

The legislation senators considered last summer would have also covered diabetes, systemic lupus erythematosus, multiple sclerosis or Hashimoto’s disease. Those conditions are not in the new version of the bill.

Under the bill, the fund for uranium workers and miners would be extended for six years. Last summer’s bill would have extended it by 19. 

In urging his colleagues to vote for the bill, Hawley noted the federal government is now testing underneath homes in the St. Louis area to determine whether a subdivision built in the 1990s was constructed on top of radioactive contamination. 

“Today we say enough,” Hawley said. “Today we turn the page. Today we begin something new.”

A group of people with the Army Corps of Engineers exit a home on Cades Cove on Monday, March 4, 2024, in Florissant. The Army Corp of Engineers were drilling into the foundation of the house to test soil for radioactive material (Zachary Linhares/Riverfront Times).

Federal officials are investigating whether residents of a small subdivision in the St. Louis suburbs are living on top of contamination dating back to World War II after finding radioactive material in their backyards.

The Cades Cove subdivision, a small enclave in Florissant, was built on top of where Coldwater Creek once meandered. The creek, which runs through several St. Louis suburbs and into the Missouri River, was contaminated decades ago by waste left over from the development of the world’s first atomic bomb. 

Now, 78 years after the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, waste from their development lingers in Cades Cove residents’ backyards. And federal officials are drilling through their basement floors to determine whether it’s under their homes. 

“There are homes built on top of the Manhattan Project in St. Louis,” said Dawn Chapman, a co-founder of Just Moms STL, an advocacy group for affected communities, “and there are residents who have been living in those homes on top of this for decades.”

Chapman was speaking on a press conference call about legislation that would compensate St. Louis-area residents who have developed illnesses because of exposure to radioactive waste.

“This is not a 50-year-old problem,” Chapman said. “This is a today problem.”

Records reveal 75 years of government downplaying, ignoring risks of St. Louis radioactive waste

Following the conference call and media inquiries on Monday, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is responsible for cleaning up Coldwater Creek and surrounding properties, announced the sampling efforts in a news release. The agency said it was planning a public meeting.

Phil Moser, a program manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said in an interview with The Independent that the agency, which is responsible for cleaning up Coldwater Creek, discovered radioactive contamination in several backyards in Cades Cove, leading officials to sample under residents’ foundations. 

Moser said it’s the first time since the agency began sampling efforts — meant to inform its cleanup plan — that it has needed to go inside residents’ homes to collect samples. He called the neighborhood an “outlier” for its contamination in residents’ yards.

Contamination in Cades Cove, Moser said, has been found deep underground because the creek meander was filled in with dirt when the neighborhood was built more than 30 years ago. He said several yards will need to be remediated. 

It’s less clear what will happen if contamination is discovered under residents’ homes. Moser said the Army Corps is going to ensure it gets all the contamination. Asked if homes may need to be demolished or whether residents might have to move, Moser said he couldn’t speak about hypotheticals. 

“We’re not taking anything off the table as far as what we would eventually have to do,” he said.

He said “no matter what” the agency will remove all the contamination.

In an email to activists about the sampling and in an interview with The Independent, Moser said the agency had been in contact with Cades Cove residents and the local homeowners’ association.

“As expected, this is a difficult time for (residents) to navigate and we are striving (to) not make it worse with too much outside attention,” Moser said in an email to activists. The Corps’ St. Louis spokesman, Jeremy Idleman, said the same in an emailed statement.

Parts of St. Louis and surrounding counties have been contaminated for decades by waste generated during the Manhattan Project, the name given to the effort to build the world’s first atomic bomb. Uranium refined in downtown St. Louis was used in the first sustained nuclear reaction in Chicago, a key breakthrough in the bomb’s creation.

After the war, waste generated from uranium processing was trucked to St. Louis County and dumped, uncovered, at the airport, right next to Coldwater Creek. Wind and rain spread the waste, polluting the creek for miles. Over the ensuing decades, tons of waste were moved around St. Louis and St. Charles counties, polluting numerous sites.

Radioactive contamination remains at sites around the St. Louis metro today, and the cleanup of Coldwater Creek and surrounding properties is expected to take until 2038. 

Even at the time the homes in Cades Cove were built, the federal government had known for years that radioactive waste stored nearby had polluted Coldwater Creek. An investigation published last summer by The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press revealed that federal officials and the company that refined uranium for the Manhattan Project knew the waste posed a risk to St. Louis residents for years before acknowledging it to the public. 

“I’m angry,” said Karen Nickel, Chapman’s fellow co-founder, who visited the neighborhood Monday. “I’m angry. I’m frustrated, disappointed, and I feel very, very bad for the people that are living in those homes, living in that subdivision.” 

Nickel said Just Moms hopes to share resources and information with Cades Cove residents and ensure those outside the neighborhood know what is being found. She criticized the Army Corps for not making the findings public more quickly.

“Stop using this excuse,” Nickel said. “…the rest of this community has the right to know.”

The revelation of the Cades Cove contamination comes at a time when St. Louis’ radioactive contamination is in the spotlight. 

The U.S. Senate is expected to vote this week on legislation that would expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act to residents of Missouri sickened by radioactive waste and several western states where atomic bomb testing exposed huge swaths of the nation to airborne radioactivity.

And Chapman is attending President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address on Thursday as U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley’s guest. 

The Riverfront Times’ Zach Linhares contributed to this report.

(Illustration by Tyler Gross)

Local governments in the St. Louis area could request radioactive waste testing from the state under a Missouri House bill that would appropriate money to a long-unfunded program. 

The Missouri House Conservation and Natural Resources Committee on Monday heard testimony on a bill that would transfer $300,000 to a radioactive waste investigations fund created six years ago. 

Despite the fund passing the legislature in 2018 and being signed into law by Gov. Mike Parson, it has never had any money allocated to it.

The funding — double what Parson recommended in his proposed budget — would allow the state to test sites that are feared to be contaminated with decades-old radioactive waste. 

“Legacy waste from the Manhattan Project has been bought, resold, moved around the area, leaving in its path radioactive contamination to the extent that we don’t necessarily know every single last place that it still exists,” said state Rep. Mark Matthiesen, an O’Fallon Republican.

Five revelations about St. Louis’ history with radioactive waste

The committee took no action on the bill Monday evening. 

Federal agencies are working to clean up several sites, but Matthiesen said the fund would allow state environmental regulators to identify nearby residential areas that could be contaminated.

“There’s many areas where we have known contamination but there could potentially be some areas surrounding those known areas where there could still be contamination that is yet to be identified,” he said. 

The St. Louis area has struggled for decades with remnant radioactive waste from World War II. The city was integral to the Manhattan Project, the name given to the war-ear effort to build the world’s first atomic bomb. Waste from uranium refining efforts in downtown St. Louis was transported to several sites in St. Louis and St. Charles counties, contaminating parks, lakes and Coldwater Creek.

Parts of the region aren’t expected to be remediated until 2038 — 93 years after the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japan and almost 90 years after the waste was identified as a risk to Coldwater Creek.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is remediating Coldwater Creek, which runs through what are now busy suburbs. It was contaminated in the years after World War II when radioactive waste was dumped at the nearby St. Louis airport and at a property in Hazelwood. 

For decades, the contaminated creek water exposed residents to radioactive waste. A federal study found the creek contamination raised the risk of certain cancers for people who lived nearby and children played in the creek. 

From the airport, the radioactive waste was sold and moved to Hazelwood where it again sat next to and leaked into Coldwater Creek. The Cotter Corporation, which bought the waste to extract valuable metals, then requested to dump the remaining waste that had no economic value at a quarry in Weldon Spring or bury it onsite. When the federal government denied the company permission, it illegally dumped the waste at the West Lake Landfill where it remains today.

The Environmental Protection Agency is leading the effort to design a remediation for the landfill.

The decades-long problem has come under new scrutiny as the EPA works to start remediation at West Lake and an outside expert identified contamination at an elementary school next to Coldwater Creek.

The Missouri Independent, in partnership with MuckRock and the Associated Press, revealed last summer that federal officials and companies that handled the waste knew the radioactive waste posed a risk to St. Louis-area residents for years before making it known to the public. 

In 1949, Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, which refined uranium in downtown St. Louis for the Manhattan Project, realized waste stored in decaying steel drums at the airport threatened to leak into Coldwater Creek. It determined that workers couldn’t move the material to new containers because “the hazards to the workers involved in such an occupation would be considerable.”

But despite knowing the waste was spreading, federal officials downplayed the risks for years. 

State Rep. Paula Brown, a Democrat from Hazelwood, noted despite the EPA reaching a decision on how to handle the West Lake Landfill, “there is still no shovel in the ground.” She noted activists for years told the EPA the agency didn’t have a handle on where all of the radioactive waste was and urged further testing of the landfill.

“They kept saying, ‘No, it’s not. No it’s not,’” Brown said. “Well, they have found it. It is awful…so this is an important bill.”

Coldwater Creek runs by the St. Louis airport and through Florissant and Hazelwood before flowing into the Missouri River. The creek is contaminated by nuclear waste left over from the effort to build the first atomic bomb during World War II (Theo Welling/Riverfront Times).

More than 70 years after workers first realized barrels of radioactive waste risked contaminating Coldwater Creek, the federal government has started work to put up signs warning residents.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said in a statement Monday that it was working with the Environmental Protection Agency to add signs along the creek to help it monitor areas “that may pose a risk if disturbed.”

Coldwater Creek has been contaminated for decades with radioactive waste left over from the World War II-era effort to build an atomic bomb. But though the creek winds through some of St. Louis’ busiest suburbs and past public parks and schools, the federal government had resisted calls to post signs warning visitors of the contamination.

“This is decades of potential exposure that could have been prevented that they drug their feet on,” said Dawn Chapman, co-founder of Just Moms STL, an organization formed to advocate for communities affected by St. Louis-area radioactive waste.

Despite the delays, Chapman said she’s thankful that the signs are finally going to be installed. 

The St. Louis area has long struggled with a radioactive waste problem. Uranium for the Manhattan Project, the name given to the effort to develop the first atomic bomb, was refined in downtown St. Louis.

After World War II, radioactive waste left over from those efforts was trucked to the St. Louis airport and dumped — some on the open ground and some in barrels — next to Coldwater Creek. As early as 1949, Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, the company that refined uranium for the federal government, was aware the waste could escape deteriorating barrels and enter the creek.

The waste was later sold and moved to a property in Hazelwood where it once again sat in the open next to Coldwater Creek. In the 1970s, the remaining waste that couldn’t be processed to extract valuable metals was transported to the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton and dumped there illegally. It’s still there today. 

Coldwater Creek is expected to be cleaned up by 2038 — 89 years after Mallinckrodt realized the waste could pose a risk to the creek.

U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, whose district includes all of St. Louis City and much of northern St. Louis County, introduced legislation in 2022 that would have required the Army Corps to install signs around Coldwater Creek. In a statement Monday, Bush said she was proud her office was working with the Army Corps and EPA to get the signs posted.

“North County residents have been unknowingly living and raising their families amongst radioactive contamination dumped by the federal government for years,” Bush said.

Bush said the community deserves to be “made whole,” which starts by “ensuring residents are aware of the existence of any environmental harms in our own backyard.” 

While the Army Corps, which has overseen the sites since the late 1990s, said the remaining contaminated sites surrounding Coldwater Creek only pose a risk if they’re disturbed, in previous decades exposure to the creek’s waters may have raised the risk of cancer for St. Louis residents. 

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry concluded in 2019 that children and adults who played in or near Coldwater Creek or lived in its floodplain between the 1960s and 1990s may have been exposed to radioactive materials that raise the risk of certain cancers. The agency — part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — recommended signs be placed along the creek to warn residents of the potential exposure risk.

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Army Corps said at the time doing so wasn’t its role.

The Army Corps said there was nothing specific that caused the agency to change its mind on installing signs. The decision was “driven by our commitment to continuous improvement,” George Stringham, a spokesman for the Army Corps, said in an email. 

Stringham said the Army Corps would “continue to prioritize the health and safety of the community.”

“We are adding signage to help inform the community and let them know where to go to for accurate information as well as provide a resource for anyone that needs to dig in areas near Coldwater Creek that may need support from our office,” Stringham said. 

The Army Corps doesn’t yet have details to share regarding the number of signs and locations along the creek where they would be posted.

The EPA said the decision to add the signs “does not reflect a new or increased level of concern about the human health risk.”

The announcement comes at a time of renewed focus on St. Louis’ radioactive waste problem. Bush and U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley have sought compensation for residents sickened because of exposure to radioactive waste, and an investigation by The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press found that private companies and government agencies downplayed the risks associated with the contamination for decades .

Andy Quinones, senior communications manager for the city of Florissant, said the Army Corps had requested to put signs in several of the city’s parks that sit along the creek.

“I’m glad,” Quinones said, “that they are taking the initiative to start doing a better job of informing the public.”

Sen. Josh Hawley delayed the NDAA’s cloture vote by about 90 minutes. A motion he filed to stop the procedural vote failed, 26-73 (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images).

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate took an important step Tuesday toward passing the nation’s annual defense policy bill, but the legislation did not include provisions aimed at compensating victims of radioactive contamination in St. Louis and around the country.

The reliably bipartisan legislation is expected to hit the same hard-right opposition in the U.S. House that has dogged lawmakers since the beginning of this Congress.

The Democratic-led upper chamber voted to end debate on this year’s $886 billion National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, in an overwhelmingly bipartisan 85-15 tally. The legislation will greenlight, but not directly fund, the continuation of U.S. military operations and nuclear weapons programs.

The bill is expected to receive final Senate approval Wednesday and reach the GOP-led House floor Thursday, where a group of far-right members accuse colleagues on both sides of the aisle of stripping the final compromise text of conservative priorities.

On the conservative wish list: Prohibiting the Pentagon’s leave and travel allowances for troops seeking abortion in states where it remains legal, and prohibiting gender reassignment surgery and hormone treatments for service members.

Congress members often use the bill as a vehicle for various legislation because lawmakers reliably get it done.

Republican U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri vowed last week to “do everything in my power to slow (NDAA passage) or stop it if I can” after his amendment to compensate those exposed to residual radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project was stripped from the final bill.

On Tuesday Hawley delayed the NDAA’s cloture vote by about 90 minutes. A motion he filed to stop the procedural vote failed, 26-73.

Hawley’s original amendment, which passed the Senate in July to be attached to the NDAA, would have opened the compensation program for St. Louis, Missouri residents and to those living in Colorado, Idaho, Guam, Montana and New Mexico, as well as expanded coverage areas in Arizona, Nevada and Utah.

Hawley was among 15 votes Tuesday against advancing the overall bill.

Sen. Ben Ray Luján, a New Mexico Democrat, spoke Tuesday on the floor along with Hawley criticizing the amendment’s removal.

“This is legislation which we all fought for,” Luján said. “We passed this with a bipartisan strong vote of the Senate, it’s now been taken out of NDAA in conference. What do I tell these families?”

Luján joined Hawley in voting against ending debate on the bill.

This year hard-right members are further incensed by House Speaker Mike Johnson’s agreement to tack on a temporary extension until April of the nation’s foreign surveillance law that was set to expire by year’s end.

Lawmakers on both sides of the political spectrum have criticized the surveillance law as “unlawful, mass surveillance of Americans,” as former House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Biggs of Arizona protested on X on Friday.

In a joint statement issued by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the senators thanked Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, for the “House’s commitment to extend vital national security authorities” under the surveillance law.

The pair promised the surveillance law will be negotiated on its own next year.

Praise for the NDAA

Schumer praised the defense package on the Senate floor Tuesday for bipartisan, bicameral support and specifically highlighted the authorization of Virginia-class submarines to Australia in a trilateral agreement also involving the United Kingdom.

“This historic agreement will create a new fleet of nuclear-powered submarines to counter the Chinese Communist Party’s influence in the Pacific,” Schumer said.

South Dakota Republican Sen. John Thune similarly said the bill “makes some genuine progress on the readiness front.” Speaking on the Senate floor Tuesday morning, Thune said “above all” he is pleased with authorization of funding for the B-21 bomber plane program, which will be located in his state at Ellsworth Air Force Base.

“I’m also pleased that this year’s NDAA takes measures to keep our military’s focus on warfighting and not the dissemination of woke ideologies by Pentagon bureaucrats,” Thune said on the floor.

The final language includes a Senate amendment to temporarily freeze the hiring of any Department of Defense positions related to diversity, equity and inclusion, often referred to as DEI. A GOP-led House amendment to eliminate the department’s DEI offices and positions, including Chief Diversity Officer, did not make it into the final bill.

However, a compromise amendment to establish a pay cap for Defense employees working solely on DEI initiatives also appeared in the final text.

A last-ditch effort by Sen. Joni Ernst that she described as “reversing the DoD abortion travel (policy)” failed, 47-53. The Iowa Republican tried to hold up the bill’s cloture vote and return it to negotiators for changes that could have included abortion policy language.

The Pentagon’s policy of allowing service members time off and travel reimbursement when seeking an abortion was the reason behind Alabama GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s nine-month blockade of hundreds of military nominees.

Despite Ernst’s objection, she voted to advance the full defense package.

Senators who also voted against advancing the NDAA included New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker, Indiana Republican Mike Braun, Utah Republican Mike Lee, Wyoming Republican Cynthia Lummis, Massachusetts Democrats Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren, Oregon Democrats Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden, Kentucky Republican Rand Paul, Vermont independent Bernie Sanders, Tuberville, Ohio Republican J.D. Vance, and Vermont Democrat Peter Welch.

Democratic Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania joined his colleagues Tuesday in supporting the defense package but in recent weeks has publicly criticized negotiators for leaving out his amendment to monitor private U.S. investment in advanced tech ventures in China.

The House GOP’s far-right opposition

The GOP’s far-right House Freedom Caucus members issued a statement Friday characterizing the compromise legislation as a “predetermined deal … reached behind closed doors (that) has been air dropped into the process to undermine many of the most critical House GOP positions.”

“Any reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) must be considered only with significant reforms as a standalone measure. Under no circumstances should an extension be attached to ‘must-pass’ legislation such as the (NDAA),” caucus members wrote.

Members are “prepared to use all available leverage to change the status quo. We will not simply vote ‘no’ on bad legislation and go home for Christmas,” the statement later said, referring to the defense policy bill as well as hinging foreign aid to Ukraine and Israel on changes to immigration policy.

If lawmakers send the defense policy package to President Joe Biden’s desk, the passage would mark Congress’ 63rd consecutive time doing so.

The White House released a statement Tuesday saying it “commends the strong, bipartisan work of the conference committee to negotiate and draft a National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that continues to strengthen our national defense, supports our dedicated troops and their families, and reinforces our alliances and partnerships around the world.”

“The NDAA provides the critical authorities we need to build the military required to deter future conflicts while supporting the servicemembers and their spouses and families who carry out that mission every day.”

The House and Senate versions of the massive defense package were reconciled by members from both chambers under the majority and minority leadership of both Armed Services committees, which included Sens. Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Roger Wicker of Mississippi, and Reps. Mike Rogers of Alabama and Adam Smith of Washington.

The “four corners,” as they are called in defense policy circles, released a joint statement on the compromise bill calling it Congress’ “most important responsibility.”

“Our nation faces unprecedented threats from China, Iran, Russia, and North Korea. It is vital that we act now to protect our national security,” they said in the Dec. 7 statement.

Both chambers are scheduled to leave Thursday afternoon for a three-week winter break. The current NDAA expires on Dec. 31.

A sign warns of radioactive material at the West Lake Landfill. Thousands of tons of nuclear waste from the Manhattan Project were dumped there in the 1970s (Theo Welling/Riverfront Times).

U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley said Thursday he would do everything he could to stop a federal defense spending bill after a provision offering compensation to Americans exposed to decades-old radioactive waste was removed. 

Speaking on the floor of the Senate, the Missouri Republican called the decision to remove compensation for Americans who have suffered rare cancers and autoimmune diseases a “scar on the conscience of this body.”

“This is an injustice,” Hawley said. “This is this body turning its back on these good, proud Americans.”

This summer, the Senate amended the National Defense Authorization Act to expand the existing Radiation Exposure Compensation Act to include parts of the St. Louis region where individuals were exposed to leftover radioactive material from the development of the first atomic bomb. It would have also included parts of the Southwest where residents were exposed to bomb testing. 

But the provision was removed Wednesday by a conference committee of senators and members of the U.S. House of Representatives working out differences between the two chambers’ versions of the bill.

Even before the text of the amended bill became available Wednesday night, U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri was decrying the removal of the radiation compensation policy. 

“This is a major betrayal of thousands and thousands of Missourians who have been lied to and ignored for years,” Hawley said in a post on social media Wednesday. 

Dawn Chapman, a co-founder of Just Moms STL, fought back tears Wednesday night as she described hearing the “gut-wrenching” news from Hawley’s staff. Chapman and fellow moms have been advocating for families exposed to or near radioactive waste for years. 

“I actually thought we had a chance,” Chapman said. But she said the group hopes to get the expansion passed another way. 

“Nobody has given up on it,” Chapman said.

Records reveal 75 years of government downplaying, ignoring risks of St. Louis radioactive waste

The St. Louis region has suffered from a radioactive waste problem for decades. The area was instrumental in the Manhattan Project, the name given to the effort to build an atomic bomb during World War II. Almost 80 years later, residents of St. Louis and St. Charles counties are still dealing with the fallout. 

After the war, radioactive waste produced from refining uranium was trucked from downtown St. Louis to several sites in St. Louis County where it contaminated property at the airport and seeped into Coldwater Creek. In the 1970s, remaining nuclear waste that couldn’t be processed to extract valuable metals was trucked to the West Lake Landfill and illegally dumped. It remains there today.

During the Cold War, uranium was processed in St. Charles County. A chemical plant and open ponds of radioactive waste remained at the site in Weldon Spring for years. The site was remediated in the early 2000s, but groundwater contamination at the site is not improving fast enough, according to the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.

For years, St. Louis-area residents have pointed to the radioactive waste to explain rare cancers, autoimmune diseases and young deaths. A study by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry found people who lived along Coldwater Creek or played in its waters faced an increased risk of cancer.

Chapman said she knew two individuals who made calls to members of Congress while receiving chemotherapy. It’s hard to ask people to keep fighting for the legislation, she said. 

“They’re not going to see another Christmas, and they’re not going to see the compensation from this,” Chapman said. “This won’t help them.” 

Was your family affected by radiation from the Manhattan Project? We want to hear your story

An investigation by The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press this summer found that the private companies and federal agencies handling and overseeing the waste repeatedly downplayed the danger despite knowledge that it posed a risk to human health.

After the report was published, Hawley decried the federal government’s failures and vowed to introduce legislation to help. 

So did U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, D-St. Louis. In a statement Wednesday night, she said the federal government’s failure to compensate those who have been harmed by radioactive waste is “straight up negligence.”

“The people of St. Louis deserve better, and they deserve to be able to live without worry of radioactive contamination,” Bush said. 

Missouri’s junior senator, Republican Eric Schmitt, grew up near the West Lake Landfill. He said in a statement that the “fight is far from over” and that he will look into other legislation to get victims compensation.

“The careless dumping of this waste happened across Missouri, including in my own backyard of St. Louis, and has negatively impacted Missouri communities for decades,” Schmitt said. “I will not stop fighting until it is addressed.”

Already, two state lawmakers have pre-filed legislation related to radioactive waste in advance of the Missouri General Assembly reconvening in January. One doubles the budget of a state radioactive waste investigation fund. The other requires further disclosure of radioactive contamination when one sells or rents a house.

In July, the U.S. Senate voted 61-37  to adopt Hawley’s amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act expanding the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act to include the St. Louis area. It would have also expanded the coverage area to compensate victims exposed to testing of the atomic bomb in New Mexico. The amendment included residents of New Mexico, Colorado, Idaho, Montana and Guam and expanded the coverage area in Nevada, Utah and Arizona, which are already partially covered.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that expanding the program could cost $147.1 billion over 10 years with St. Louis’ portion taking up $3.7 billion of that. 

The amendment would have also renewed the program for existing coverage areas. Without renewal, it will expire in the coming months. 

Hawley said, however, the “fight is not over.” 

“I will come to this floor as long as it takes. I will introduce this bill as long as it takes,” he said. “I will force amendment votes as long as it takes until we compensate the people of this nation who have sacrificed for this nation.” 

This story has been updated. 

A fishing boat sits at Lake No. 34 in August A. Busch Memorial Conservation Area. Lake 34 is one of several that were contaminated by a nearby uranium refining plant decades ago (Allison Kite/Missouri Independent).

Steve Allen and Eric Singsaas grew up hunting and fishing in August A. Busch Memorial Conservation Area and swimming in quarries along the Missouri River in St. Charles County, never knowing they were playing near nuclear waste. 

“Everything we did,” Allen said in an interview, “we did together.”

Allen said he and Singsaas even attended a tour of an old uranium plant nearby — put on by the federal government in 1991.

“For the most part, we trusted what the government told us,” Allen said, “and surely, in our brain, if there was something bad there, (the government) wouldn’t allow us to be there.”

Decades later, Singsaas woke up with a numb foot. Within a week, he found out he had three cancerous brain tumors. 

Two years later, he died. 

It’s unclear what confluence of factors may have caused  Singsaas’s cancer diagnosis and death in 2018, at the age of 50, or whether exposure to radioactive contamination played any part. But testing results from sampling conducted by the Department of Energy show that, in the 1980s and 1990s, three lakes within the Busch conservation area — almost 7,000 acres of some of the busiest fishing lakes and hiking trails in the state — contained higher-than-natural levels of uranium and radioactivity. 

Several of the uranium readings are much higher than the EPA maximum level for uranium in drinking water, which was first set in 2003. 

Health experts say the levels would only pose a measurable threat if someone drank the lake water regularly. 

But in a region where contamination from America’s nuclear age has been allowed to spread even when the federal government and private companies knew of the danger, and generations of residents watched loved ones suffer from rare cancers and autoimmune diseases, those assurances can ring hollow. After discovering contaminated water flowing from Burgermeister Spring into the lakes in the mid-1980s, the Missouri Department of Conservation resisted calls to install signs warning visitors of the risks, dismissing it as the “most drastic thing we could do” and arguing that people would inevitably disregard any state-mandated prohibition on swimming in the lakes or eating fish.

And while the plant started processing radioactive material in the 1950s, federal records of uranium monitoring only date back to the 1980s. Neither the Department of Energy nor the Department of Defense has records from the 10 years the Weldon Spring plant processed uranium. The plant sat shuttered, and the groundwater wasn’t monitored for at least 10 years after that.

Denise DeGarmo, a political science professor who has researched and written about nuclear waste in the St. Louis region, said the government has never done sufficient testing to identify all of the contamination. She said the community’s trust in the federal government had eroded over decades of being ignored or brushed off. 

“They know when something’s wrong,” DeGarmo said. “They know that when red water is showing up in a muddle somewhere, it shouldn’t be there. They know when their kids are getting sick.” 

A federal study in the late 1990s cast doubt on potential health impacts from Weldon Spring Chemical Plant, which manufactured TNT and DNT and later refined uranium for the federal government. Waste from the plant contaminated quarries by the Missouri River and made its way into the groundwater and, eventually, to the Busch conservation area. 

State officials monitored the waters and tested fish in the Busch conservation area, which abuts  property that held the Weldon Spring Chemical Plant. 

But when the Department of Energy demolished the uranium plant and emptied the pits where radioactive waste was stored — and which had been exposed to wind and rain for decades  — officials decided to simply monitor the contamination in groundwater and surface water until it naturally dissipated.

And while the federal government has known since at least the 1980s that surface water around the Weldon Spring uranium plant was contaminated, the Busch lakes and other publicly-accessible bodies of water nearby have no signs warning visitors of potential hazards. 

Starting in the 1980s and continuing into the 2000s, state officials repeatedly said signs weren’t needed because the contamination wasn’t significant enough. 

In addition to the conservation area, radioactive contamination showed up in the 1980s in about 150 private drinking water wells, though the state health department concluded the water was affected by “naturally-occurring radioactive material.” Seventeen wells had radionuclide concentrations high enough to need to be routinely tested until the early 2000s, Lisa Cox, a spokesperson for the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, said in an email. 

Almost 25 years later, the Missouri Department of Natural Resources told federal officials the contamination in some areas of the site isn’t going away quickly enough. The department noted in a 2021 letter to the U.S. Department of Energy that contamination levels in some monitoring wells near where radioactive waste was stored at the site aren’t decreasing.

“The department has expressed concerns with the long-term monitoring and surveillance since the record of decision…in 2004,” Connie Patterson, a spokeswoman for the department of natural resources, said in an email. The department doesn’t believe, however, that the Busch lakes pose a human health threat. 

Through a spokesperson, the Department of Energy insists the site is now safe, and following the state’s 2021 concerns, the federal agency created a working group to identify locations for additional monitoring wells and evaluate solutions for further decontamination.

Decades of contamination 

St. Louis played a pivotal role in supplying uranium for the Manhattan Project, the name given to the effort to develop the first atomic bomb during World War II.

Uranium processed by workers at Mallinckrodt Chemical Works in downtown St. Louis was used in the first sustained nuclear chain reaction in Chicago, a key breakthrough in research for the bomb.

But for decades after the war, radioactive waste from the project was improperly transported and stored, causing contamination that remains in St. Louis and St. Charles counties today.

Waste from Mallinckrodt was stored at the St. Louis airport following the war in open piles and deteriorating barrels. Contamination seeped into Coldwater Creek, which runs through busy suburbs in St. Louis County, and polluted its waters for miles.

In the 1960s, the waste was sold and transported to Hazelwood for a private company to extract valuable metals. At that site, too, radioactive waste was able to erode into Coldwater Creek.

Once all of the valuable materials had been processed and moved offsite, the rest was scooped up with contaminated soil and dumped into the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton, where it remains today.

After World War II, Mallinckrodt started processing uranium in Weldon Spring for the federal government’s Cold War-era nuclear program. 

Waste from the plant was stored in open pits, and contaminated material from World War II was dumped in a quarry on the Missouri River.

Rainwater carried radioactive material from the disposal ponds, through streams and groundwater, more than a mile away into August A Busch Memorial Conservation Area, where uranium contaminated streamways and three fishing lakes.

“They said that it had been cleaned up already, even though there were little signs all over saying that the place was radioactive,” Lindsey said.

Lindsey said her unit once found an old train car full of 55-gallon drums in the woods near the site. They weren’t sure what was in them. 

It wasn’t until years later that Lindsey learned about the radioactive waste around St. Louis and its connection to the Manhattan Project. She said it was “lousy” her unit wasn’t made aware of what was around them.

“I don’t think most of us knew,” she said. “Because we would joke about, ‘Well yeah, if we step on this side of the barbed wire, we’ll be able to light our way home when we’re old.’ You know, it was funny.” 

She added: “Well, it’s funny in your 20s when you have no clue.”

Now 56, Lindsey said she sees a hematologist and an oncologist regularly, though the doctors don’t know what’s wrong. Her white and red blood cells take turns spiking and falling.

When she was training at Weldon Spring, Lindsey struggled with uterine fibroids and ovarian cysts. She had a total hysterectomy about 10 years ago because she was at risk of uterine cancer, she said. 

“When I was younger, it didn’t even bother me,” Lindsey said of the radioactive waste around her, “but I just keep thinking about how many other people that were out there training with me…are there people that are sick?”

Uranium in public lakes 

Sampling from the 1980s and ‘90s show uranium levels in the lakes and springs around the Mallinckrodt site and within Busch often exceeded what is now the Environmental Protection Agency’s limit for drinking water: 30 micrograms per liter. 

At that time, the EPA didn’t have a limit for uranium alone, though it had standards for radioactivity.

Testing conducted by the Department of Energy in 1989 showed uranium levels in Busch Lake No. 34 were as high as 57.6 micrograms per liter, almost twice the modern limit for drinking water. At Busch Lake No. 36, uranium levels reached almost 80 micrograms per liter in 1987. They fluctuated over the years but hit almost 80 again in 1996. 

Uranium levels were typically lowest in Busch Lake No. 35. Except for one extraordinarily high reading the department determined was an outlier, they never rose above the modern EPA drinking water standard once testing commenced. 

Burgermeister Spring, named after the family that lived there before World War II, feeds into the Busch conservation area and was found to have concentrations of uranium as high as 250 micrograms per liter, almost nine times the modern EPA drinking water limit, according to a 1987 report by the U.S. Geological Survey.

Uranium concentrations in Burgermeister have fallen over the years, but routinely exceeded 30 micrograms well into the 2010s. It repeatedly exceeded 100 micrograms until the early 2000s. Detections over 150 micrograms per liter would trigger contingency efforts.  

A risk assessment performed by the Department of Energy in 1997 found the contamination at that time would not pose a risk for recreational visitors. The EPA’s limit of 30 micrograms per liter for drinking water is based on someone drinking two liters of water a day for decades. 

Even then, Kathy Higley, a distinguished professor at Oregon State University who teaches courses on radiochemistry and dosimetry, said consuming water every day at the EPA limit of 30 micrograms per liter would only result in a dose of 4 millirem per year. The average annual dose of radiation from everyday sources — such cosmic radiation, X-ray machines and traveling by airplane — is 620.

That 4 millirems is “kind of in the noise,” she said.

“At really, really low doses…we can’t measure observable risks of cancer because there’s such a high natural background,” Higley said. 

Finding out about the cleanup at Weldon Spring years later made Dwain Jansen wonder if he ate contaminated fish when his family frequented the Busch conservation area in the 1980s. He said his family caught about 200 pounds of fish every year, primarily at Lake No. 34. 

His wife’s family fished there a lot, too. Jansen’s wife, Amber, died from complications related to cancer in 2011 at the age of 42. 

“It’s too young for someone to die,” Jansen said. “Can I point this toward Weldon Spring or the fish or well water? No, I have no definitive answer.”

Public awareness and cleanup

For decades, there have been no signs warning visitors the Busch lakes contained uranium.

Starting in the 1980s, the federal Department of Energy and the Missouri Department of Conservation simply said that they weren’t needed. John Vogel, who managed the Busch conservation area for the conservation department, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2003 the department didn’t want to put up signs and create a panic.

By then, uranium concentrations in the lakes had fallen compared to the high readings of the 1980s and 1990s. Asked if the department would make the same decision today, conservation department spokesman Dan Zarlenga said any agency communication about human health would be informed by the department’s state and federal partners, including the state health and natural resources departments and the EPA, which “have the expertise to make these determinations.” 

When officials began studying the site and preparing to remediate it, they looked into strategies to decontaminate the groundwater, the Environmental Protection Agency said in a statement.

But both “conventional and innovative techniques for active remediation were ineffective due to the site’s complex hydrogeological features,” EPA spokesperson Kellen Ashford said in an email.  

Zarlenga said the department was planning to collect fish from the Busch lakes this fall to test for uranium and other heavy metals.

What remains unclear is how dangerous the waters in Busch conservation area were in the years during — and just after — Mallinckrodt’s uranium operations in Weldon Spring.

Data provided by the Department of Energy show sampling started in 1987. But the department’s remedial investigation, released in 1992, references studies from the late 1970s and mid-1980s.

In an email, a Department of Energy spokesperson said the first samples the department performed were released in a report in 1986. It took control of the site from the Department of the Army in 1985.

The report says records “of routine environmental monitoring by (the Army) during previous years are unavailable.”

Asked about monitoring data, the Department of Defense referred questions back to the Department of Energy, saying it was not aware of any uranium monitoring by the federal government before 1985.

Coldwater Creek runs by the St. Louis airport and through Florissant and Hazelwood before flowing into the Missouri River. The creek is contaminated by nuclear waste left over from the effort to build the first atomic bomb during World War II (Theo Welling/Riverfront Times).

Cleaning up Coldwater Creek and other radioactive waste sites in St. Louis County will cost more than twice what federal officials thought six years ago, a new federal report finds. 

A report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office released Tuesday finds the government’s financial liability at the sites ballooned from $177 million in 2016 to $406 million last year, primarily because of additional contamination that forced the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to expand the investigation and cleanup to include the creek’s 10-year floodplain. 

The report takes to task the Army Corps, which is overseeing the cleanup of Coldwater Creek, a tributary of the Missouri River that has been contaminated for decades by radioactive waste leftover from the development of the first atomic bomb during World War II. 

GAO auditors found the Army Corps didn’t sufficiently meet several best management practices, which could help prevent cost overruns or identify risks with cleanup projects. The Army Corps largely agreed with the findings of the report. 

Tuesday’s report follows the GAO’s earlier findings that the U.S. government’s environmental liabilities pose a high risk. 

“In our most recent high-risk list update, we found that departments and agencies, including the Department of Defense, need to take additional steps to monitor, report on and better understand their environmental liabilities,” the report says. 

The GAO’s report focuses on sites within the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program, which was created in the 1970s to clean up areas contaminated in the course of the Manhattan Project, the name given to the World War II nuclear weapons program.

A monthslong investigation by The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press published earlier this year found radioactive waste was known to pose a threat to people living near Coldwater Creek as early as 1949, but federal officials repeatedly wrote potential risks off as “slight,” “minimal” or “low-level.”

St. Louis was pivotal to the Manhattan Project, resulting in a decades-long radioactive contamination problem. Uranium was refined in downtown St. Louis during the war, contaminating surrounding properties.

Records reveal 75 years of government downplaying, ignoring risks of St. Louis radioactive waste

After the war, waste from the downtown site was trucked to St. Louis County, sometimes spilling along the way, and dumped at the airport. Decaying barrels released radioactive waste into Coldwater Creek, and despite acknowledging the risk of contamination, the private company that produced the waste thought it was too dangerous for workers to put the material in new barrels.

Eventually, the waste was sold to another private company and moved to a property on Latty Avenue, also adjacent to Coldwater Creek. The material was stored in the open where it could continue to contaminate the creek. 

The Cotter Corp., which purchased the waste to extract valuable metals, dried and shipped most of it to its facility in Colorado before dumping the rest in the West Lake Landfill, where it remains today. 

The Army Corps has authority through FUSRAP over the downtown, Coldwater Creek, airport and Latty Avenue sites, but cleanup of the landfill is being overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency. 

U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, D-St. Louis, requested the GAO investigate the Army Corps stewardship of the sites in 2021. She noted in a statement the report found that, compared to other FUSRAP sites, the St. Louis sites are near some of the most underserved communities.

“The federal government bears full responsibility for ensuring that this waste is expeditiously cleaned up and that all those harmed are made whole,” Bush said.

The Army Corps’ liability at the downtown site where Mallinckrodt Chemical Works refined uranium during World War II also rose precipitously. 

The GAO report evaluated the cleanup efforts and costs at 19 FUSRAP sites spread across eight states, totaling $2.6 billion in environmental liabilities. Four of those sites make up about 75% of that total amount: the North St. Louis County sites; the Niagara Falls Storage Site in New York; the Shallow Land Disposal Area, in Parks Township, Pa., outside Pittsburgh; and Guterl Specialty Steel, also in Niagara County, N.Y. 

These four sites generally require complex cleanup work or cover large areas; for example, the Niagara Falls Storage Site has several types of buried radioactive waste that will be exhumed, packaged and shipped to an offsite location, officials say. In addition, eight of the 19 sites are within or adjacent to underserved racial or ethnic populations or have high rates of poverty compared with the rest of the county where they are located. 

All told, the liability estimate for all 19 sites has grown by nearly $1 billion, or roughly 63%, over the past seven years, the GAO found.

Difficult cleanups

For years, contaminated soil at the downtown site wasn’t accessible to the Army Corps, the report says, because it was under a building that was in use by the property owner. The owner of the site decided to grant access, and the Corps found it had additional cleanup work to do, increasing the liability for the site from $17 million to $96 million within a year. 

The GAO also found the Army Corps sites in St. Louis city and county are all situated in underserved communities. 

While 53% of the residents of St. Louis are from underserved racial or ethnic groups, the report says, 80% of individuals near the downtown Mallinckrodt site are. The area’s poverty rate is 1.5 times higher than the rest of the city. 

In St. Louis County, 29% of residents are from underserved groups compared to 63% of residents near the radioactive sites. Like downtown, the area suffers from a poverty rate 1.5 times the rest of the county. 

The Government Accountability Office found the Army Corps could benefit from better management practices, including a risk management program. 

While Army Corps conducts risk management operations on individual projects, the GAO found it doesn’t have a risk management plan for the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program as a whole. Doing so could help it more efficiently allocate resources, the report says. 

“Furthermore, better risk management could help the Corps plan for uncertainties, such as the discovery of more contamination requiring cleanup, that may affect future environmental liability,” the GAO says. 

The report says a risk management program could also identify potential opportunities affecting the entire program. The report gives, as an example, the $182 million the Army Corps received in appropriations but hasn’t spent because of its limited staffing. 

In a response included in the report, the U.S. Department of Defense largely concurred with the GAO’s recommendations and said it would work with the Army to implement several management practices.

Bush said the report shows the Army Corps is “leaving money on the table as a result of mismanagement” and needs to build trust and improve communication with the community.

“This report validates concerns people have been raising for years,” Bush said. “The Corps must heed their recommendations without delay.”

Congressman Jamie Raskin, D-Maryland, ranking member on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, said in a statement that the long delay in remediating Manhattan Project sites is “unconscionable.” 

“Decades after the federal government generated large amounts of toxic nuclear waste as a result of nuclear weapons production,” Raskin said, “America’s most underserved communities still bear the brunt of deadly contamination from one of the most significant environmental disasters in our nation’s history.” 

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, speaks at a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday alongside individuals advocating for the extension of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) program (Samantha Dietel/States Newsroom).

WASHINGTON — Victims of nuclear contamination rallied in the nation’s capital on Wednesday in support of bipartisan legislation that would extend compensation for those harmed by radioactive waste.

U.S. Sens. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, and Ben Ray Luján, a New Mexico Democrat, held a rally and press conference outside the U.S. Capitol as part of their efforts to advance legislation to extend coverage from the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, or RECA, program.

People from New Mexico, Utah and Missouri, including Just Moms STL advocates and others from St. Louis who had been harmed by nuclear contamination, joined the event.

Hawley sponsored an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that the Senate adopted in July. The defense bill, which is not yet finalized, authorizes Department of Defense policy for the next fiscal year.

This amendment extends the RECA program to include people in St. Louis who were affected by improperly stored Manhattan Project waste. The Manhattan Project was the U.S. nuclear weapons development program in the 1940s that created the atomic bomb.

An investigation earlier this year by The Missouri Independent and MuckRock found that, for decades, private companies and federal agencies knew the haphazardly handled waste posed a risk to human health and the environment but downplayed it.

Following World War II, uranium refined in downtown St. Louis was dumped, uncovered, at the city’s airport. Chunks of radioactive waste fell from trucks on the road from the processing facility to St. Louis County.

Once at the airport, the wind and rainwater carried the waste into Coldwater Creek, which won’t be fully remediated for another 15 years.

“If a government is going to create a disaster, the government should clean it up,” Hawley said. 

Hawley said it is the responsibility of the federal government to “pay the bills of the men and women who have gotten sick,” and to “pay the survivor benefits of those who have been lost.”

“The government used the city of St. Louis as a uranium processing facility as a major site, and then when that was over, what did it do? Did it take care of the waste? No,” Hawley said. “It allowed it to seep into the groundwater. It allowed it to get into Coldwater Creek. It allowed it to get into the soil.”

Hawley referenced high breast cancer and childhood brain tumor rates in St. Louis, and said it’s not a coincidence. 

“Generations of Missourians, children, were poisoned because of the government’s negligence,” Hawley said. 

Expansion of RECA

Expanding the compensation program would allow individuals in ZIP codes affected by the waste to receive compensation if they suffer from certain cancers or diseases.

RECA coverage would also be extended to New Mexico “downwinders,” who lived downwind of the bomb’s testing site in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and post-1971 uranium miners.

Colorado, Idaho, Montana and Guam would also be given coverage under the amendment, with coverage expanded to areas in Nevada, Utah and Arizona not already included.

“Justice is not complete until it is justice for all, and that is what we are asking for — justice for everybody who was hurt in the mining,” said U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez, a New Mexico Democrat who spoke at the event.

Hawley, Luján and U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo, an Idaho Republican, worked in a bipartisan effort to get the amendment included in the defense authorization bill, which still must be negotiated by the House and Senate. 

The RECA program is currently due to sunset in 2024, but Hawley’s amendment would extend the program for an additional 19 years once enacted, according to a press release.

Hawley and Luján said they are optimistic and hopeful that the amendment will be included in the final version of the defense policy bill.

“Senators, you did an amazing thing,” Fernandez told Hawley and Luján. “I saw you working. I saw all of you working on the floor. We were watching, and we were crying. We were crying out of pride, and the idea that this is the moment, this is the historical moment when this will finally get done.”

Lasting impact on Navajo Nation

Crystalyne Curley, speaker of the Navajo Nation Council, said there is a debt owed to Navajo uranium workers. She said from 1944 to 1986, nearly 300 million tons of uranium was extracted from Navajo Nation.

Curley said the government failed to adequately communicate with Navajo uranium workers and neglected to translate the risks associated with the exposure to radiation. This has led to generations of illnesses and deaths across Navajo communities, Curley said.

Curley told the audience about Leslie Begay, one of the victims, who was sitting in a wheelchair near her. Begay served in the Marine Corps and mined uranium, she said, “and he was rewarded with disease and near-death experiences.”

Curley said Begay struggled to access the medical treatment he needed, as he was turned away from the Indian Health Service and Department of Veterans Affairs. Begay was eventually able to receive a double lung transplant, Curley said.

Luján spoke about his father, who worked in Los Alamos and died from lung cancer linked to nuclear contamination.

“While it (the cancer) had spread, he believed that he needed stronger lungs, and he would tell us, ‘Lend me your breath,’” Luján said, choking up.

“You’re lending your breath to many people,” Luján told Begay. 

Phil Harrison, a former uranium miner, also spoke at the event. He is a founder of the Navajo Uranium Radiation Victims’ Committee, which helped to first get RECA passed in 1990.

Harrison said his father died from lung cancer when he was 43 years old. Harrison’s own kidneys failed, he said.

“I thought I just had a mosquito bite, rash all over my body,” Harrison said.

He said he drank water in the mine while working his eight-hour shifts. He said no one had told him about the potential safety risks of his actions.

Harrison said the Navajo miners “couldn’t read and write and understand.” They “were given a shovel simply to feed their families, put food and clothes on the table,” Harrison said.

“We protected national security, so you all can have freedom,” Harrison said.

New Mexico and Utah downwinders

Tina Cordova, co-founder of Tularosa Basin Downwinders Conservation, said she represents the people who lived “as close as 12 miles to where they detonated the first bomb in the desert of New Mexico.”

New Mexico residents who suffered after the first atomic bomb was detonated at a test site 200 miles from the laboratory in Los Alamos still haven’t been compensated.

The first atomic bomb was detonated in the Tularosa Basin in July 1945 with no warning to residents.

The “downwinders” in New Mexico still aren’t eligible for compensation offered to residents downwind of another test site in Nevada. Residents downwind of that site in parts of Nevada, Utah and New Mexico can receive a payment of up to $50,000.

“They didn’t have the decency to let us know that as that ash fell from the sky for days afterwards, that it would completely contaminate our water supply,” Cordova said.

She said she is the fourth generation in her family to have cancer since 1945.

“And this is what a fifth generation looks like,” Cordova said, and held up a photograph of her 23-year-old niece who has been diagnosed with thyroid cancer.

Cordova was diagnosed with thyroid cancer when she was 39, she said.

“This is the legacy of the nuclear development and testing that took place in our country during the Cold War and before, and it is time for justice,” Cordova said.

Mary Dickson, a “downwinder” from Salt Lake City, Utah, said she and other nuclear contamination victims are the legacy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who is often called the “father of the atomic bomb.”

Dickson, who had thyroid cancer and had a hysterectomy due to tumors, said two of her sisters were also diagnosed with cancers. Dickson’s older sister died from cancer, and her niece has thyroid cancer. 

She said 54 people from her neighborhood in Salt Lake City have had different cancers, tumors or illnesses related to radiation. 

“When we hear that we must be fiscally responsible, I ask you, what is the life of my sister worth?” Dickson said. “What are the lives of your families worth? There can be no amount that can make up for their lives.”

Dickson said this struggle is “not just physical, it’s emotional, it’s financial.”

“Every time I feel a lump, every time I get sick, I worry that it’s happening again,” Dickson said.

Protecting St. Louis

Dawn Chapman, co-founder of Just Moms STL, an organization aiming to protect people from further exposure to radioactive waste from the atomic bomb, said they were not “asking for a handout.”

“We’re asking for the extension of a program that’s already in existence,” Chapman said. “And we’re asking for people to be included, who frankly this program was created for — and why in the world they were left out of it, I have no idea.”

Hawley said that everyone is affected by this issue and “this ought to be something that everybody can get behind.” 

“We need to get out there and make sure that we start testing the people in St. Louis and throughout Missouri who were exposed so we can save their lives,” Fernandez said.

Hawley said 301 dump truckloads of radioactive waste have been carted out near Jana Elementary School in Florissant, Missouri. The school was shut down in October 2022 following signs of radioactivity on the property.

“Just two months ago, they were telling us there is no radioactive waste nearby, no reason to be concerned,” Hawley said. “Now they are carting it out, and they’re also telling the community, though, ‘You’re just going to have to live with it, we’re not going to reopen the school.’”

The school needs to be cleaned up and reopened, Hawley said.

Allison Kite of The Missouri Independent contributed to this report.

A Republic Services truck enters the West Lake Landfill property. The company, which also owns the adjacent Bridgeton Landfill, is partially responsible for the costs of decontaminating the West Lake Landfill, which contains thousands of tons of radioactive waste and contaminated soil. (Theo Welling/Riverfront Times)

For thousands of families who lived and worked near top-secret nuclear testing sites or uranium processing facilities in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, the road to getting an official apology from the federal government — and financial help for medical bills related to cancers and other diseases — might be coming to an end.

The U.S. Senate, with bipartisan support, voted narrowly in late July to expand a program that compensates Americans who become ill because of exposure to radiation from the country’s development and testing of nuclear weapons and the buildup to the Cold War. President Joe Biden has signaled his support for the proposal and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm visited one of the contaminated sites during a visit to St. Louis this month. Senators attached the legislation to the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual defense bill that still needs approval by the U.S. House of Representatives.

If passed into law, the victims’ fund would extend health care coverage and compensation to more uranium industry workers and so-called “downwinders” exposed to radiation in several new regions — Colorado, Missouri, New Mexico, Idaho, Montana and Guam — and expand coverage to remaining parts of Arizona, Nevada and Utah.

It would also be particularly significant for the Navajo Nation, one of the most affected tribal areas from the world’s first atomic bomb testing in 1945.

Years of attempts by New Mexico legislators to extend and expand the program, which is set to run out of funding in 2024, had previously failed. But “Oppenheimer,” the new film about the development of the nuclear bomb, brought renewed attention to those impacted. And the latest proposed expansion comes in response to “Atomic Fallout,” an investigation by The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press, which found that, since the late 1940s, private companies and the federal government repeatedly downplayed the potential health risks of contamination in the St. Louis region. In internal memos, they wrote off health risks from exposed nuclear waste leaching into groundwater and neighborhood creeks as “slight,” “minimal” or “low-risk.”

The issue has been covered extensively by journalists over the years but the trove of previously-unreleased documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act laid bare decades of failure that allowed radioactive waste created during the 1940s to linger in the St. Louis region 80 years later. (Read the documents and how journalists used them.)

The reaction from federal and Missouri state lawmakers was swift. Within days, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, who introduced the amendment to the Defense bill, and Rep. Cori Bush, D-Missouri, pledged action, calling the investigation “devastating” and decrying the federal government’s “negligence,” and Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey said his office would “do everything in our power to hold the federal government accountable.”

The proposed expansion — adding five additional states and the territory of Guam and significantly expanding regions of three other states — could result in thousands of additional claimants and hundreds of millions in federal compensation.

Since the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act Program began more than 20 years ago, in April 1992, more than 54,000 claims have been filed. Of those more than 40,000 claims, or about 75%, have been approved and roughly $2.6 billion has been paid out, as of the end of 2022. Claims for “downwinders” and uranium workers typically range from $50,000 to $100,000. The Department of Justice’s civil division, which oversees the program, says that, of the denials, just 16 claimants have appealed their determinations in federal district court.

Definitively proving that exposure to nuclear waste and radiation caused cancers and other diseases is difficult. But the federal program doesn’t require claimants prove causation. They only have to show that they or a relative had a qualifying disease after working or living in certain locations during specific time frames. In Missouri, for example, the affected areas in the proposed amendment include 20 ZIP codes and residents have to show they lived there for at least two years, from 1949 onward.

A federal study released in 2019 of one of the most heavily impacted sites, Coldwater Creek in North St. Louis County, found elevated rates of breast, colon, prostate, kidney and bladder cancers as well as leukemia in the area. Childhood brain and nervous system cancer rates are also higher.

We want to hear from those who may be affected by this new legislation. Fill out the form below and a journalist may reach out to you to get more information.

President Joe Biden delivers remarks in New Mexico on Wednesday. Biden expressed support for expanding a program to compensate people exposed to radiation from weapons production and testing to Missouri and New Mexico, among other states (Gino Gutierrez/Source NM).

President Joe Biden on Wednesday said he’s interested in expanding a federal program to compensate people who have gotten sick because of the country’s nuclear weapons development and testing programs. 

The Associated Press reported Biden told a crowd in New Mexico he was ”prepared to help in terms of making sure that those folks are taken care of.” The comment came a day after the president’s energy secretary stopped short of voicing support for the measure during a trip to St. Louis.

An expansion could open up compensation to St. Louis-area residents who have been exposed to radiological contamination left over from World War II. Some current and former St. Louis County residents face higher cancer risks because they unknowingly played in a creek contaminated by radioactive waste growing up.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Since 1990, the federal government has offered compensation to people who processed uranium or lived near weapons production and test sites and have developed illnesses associated with exposure to radiation.

But even though the first atomic bomb was tested in New Mexico in 1945, residents of the state who lived downwind of the test site weren’t covered. Neither were St. Louis-area residents who were exposed to radioactive waste left over from uranium refining during the development of the bomb.

Records reveal 75 years of government downplaying, ignoring risks of St. Louis radioactive waste

The U.S. Senate voted narrowly last month to expand the program, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, to New Mexico and Missouri residents as well as residents of Colorado, Idaho, Montana and Guam. It would also expand coverage in Nevada, Utah and Arizona, where “downwinders” in certain areas are already covered. Senators attached the legislation to the National Defense Authorization Act, which still needs approval by the U.S. House of Representatives.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, and Sen. Ben Ray Lujan, D-New Mexico, urged support for the expansion. 

“For decades — decades — they told the people of St. Louis, ‘No problem. There’s no problem here,’” Hawley said on the Senate floor last month. “Meanwhile, children were dying of cancer.” 

In a news release Thursday, Hawley said he was glad the president endorsed the legislation.

“Compensating victims of government-caused nuclear contamination and negligence should not be a partisan issue,” Hawley said. “It’s about justice.” 

Hawley said “we also must hear from the Biden Administration about their next steps to support victims in the St. Louis area and beyond.”

U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, D-St. Louis, said in a statement that she has long believed responsibility for the nuclear waste cleanup should fall to the federal government. She was glad to hear Biden’s support of expanding the compensation program.

Bush also met with Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on Tuesday to convey the community’s concerns about radioactive waste sites.

“I believe we are closer now than ever to expediting this cleanup, expediting testing and restoring health, safety and trust back in our community,” Bush said.

U.S. Rep. Ann Wagner, R-Missouri, said in a statement that she was supportive of Hawley and Lujan’s amendment and hoped a House-Senate conference committee keeps it in the final version of the bill. 

“The St. Louis area was significantly impacted by our country’s WWII nuclear program, and I will continue to advocate for those affected by it,” Wagner said. 

On Tuesday, Granholm visited St. Louis to tout projects funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Asked about expanding the compensation program in the defense bill, Granholm wouldn’t commit. 

“I can’t speak for the administration on that particular piece because I just don’t know the answer,” Granholm told reporters, “but it certainly is something worth looking at for sure to bring justice to the families that have been affected.” 

To this day, St. Louis struggles with radioactive contamination left behind from the World War II-era Manhattan Project.

Uranium was processed in downtown St. Louis for use in development of the bomb. After the war, it was trucked to several sites in St. Louis County where it contaminated property at the airport and seeped into Coldwater Creek. In the 1970s, remaining nuclear waste that couldn’t be processed to extract valuable metals was trucked to the West Lake Landfill and illegally dumped. It remains there today.

After World War II, uranium was still processed in St. Charles County, and a chemical plant and open ponds of radioactive waste remained in Weldon Spring for years. 

The site was remediated in the early 2000s, but groundwater contamination at the site is not improving fast enough, according to the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.

U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, left, and Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, to her right, take questions from reporters during the secretary's visit to St. Louis. Granholm would not commit to supporting federal legislation to offer compensation to St. Louis-area residents exposed to radioactive waste. (Allison Kite/Missouri Independent)

ST. LOUIS — Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm in a visit to Missouri on Tuesday would not commit to supporting bipartisan legislation meant to compensate people who have been exposed to radioactive material from U.S. weapons development and production.

“I can’t speak for the administration on that particular piece because I just don’t know the answer,” Granholm told reporters, “but it certainly is something worth looking at for sure to bring justice to the families that have been affected.” 

Granholm was in St. Louis to tout projects funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and attended a groundbreaking ceremony for a $400 million battery materials manufacturing facility. Her visit comes as her agency faces calls from activists and elected officials to clean up sites contaminated decades ago with nuclear waste from the World War II-era Manhattan Project.

In her remarks, Granholm didn’t mention the region’s struggle with radioactive waste. But she took questions on the subject. Later in the day, she visited a contaminated site in St. Charles County with U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, D-St. Louis.

“There is no doubt that we have to clean up these sites,” Granholm said, “and there’s no doubt that the testing and remediation is ongoing now…We’ve got to make sure that people feel safe.”

The St. Louis area was pivotal to the development of the first atomic bomb, and the Manhattan Project casts a long shadow over the region. Sites where uranium was processed or stored have been contaminated for decades, leading to higher cancer risks in some areas.

The issue has been covered extensively over the years, but a six-month investigation by The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press found that federal officials and private companies either downplayed or failed to fully investigate the extent of radioactive contamination in St. Louis and St. Charles counties, allowing generations of families to be exposed.

The findings prompted renewed calls for an end to the decades-long environmental disaster.

U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, called on Granholm to tour the sites and sent a list of questions to her office last month. 

“The allegations in this report demand answers,” Hawley wrote, referencing the reporting of The Independent, MuckRock and the AP. “The people of St. Louis have a right to know the full extent of radioactive contamination in their community.”

Five revelations about St. Louis’ history with radioactive waste

A bipartisan group of senators attached an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would expand an existing program to offer compensation to residents who have become ill because of possible exposure to radioactive waste. 

The legislation, which still faces a vote in the House of Representatives, would expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act to Missouri and long-overlooked communities downwind of where nuclear weapons were tested during World War II.

Dawn Chapman, co-founder of Just Moms STL, has been advocating for communities around the West Lake Landfill, a contaminated site in Bridgeton, for a decade.

Chapman believes Granholm’s predecessors at the U.S. Department of Energy and earlier nuclear regulators deceived Missouri. She had hoped to discuss the issue with the secretary during her visit, but she was unable to arrange a meeting. 

“To have her be so close to us and in town,” she said, “it is a really hard thing.”

She added: “There are people here who have just been through absolute tragedies in their family because of the agency she heads and what they did.”

Bush said in an interview Tuesday evening that Granholm wasn’t able to meet with residents who lived near contaminated sites or who had been harmed by nuclear waste because of her tight schedule.

But Bush met with advocates on Monday so she could convey their concerns to the secretary on Tuesday. Granholm was familiar with the sites and news findings about the Department of Energy’s earlier failures, Bush said.

She couldn’t share any commitments Granholm had made to take action at the sites, but Bush said the secretary was receptive to the community’s concerns. Bush said she and Granholm talked about how urgently the sites need remediation.

“While we’re waiting for this cleanup to be completed…people are still dying…people are still getting sick,” Bush said, adding: “It’s a matter of life and death.”

In the St. Louis area, contamination from the Manhattan Project lingered in numerous sites for decades. 

After the war, waste from uranium processing efforts in downtown was trucked to the airport where it sat, exposed to the elements, for years. Wind and rainwater eroded the site, and the waste contaminated Coldwater Creek, which winds through busy northern St. Louis County suburbs.

From there, it was transported to a property in Hazelwood, also adjacent to the creek. When the waste was removed, the site wasn’t fully decontaminated.

Waste left at the Hazelwood site that couldn’t be further processed to extract valuable metals was trucked to the West Lake Landfill and illegally dumped there in 1973. It remains there today.

Uranium was also processed at a separate site in Weldon Spring during the Cold War. Though production ended in the 1960s, the site wasn’t cleaned up for more than 30 years. 

Still, contamination remains in the groundwater around the site. The Missouri Department of Natural Resources wrote to the Department of Energy in 2021 that uranium concentrations in the groundwater weren’t improving.

This story has been updated. 

(Illustration by Tyler Gross)

One of Missouri’s top Democratic officials asked the governor on Monday to call a special legislative session in response to news reports of the “unacceptable mismanagement” of radioactive waste in the St. Louis area. 

“The problems related with this waste have festered for nearly 80 years,” House Minority Leader Crystal Quade said in a letter to Gov. Mike Parson. “It is well past time for us to begin the long process of finally resolving them for the sake of all Missourians.”

But according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Parson rejected the request. Parson’s spokesman Johnathan Shiflett told the Post-Dispatch “there are no plans for a special session at this time.”

“Governor Parson is concerned for the impacted communities, but this issue was caused by the federal government and should be fixed by the federal government,” Shiflett said. Shiflett didn’t return requests for comment from The Missouri Independent.

Quade, D-Springfield, is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor in 2024. Her comments follow a six-month investigation by The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press into radioactive contamination still lingering from World War II.

Uranium for the first atomic bomb was processed in downtown St. Louis, and radioactive waste was trucked across the region. Contamination from the effort still lingers in Weldon Spring, Coldwater Creek and the West Lake Landfill. 

The newsrooms found that, for decades, federal officials and private companies either downplayed or failed to fully investigate the extent of radioactive contamination in St. Louis and St. Charles counties, allowing generations of families to be exposed.

Radioactive contamination in the St. Louis area has been extensively covered over the years, but new federal documents showed the way the federal government knew in the years after World War II that radioactive waste posed a threat to the environment and wrote off the contamination as “low-level” or “minor,” even as young families flocked to burgeoning suburbs surrounded by nuclear waste.

In a letter dated Monday, Quade asked Parson, a Republican, to call a special legislative session to appropriate money to a state program so the Missouri Department of Natural Resources can investigate areas of radioactive waste under a law passed in 2018.

Over the years, the state department has routinely pushed the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy for more extensive sampling and cleanup of radioactive waste, which Quade applauded. 

“However, there is more that can and must be done by the state to protect the health and safety of our citizens,” Quade wrote in the letter.

According to the letter, the state can develop its own sampling and analysis plan, including sampling residents’ homes if they agree. 

Parson’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

Rep. Tricia Byrnes, R-Wentzville, who grew up in the area and, as a teen, swam in a quarry she didn’t know was contaminated in Weldon Spring, has researched the issue extensively. She led efforts this spring to pass a resolution to require the state’s attorney general to seek compensation for residents who have become ill from exposure to radioactive waste.

The resolution passed the House but did not receive a Senate vote.

Byrnes said she and other elected officials and activists from the area need the help of anyone who wants to be involved, regardless of party. But Byrnes and a Missouri Senate Republican leader questioned Quade’s motivations as she campaigns for governor.

Byrnes said the area needs support, “not political moves during an election.” 

“Any politician that wants to stand in the blood of my community for a moment in the spotlight will be called out,” Byrnes said. 

Dawn Chapman, who co-founded Just Moms STL, which advocates for the community around the West Lake landfill in Bridgeton, said she’d like to see elected officials in Missouri put pressure on the Department of Energy to take responsibility for the contamination.

“I don’t think the state necessarily needs to do its own investigation because I think the Department of Energy’s numbers and documents are out there that say how bad this is,” Chapman said.

State Senate Majority Leader Cindy O’Laughlin, R-Shelbina, said she thought there was likely a “more methodical way” to approach the issue. She said there’s a lot of work to be done talking to affected parties and researching before calling a special session, which would cost a lot of money.

“I think people sometimes tend to call for a special session prematurely,” O’Laughlin said. “I’m not going to say that she’s doing that, but she is running for governor and it is a way to kind of get yourself out there in the headline.”

Byrnes said she has been in contact since the spring with the offices of U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican, and Rep. Cori Bush, a St. Louis Democrat. 

Last week, Hawley successfully attached an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would expand a federal program that offers compensation to people who have become ill after exposure to radioactive waste from the federal government’s weapons development and testing programs. 

Under the amendment, St. Louis-area residents would be eligible for compensation. It also expands coverage to the long-overlooked “downwinders” in New Mexico, and affected residents in a handful of other states and regions, who developed cancers and other illnesses from exposure to the testing of the first atomic bombs. 

An undated photo from the 1980s, of two teenagers stepping on rocks and wooden planks on Coldwater Creek. The photo is from a scrapbook kept by Sandy Delcoure, who lived on Willow Creek in Florissant and donated the scrapbook to the Kay Drey Mallinckrodt Collection (State Historical Society of Missouri, Kay Drey Mallinckrodt Collection, 1943-2006).

The U.S. Senate voted narrowly Thursday in favor of expanding a program that compensates Americans who become ill because of exposure to radiation from the country’s development and testing of nuclear weapons to cover Missourians.

The proposal, offered by Sen. Josh Hawley, was attached as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, which authorizes funding levels and sets policy for the Department of Defense. The bill itself still faces a Senate vote and agreement by the U.S. House of Representatives.

“It is about basic justice — compensating the victims of the federal government’s negligence,” Hawley, a Missouri Republican, said on the Senate floor.

The Senate vote comes on the heels of a six-month investigation by The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press, which found that private companies and the federal government repeatedly downplayed or failed to fully investigate the extent of the contamination from the development of the first atomic bomb.

“This is nothing short of a miracle,” said Dawn Chapman, co-founder of Just Moms STL, which has advocated for cleanup of nuclear waste for a decade. Chapman lauded Hawley during a press call following the vote.

The St. Louis region was pivotal to the development of the bomb during World War II. Workers in downtown St. Louis processed uranium that was used in the first sustained nuclear reaction in Chicago, a major breakthrough of the Manhattan Project.

The development of the bomb still casts a shadow over the region almost 80 years later. Radioactive waste contaminated public lakes and creeks where residents fish and swim. It polluted groundwater and park land. Several sites in St. Louis County still aren’t cleaned up.

Decades later, many St. Louis-area residents believe the radioactive waste is to blame for their rare cancers and autoimmune disorders.

“For decades — decades — they told the people of St. Louis, ‘No problem. There’s no problem here,’” Hawley said. “Meanwhile, children were dying of cancer.” 

The program Hawley seeks to amend, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, already covers uranium miners and millers as well as those who were onsite and some who lived downwind when nuclear weapons were tested in the Southwest.

Hawley’s amendment would expand the program to cover St. Louis-area residents who develop certain illnesses associated with radiation exposure. 

It’s nearly impossible to know with certainty whether a person’s illness stems from exposure to radioactive waste. Expanding the compensation law would make residents eligible so long as they lived in the area during a particular window and developed a covered illness.

U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Missouri Republican who had yet to speak publicly on the recent reports, grew up near a contaminated site in Bridgeton and backed Hawley’s bill. He said he was proud to support the residents who had been harmed.

“Nothing will make them whole, but this is a step,” Schmitt said.

The amendment needed 60 votes to pass. It passed 61-37 without support from Republican leadership.

Amending the act would also expand coverage, for the first time, to residents of New Mexico.

Even though the first atomic bombs were constructed in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and tested at Alamogordo Bombing Range, civilians weren’t eligible for compensation as “downwinders,” or residents who lived downwind of the testing site. That status was granted to residents in certain parts of Arizona, Nevada and Utah. 

The amendment would also expand the law to cover Colorado, Idaho, Montana and Guam and expand coverage to remaining parts of Nevada, Utah and Arizona.

Sen. Ben Ray Luján, a New Mexico Democrat, cosponsored the amendment with Hawley. He asked the Senate to “show these victims compassion, understand their pain and suffering so that they know it’s not gone unnoticed.” 

Luján said residents with cancers, asthma and heart problems had traveled to Washington to beg the federal government to expand coverage. 

“A few years ago, an elder from the Navajo Nation traveled here to testify, and she looked us all in the eye and she asked a simple question: ‘Are you waiting for us all to die for the problem to go away?’” Luján said. 

A legacy of contamination

Following World War II, nuclear waste from uranium processing was trucked from St. Louis to surrounding counties.

For years, it sat in the open at the St. Louis airport where wind and rain dispersed it. As early as 1949, the company that refined the uranium realized highly radioactive waste sitting in deteriorated drums could pose a threat to Coldwater Creek, a tributary of the Missouri River that winds through what are now busy suburbs.

While sampling conducted for the federal government showed radioactive waste was washing into Coldwater Creek, the public wouldn’t find that out for years.

Countless St. Louis County residents grew up swimming, riding bikes and catching tadpoles in Coldwater Creek. A federal health study shows they now face an increased risk of cancer.

Waste was moved again from the airport to a property in Hazelwood where it continued to pollute Coldwater Creek.

And in 1973, a private company that processed the waste to extract valuable metals dumped the rest at the West Lake landfill where it remains today.

Nuclear waste also sat in the open at a plant in Weldon Spring. The buildings were demolished and buried, along with the radioactive residue, at the site. But state regulators have raised concerns over the years that the groundwater remains polluted.

The sites have come under scrutiny in recent years by environmental activists and state lawmakers.

State Rep. Tricia Byrnes, R-Wentzville, said it was “huge to be heard” after decades of inaction on St. Louis radioactive waste. 

“We have a lot of parents who’ve lost children. Children have lost their parents, and unfortunately, we have some families where mom, dad and all of the siblings have died,” Byrnes said. “That is our reality. So I thank you because tonight is so amazing.”

Hawley has extended invitations to U.S. Department of Energy officials to visit St. Louis, which he said has gone unanswered along with requests for additional testing for radioactive materials.

He said it’s “absolutely sickening after what this region has been through and these folks have been through to have the government unwilling to even engage on this issue.”

The amendment was adopted without support from Senate Republican leadership, meaning it could face an uphill climb for final passage. Hawley said he would have to work hard to ensure the language stays in the bill, but he said once someone learns the facts about what happened to St. Louis-area residents, it’s hard to vote no.

“We got this done against all odds today,” Hawley said. “Will there be tough lifts ahead? Yes, there will be — absolutely there will be — and I don’t downplay those for a moment.” 

This article has been updated since it was initially published.

A plaque on top of a radioactive containment cell acknowledges the communities displaced by the federal government's efforts to build weapons in St. Charles County (Allison Kite/Missouri Independent).

“Atomic Fallout” is a historical re-investigation of the St. Louis region’s 75-year history with nuclear waste, conducted by a consortium of newsrooms, including The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press. It relies on thousands of pages of federal government documents, most of which were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

Many of the documents have either been newly-declassified or never before reviewed.

To better understand the records, journalists from different organizations spent the past six months researching and annotating them. We consulted experts to analyze the government memos and testing results anew, to see if the environmental and radioactivity testing done decades ago could be seen and understood in a different, modern light. We also tried to answer a question that Missouri state agencies, elected officials and local residents repeatedly asked government agencies and private companies, with little success:

What did the federal government and private companies know about the potential risks to public health posed by the nuclear waste and when?

What we found shows, for the first time, that Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, which processed uranium in the St. Louis area for the Manhattan Project, and government agencies it contracted with, including the Atomic Energy Commission, the precursor to the Department of Energy, knew as far back as 1949 that Coldwater Creek could be contaminated by radioactive waste flowing from deteriorating steel drums.

We found multiple points in time — in the 1960s, 70s and 80s — where federal agencies knew about spreading contamination into soil, groundwater and a creek neighborhood children played in and wrote it off as “slight,” “minimal” or “low-level.”

And, with the passage of time and the improved knowledge about the effects of thorium, radium and other nuclear residues on human health, experts helped us piece together how bad the ionizing radiation was for the environment and the people who lived near it, and how it could have played a role in the documented increase in cancers in the surrounding areas.

We found similar downplaying of human health and environmental risk at nearby nuclear waste sites, including the West Lake Landfill and Weldon Spring.

Where the documents came from and how we used them

Many of the government documents we obtained were not declassified until the 2000s and, in the absence of draft and final reports from the Atomic Energy Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency, many of the details were left out of the public record.

That void has, at times, fed outsized public concern. Definitively linking cancer to radiation exposure, known as proving a “cancer cluster,” is notoriously difficult, experts told us, and the data from both the West Lake Landfill and the runoff from Coldwater Creek doesn’t suggest a current public health threat. Still, a 2019 federal study by the CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry found elevated rates of breast, colon, prostate, kidney and bladder cancers as well as leukemia in the area in recent decades. Childhood brain and nervous system cancer rates are also higher.

The Freedom of Information Act requests were filed by Lucas Hixson, a nuclear researcher who has written extensively on the Chernobyl disaster and co-founded the Clean Futures Fund, a nonprofit that raises awareness and provides support for communities affected by industrial accidents and long-term remedial activities. In 2015 and 2016, with the help of a law firm, Hixson requested documents related to the West Lake Landfill and Coldwater Creek from a host of government agencies.

The documents produced through Hixson’s requests totaled more than 29,000 pages, released in batches between 2017 and 2020. Some were duplicative and others were fairly mundane so Hixson flagged hundreds of documents that, in his opinion, were notable and shared them with a number of advocacy groups, including Just Moms STL. But we wanted to go a step further, and see what the government had produced in total. So we re-requested the FOIAs from the agencies and downloaded the full document sets.

Many carried “Classified” markings and, in turn, declassification stamps, including dates they were declassified and the reason they were kept from public view in the first place, such as the Atomic Energy Act of 1954.

A group of journalists spent weeks carefully reading through the documents while using DocumentCloud to categorize different types of documents, record the date of the document and flag the types of information the document contained. The goal of this massive undertaking of reading and annotating was to help reporters connect the dots between documents across decades of history. Attaching more information onto each document in DocumentCloud then allowed reporters to sort and filter documents quickly.

This system also enabled reporters to take that information out of DocumentCloud using [an Add-On on for scraping metadata](https://www.documentcloud.org/app?q=%2Buser%3Adillon-bergin-104081#add-ons/cam-garrison/documentcloud-metadata-grabber) on DocumentCloud and organize the documents into a timeline.

Reporters did not use any type of AI or machine learning assistance given the deeply technical and nuanced nature of many of the records. They added relevant tags to each record along with notes and questions to pose to experts.

Asking experts, the public and fellow journalists for help

MuckRock and The Missouri Independent then sent some of the more notable documents, including those that included air, soil and water readings, to a group of experts, some with deep connections to the St. Louis nuclear waste story and others who had only read about it in passing.

Robert Criss and Lee Sobotka are longtime professors from Washington University in St. Louis; Criss is a geologist and Sobotka is a physicist and both are well versed in the minutiae of the West Lake Landfill and the nuclear waste left there. Criss has oftentimes been fiercely critical of the federal government while Sobotka has cautioned that federal agencies weren’t necessarily acting with intentional malice and the current health risks were low.

Still, after reviewing the documents for our project, they largely came to the conclusion: The West Lake Landfill and the radioactive waste running off into Coldwater Creek is an environmental and public health flashpoint that will require close attention for generations to come. And the government made repeated mistakes in how they handled that waste and what they told the public.

We launched a public callout to collect stories from those who lived near Coldwater Creek and the West Lake Landfill. We heard from dozens of current and former residents of Florissant and Hazelwood, many of whom said they never knew about radioactive waste that had been dumped nearby.

We also attended an important community meeting held in May between residents and the Environmental Protection Agency, which, since 1995, has overseen the West Lake Landfill as a federally-designated Superfund site. Handouts included and a way for residents to fill out a form about their experiences.

From those submissions, we set out to interview each one who was willing to talk to us, along with another set of residents who had testified in Jefferson City. A group of University of Missouri students, led by Virginia Young, a former Post-Dispatch reporter and bureau chief, and Mark Horvit, a former president of Investigative Reporters and Editors who now runs the school’s Jefferson City Capitol reporting program, conducted those interviews and they provided the narrative backbone for “Atomic Fallout.”

We also shared some of our lead findings with those who have covered the St. Louis nuclear story, including Carolyn Bower and Gerry Everding, who were part of the original St. Louis Post-Dispatch team that published “Legacy of the Bomb” in 1989. Their expertise proved invaluable. And we compared the findings with the public record — government reports like the 2019 federal CDC study; community-led working groups, like one convened about the St. Louis airport in 1994; and media accounts.

Our top five takeaways from our work can be found here.

If you have questions for us about this project or our work, feel free to email us at fallout@muckrock.com.

A containment cell covered with rock holds the debris from a demolished uranium processing facility in Weldon Spring and radioactive waste from the Cold War (Allison Kite/Missouri Independent).

Missouri environmental regulators warned the federal government in 2021 that radioactive contamination of groundwater from a uranium processing site near St. Louis wasn’t improving despite cleanup efforts, according to documents reviewed by The Independent and MuckRock.

Officials with the Missouri Department of Natural Resources wrote a letter to the U.S. Department of Energy in May 2021, responding to the agency’s five-year review of its cleanup efforts at a Weldon Spring site where uranium was refined during the Cold War.

While the radioactive waste and contaminated debris from the processing site have been contained, Missouri regulators noted that contamination to the surrounding groundwater wasn’t getting better.

“The (state) disagrees that the remedy is functioning as intended,” wrote Taylor Grabner, who at the time was serving in the federal facilities section of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.

The letter, which has not been reported publicly, is the latest example of Missouri officials pushing the federal government to do more to protect the health of St. Louis-area residents near the litany of World War II and Cold War-era nuclear sites in the region. 

A six-month investigation by The Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press found that federal agencies and private companies, for decades, downplayed concerns about radiological contamination or failed to investigate it fully at sites in St. Louis and St. Charles counties.

The state’s dour opinion of the federal cleanup in Weldon Spring was revealed in a document obtained by state Rep. Tricia Byrnes through Missouri’s Sunshine Law and provided to the newsrooms. Byrnes plans to hold a town hall meeting next month so the community can learn about cleanup efforts. 

St. Louis and surrounding areas played a key role in the development of the first atomic bomb during World War II. Uranium processed in downtown St. Louis was used in the first sustained nuclear reaction in Chicago. After the war, Mallinckrodt, which operated the downtown plant, started similar operations at a new facility on Missouri Highway 94 just north of the Missouri River.

The more than 200-acre site has been contaminated for decades by radium, thorium and uranium as well as dangerous non-radioactive chemicals from its use to manufacture explosives and process uranium ore. 

The Weldon Spring plant was demolished and the debris buried, along with residue leftover from uranium processing, in a 41-acre containment cell covered with rock. The containment cell, the highest point in St. Charles County, is accessible to the public and has a monument to the communities displaced by the war effort and information on the cleanup effort at the top.

Closer to the Missouri River, a quarry the federal government used to store radioactive waste was also contaminated. It’s separated from the main site but part of the same cleanup and monitoring effort.

Remediation of the plant is complete, but for years the contaminated groundwater has only been monitored. In recent years, that monitoring has shown uranium contamination is not decreasing. 

“The (state) has consistently expressed concern that further delineation of contamination…was necessary to better define the extent of groundwater contamination,” Missouri officials wrote in 2017. 

It’s unclear whether conditions at the Weldon Spring site have improved since 2021.

The Department of Energy declined to answer questions directly but supplied a letter it sent in response acknowledging the state’s concerns. In its 2021 annual report, the agency said it would “evaluate alternative solutions for removing residual uranium sources and restoring groundwater.”

The Environmental Protection Agency shared some of the state’s concerns that the groundwater monitoring network was insufficient and the groundwater is not projected to be restored in a reasonable timeframe. But the agency said the publicly-accessible areas nearby, including state conservation areas and trails, are safe “for their intended use of recreation.”

The Missouri Department of Natural Resources did not answer questions from journalists about its letter. 

Missouri regulators outlined a number of shortcomings in the draft five-year review, including that “the remedy is not projected to meet the (objective) of restoring groundwater to its beneficial use within a reasonable timeframe.”

The state said its federal counterparts with the Environmental Protection Agency had “mentioned numerous times” that the site is only “short-term protective.”

Beyond that, the state says, the extent of the contamination hasn’t been sufficiently defined, meaning it could be more widespread than the Department of Energy knows based on its sampling. The federal sampling program, the state argues, is inadequate.

Uranium levels in the slough next to Femme Osage Creek aren’t decreasing, the state noted. A public lake has levels of uranium slightly above what is natural. 

Missouri regulators, in their letter, repeatedly corrected the Department of Energy when the federal agency said uranium levels were falling in groundwater wells at the site.

In a response to the state, the federal government said it would revise its conclusion that the remedy was working. 

“No, the remedy is not functioning as intended by the decision document,” the finalized review says. “The remedy is short-term protective, however there are early indicators of potential issues.”

While a spokesperson for the Missouri Department of Natural Resources said keeping citizens informed “is always a priority,” Byrnes said state officials should have alerted the public that they didn’t feel the remediation was working. 

Elected last year, Byrnes swam in the contaminated quarry as a teen and attended Francis Howell High School, which is just down the road from the chemical plant site. 

“Had I not specifically asked,” said Byrnes, a Wentzville Republican, “I’d still be in the dark.”

State Rep. Tricia Byrnes, center, speaks at a press conference in Weldon Spring about radiologically contaminated sites in the St. Louis region. To her left stands U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, who promised to introduce legislation to compensate residents who became ill because of radiation exposure (Allison Kite/Missouri Independent).

WELDON SPRING — U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley on Thursday decried the federal government’s “negligence” that allowed radioactive waste to sicken St. Louis-area residents for decades and invited Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to visit the community still suffering from the legacy of the atomic bomb.

“You all have had enough of it,” Hawley said. “I’ve had enough of it. It’s time to put a stop to this.”

But even as he joined activists and a bipartisan coalition of state officials calling for federal action, Hawley faced questions about his own environmental track record during his two years as Missouri’s attorney general. And activists said they have had no luck getting a meeting to discuss the issue with the current attorney general, Andrew Bailey.

Bailey’s office said earlier in the day that it will work to hold the federal government accountable.

Speaking at a news conference in Weldon Spring attended by Republican and Democratic elected officials, Hawley addressed the findings of a six-month joint investigation by The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press that revealed that for decades government agencies and private companies downplayed or failed to fully investigate radioactive contamination stemming from the effort to build the first atomic bomb during World War II.

“We’re here because for 75 years…the federal government has poisoned the water, the soil and the air of this community and has lied about it,” Hawley said.

The issue has been covered extensively by journalists over the years, but a trove of previously-unreleased documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and reviewed by the three newsrooms laid bare decades of failure that allowed radioactive waste created during the 1940s to linger in the St. Louis region 80 years later.

Records reveal 75 years of government downplaying, ignoring risks of St. Louis radioactive waste

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U.S. Rep. Cori Bush was in Washington for votes, but her aide read a statement saying the new findings confirm what the community already knew — that the “federal government actively and knowingly treated St. Louis as a dumping ground for harmful and toxic radioactive waste.”

“The federal government must not continue to allow our communities to be further collateral damage,” Bush said in her statement.

State Rep. Tricia Byrnes, R-Wentzville, said the region has become “desensitized to the insanity.”

Hawley, a Republican and Missouri’s senior U.S. senator, joined activists from Just Moms STL in calling on the Department of Energy to finance cleanups of nuclear sites across St. Louis and St. Charles counties and reiterated his pledge to introduce legislation to compensate individuals who have contracted rare cancers or autoimmune disorders because of radioactive exposure.

In an email Thursday evening, the Department of Energy said it does “not underestimate the impact that nuclear research and the production of nuclear weapons had on communities.

“The department proudly works alongside partners at the federal, state and local levels, including in Missouri, to protect the health and safety of community residents, and protection of the environment,” the statement said.

But Hawley faced questions about his decision to eliminate the environmental division of the Missouri attorney general’s office shortly after he took it over in 2017, as well as his campaign’s acceptance of contributions from companies that created or handled the nuclear waste.

Hawley’s decision to eliminate the environmental division raised concerns at the time that the attorney general wouldn’t prioritize defending Missouri’s natural resources.

It was among his first decisions in office, one former staffer told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch at the time, and sent a “chilling message” that the environment “was no longer what he considered to be an important part of the mission.”

At Thursday’s news conference, Hawley denied that the division was dissolved. Rather, he said, the entire attorney general’s office was restructured, though he couldn’t recall what division included environmental enforcement.

But he said “we held those guys accountable,” referring to a settlement Hawley’s office reached in a lawsuit filed by his predecessor, Democratic Attorney General Chris Koster, against Republic Services, which owns the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton.

The landfill has held thousands of tons of radioactive waste and contaminated soil since 1973 when it was dumped there against the regulations of the Atomic Energy Commission by a contractor for the Cotter Corporation.

Dawn Chapman, co-founder of Just Moms STL, said that settlement provided a free clinic for the community.

Hawley was also asked whether he would return the combined $5,000 his state campaign committee and federal leadership political action committee received from Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, which refined uranium for the federal government in the 1940s as Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, and Republic Services. Of the $2,500 Hawley received from Mallinckrodt during his campaign for attorney general in 2016, $2,254 was refunded when the committee was terminated following Hawley’s 2018 election to the U.S. Senate. Senate leadership political action committees in 2018 also received $250,000 from General Atomics and employees, the parent company of Cotter.

He said he would look into it.

Elad Gross, who served in the attorney general’s office under Koster and is making his second run for the Democratic nomination for attorney general next year, attended the news conference and said the state desperately needs an environmental division.

“Look at where we are right now,” Gross said. “We’ve got folks in the press who are doing great work and getting this information out to the public faster than the attorney general is investigating it…so we’re obviously seeing what happens when you don’t have a dedicated conservation division in that office.”

But Chapman said when Hawley replaced Koster, he reached out to her and other activists and pledged support for them. The attorneys working on the case against Republic, she said, never changed.

“I can only speak to how hard his office worked,” Chapman said, adding she had the same access to Hawley that she did Koster.

But Chapman said she and fellow Just Moms STL co-founder Karen Nickel haven’t heard from Bailey despite the fact that they provided his office in May thousands of pages of documents reviewed by The Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press.

Bailey faced criticism Wednesday and calls to sue the federal government over the findings of the investigation.

On Thursday, Bailey broke his silence, issuing a statement saying he assigned an attorney to investigate the issue when his office received the documents from Chapman and Nickel.

“We will convey our findings to the appropriate parties,” Bailey said, “and we will do everything in our power to hold the federal government accountable.”

Chapman and Nickel said they still hope to hear from Bailey or someone in his office.

“You’ve really got to come here and meet us and let us show you what you’re seeing in these documents,” Chapman said. “That’s all I’m asking.”

A sick community

The renewed attention brought to St. Louis’ legacy of radioactive contamination was cathartic for a community that, for years, has watched as friends and family members were lost to mysterious cancers or suffered with chronic illnesses.

Byrnes said she first found out about the radioactive contamination when her son developed cancer. Growing up, she swam in a quarry in Weldon Spring just outside the banks of the Missouri River, never knowing it was contaminated with nuclear waste.

For a long time, when she talked about the issue, Byrnes said she would preface her speech: “I’m going to sound crazy.”

“For the first time ever,” Byrnes said, “I woke up this morning not feeling crazy.”

Byrnes attended Francis Howell High School in Weldon Spring. Driving southwest on Missouri Highway 94, just after the school baseball fields, the road bends and a mound of rock becomes visible on the right.

It’s the highest point in St. Charles County, and underneath lies rubble and nuclear waste from Cold War-era uranium processing. Residents can walk to the top of the pile, which contains the rubble from the Mallinckrodt plant that stood there and pits where nuclear waste was stored.

Children continued to attend the high school during the cleanup in the 1990s.

When Christen Commuso, a spokesperson for the nonprofit organization the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, was growing up in north St. Louis County, she didn’t know about contamination at several sites nearby.

Commuso said within a year in 2012, she had a total hysterectomy and an adrenal gland gland and her gallbladder removed. She developed a tumor on her other adrenal gland and suffered from thyroid cancer.

“I’m still living with the consequences,” she said.

State Rep. Doug Clemens, D-Place, found out at age 13 that he shouldn’t be playing in Coldwater Creek, which was contaminated by runoff from nuclear waste storage sites, from Kay Drey, an activist who spearheaded grassroots efforts to advocate for the cleanup of St. Louis County sites starting in the 1970s.

“Our whole region is injured by this — psychologically, emotionally, physically,” Clemens said.

Nickel said Coldwater Creek was a part of her neighborhood growing up. She played in St. Cin Park, right next to the creek. The park had to be remediated because of radioactive contamination.

Now Nickel lives with several autoimmune disorders. Her five-year-old granddaughter was born with cysts on her ovaries. Nickel’s sister, too, suffered from ovarian cysts as a child.

Getting compensation

Just getting the sites cleaned up isn’t enough for Hawley, who pledged on Wednesday to introduce legislation requiring the federal government to pay medical bills for St. Louis area residents sickened as a result of radioactive waste.

He said it would be similar to legislation that offered the same to “Downwinders,” residents who became sick after being exposed to radiation from testing of nuclear weapons in western states during World War II.

Hawley said it shouldn’t be on sick residents to prove their illness was caused by radiation. If they have a disease linked to radiation exposure and lived in the area during the period, he said, they should receive compensation.

“Victims shouldn’t be on trial,” Hawley said.

Asked if the private companies — Mallinckrodt, Cotter and Republic — that have handled the waste or overseen the West Lake Landfill should bear some of the financial burden, Hawley said he hopes there will be “some legal recourse.” He said he hoped those who could bring a legal case against the companies would “bring the heat.”

“I’ll do everything I can legislatively,” he said.

Hawley pledged to ask U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, who chairs the Senate Energy Committee, to hold hearings about the St. Louis-area nuclear waste.

“In one sense, I say the federal government should make people whole,” Hawley said, “but we all know that the time to make people truly whole has passed because of the government’s negligence.”

Clarification: This story has been updated to reflect that U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley’s campaign committee refunded most of the donation it received from Mallinckrodt in 2019.

Coldwater Creek runs by the St. Louis airport and through Florissant and Hazelwood before flowing into the Missouri River. The creek is contaminated by nuclear waste left over from the effort to build the first atomic bomb during World War II (Theo Welling/Riverfront Times).

Revelations that government officials and private companies downplayed or failed to fully investigate the dangers of radioactive waste in St. Louis sparked outrage among state and federal lawmakers Wednesday and a promise from U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley to seek funding for residents who have become ill.

At the heart of the bipartisan calls for action were the findings of a six-month joint investigation by The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and the Association Press that delved into thousands of pages of previously-unreleased government documents detailing the St. Louis area’s legacy of contamination.

The issue has been covered extensively by journalists over decades, but the trove of documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and reviewed by the three newsrooms show that year after year, decade after decade, government regulators and companies downplayed the risks posed by remnant nuclear waste or failed to investigate them fully.

Records reveal 75 years of government downplaying, ignoring risks of St. Louis radioactive waste

Hawley, in an afternoon Senate speech following publication of the findings, said when the U.S. has asked citizens to “bear unique burdens or when we have put them in harm’s way,” it has promised to stand with them. The government should do the same, he said, for St. Louis residents who have been exposed to nuclear waste left over from World War II.

“The Manhattan Project, which was a national project for war — the people of St. Louis have borne the burden of it,” said Hawley, R-Missouri. “And now it’s time for their government to make it right.”

The federal government needs to pay the medical bills for St. Louis residents who have contracted illnesses because of radioactive waste, Hawley said, and he will introduce legislation to create a fund to “make the people of St. Louis whole.”

Hawley and U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, D-St. Louis, both released statements critical of the federal government’s handling of the waste.

Missouri’s other U.S. senator, Republican Eric Schmitt, grew up in the area and said in a statement that the issue “is near and dear to my heart” and that he would fight for residents “every step of the way.”

While Missouri’s congressional delegation united across party lines to decry the latest revelations, there were also calls for action on the state level.

Activists and state lawmakers demanded Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican who took over the office in January, to take legal action against the U.S. Department of Energy and other federal agencies.

And three state representatives announced they will address the “dangerous situation” at a news conference Thursday and “call on Missouri’s leaders, the U.S. Department of Energy and the federal government to do the right thing and work to resolve these issues once and for all.”

“Today, we found out they knew all along people were being harmed,” Rep. Richard West, R-Wentzville, said in the release.

St. Louis’ legacy of nuclear waste starts in downtown where Mallinckrodt Chemical Works processed uranium for the Manhattan Project, the name given to the effort to develop the first atomic bomb.

After the war, waste was left in the open at the St. Louis airport where it was dispersed by wind and rainwater. Government documents show it entered Coldwater Creek, which winds through suburban St. Louis before emptying into the Missouri River, from the site.

The waste was moved to a site on Latty Avenue in Hazelwood where it was dried by a private company that purchased the waste to extract valuable metals. There, it also sat in close proximity to Coldwater Creek – some of it in deteriorating steel drums.

And in 1973, the leftover waste that couldn’t be used to extract metals was dumped into the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton where it remains today.

“From downtown St. Louis to my backyard, the Department of Energy’s lack of diligence has destroyed families and lives,” said Rep. Doug Clemens, D-St. Ann. “They should be held accountable for their waste and the harm it has caused.”

Coldwater Creek

Coldwater Creek, which winds through Hazelwood, Florissant and other St. Louis suburbs was a playground for many kids growing up in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. But residents didn’t know it was contaminated.

Now, decades later, droves of them, including Karen Nickel, co-founder of Just Moms STL, attribute a host of rare illnesses and cancers to the creek’s waters.

“These documents are all the proof I need to validate that I am sick,” Nickel said in a release Wednesday. “For the past 11 years, I have been labeled as a crazy, hysterical mom.”

Bush called the findings from the investigation “troubling.”
“They are not surprising and confirm what we’ve known for years,” Bush said in a statement. “For far too long, our community has suffered the consequences of radioactive waste that poisons our water, our neighborhoods and our loved ones.”

Bush has proposed legislation, alongside Hawley, to force the cleanup of a local elementary school and require the Department of Energy to publicly track radioactive waste. She said she stays in constant communication with federal agencies overseeing cleanup efforts.

“Our community needs and deserves answers,” Bush said. “We all deserve a clean environment, especially in the places we send our children. It is the responsibility of the government to protect people from harm, not expose them to it.”

While in office, former U.S Sen. Kit Bond, R-Missouri, worked to direct funds toward the cleanup of a contaminated quarry and uranium processing site in Weldon Spring and championed legislation to provide compensation to uranium workers from the area.

“During his time in the Senate, whether it was fighting for the justice our Cold War workers were owed or to get an old site cleaned up, the process was mired in bureaucratic red tape, funding problems, liability concerns, and authorization delays,” said Shana Marchio, a spokesperson for Bond.

According to government documents, Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, which refined uranium in downtown St. Louis, knew as early as 1949 that radioactive residue stored in deteriorating steel drums at the airport posed a risk of contaminating Coldwater Creek.

Testing from 1976 by the Department of Energy showed contamination entering the creek. But the public wouldn’t find out about contamination to Coldwater Creek for years.

Christen Commuso, a spokesperson for the nonprofit advocacy organization the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, noted there still isn’t any signage to discourage residents from entering the creek.

“After all these years of them knowing it, the fact that there’s nothing stopping people is absolutely dangerous,” Commuso said in an interview Wednesday.

Commuso said she’s a survivor of a cancer linked to radiation exposure.

“I dare somebody to look me in the face and tell me I wasn’t harmed when one of the first questions that was asked to me (by health professionals) was, ‘Were you exposed to radiation as a child?’”

Calls for action

Just Mom’s STL’s co-founder, Dawn Chapman, on Wednesday called for Missouri’s attorney general to take action.

Chapman said Just Moms STL provided some of the same documents reviewed by The Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press to Bailey’s office earlier this year.

“He is the ONLY elected official who has and has had these documents!” Chapman said on Twitter.

Rep. Tricia Byrnes, R-Wentzville, said she reached out to Bailey’s office ahead of a May community meeting held by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and was told it wouldn’t be appropriate for the attorney general to attend.

“Didn’t even call to ask how it went afterwards,” Byrnes said.

Bailey’s office did not return an email or voicemail seeking comment.

Derek Kravitz and Kelly Kauffman of MuckRock contributed to this report.

(Illustration by Tyler Gross)

For kids like Sandy Mitchell, Ted Theis and Janet Johnson, childhood in the North St. Louis County suburbs in the 1960s and ‘70s meant days playing along the banks or splashing in the knee-deep waters of Coldwater Creek.

They caught turtles and tadpoles, jumped into deep stretches of the creek from rope swings and ate mulberries that grew on the banks.

Their families — along with tens of thousands of others — flocked to the burgeoning suburbs and new ranch style homes built in Florissant, Hazelwood and other communities shortly after World War II. When the creek flooded, as it often did, so did their basements. They went to nearby Jana Elementary School and hiked and biked throughout Fort Belle Fontaine Park.

Growing up, they never knew they were surrounded by massive piles of nuclear waste left over from the war.

Generations of children who grew up alongside Coldwater Creek have, in recent decades, faced rare cancers, autoimmune disorders and other mysterious illnesses they have come to believe were the result of exposure to its waters and sediment.

“People in our neighborhood are dropping like flies,” Mitchell said.

The earliest known public reference to Coldwater Creek’s pollution came in 1981, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency listed it as one of the most polluted waterways in the U.S.

By 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was advising residents to avoid Coldwater Creek entirely. Cleanup of the creek is expected to take until 2038. A federal study found elevated rates of breast, colon, prostate, kidney and bladder cancers as well as leukemia in the area. Childhood brain and nervous system cancer rates are also higher.

“Young families moved into the area,” Johnson said, “and they were never aware of the situation.”

Theis, who grew up just 75 yards from the creek and played in it daily, died in August at the age of 60 from a rare cancer. Mitchell is a breast cancer survivor whose father died from prostate cancer. Johnson’s sister has an inoperable form of glioblastoma and other family members, including her father, daughter and nephew, have had various cancers.

Families who lived near Coldwater Creek were never warned of the radioactive waste. Details about the classified nuclear program in St. Louis were largely kept secret from the public. But a trove of newly-discovered documents reviewed by an ongoing collaboration of news organizations show private companies and the federal government knew radiological contamination was making its way into the creek for years before those findings were made public.

Radioactive waste was known to pose a threat to Coldwater Creek as early as 1949, records show. K-65, a residue from the processing of uranium ore, was stored in deteriorating steel drums or left out in the open near the creek at multiple spots, according to government and company reports.

A health expert who, as part of this project, was recently presented with data from a 1976 test of runoff to the creek concluded it showed dangerous levels of radiation 45 years ago.

Federal agencies knew of the potential human health risks of the creek contamination, the documents show, but repeatedly wrote them off as “slight,” “minimal” or “low-level.” One engineering consultant’s report from the 1970s incorrectly claimed that human contact with the creek was “rare.”

The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press spent months combing through thousands of pages of government records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and interviewing dozens of people who lived near the contaminated sites, health and radiation experts and officials from government agencies.

Some of the documents, obtained by a nuclear researcher who focuses on the effects of radiation, had been newly declassified in the early 2000s. Others had been previously lost to history, packed away in government archives and not released publicly until now.

All told, the documents from the now-defunct Atomic Energy Commission; its successors, the U.S. Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; and the Environmental Protection Agency span the 75-year lifespan of the nuclear saga in St. Louis.

It starts in downtown St. Louis, where uranium was processed, and at the St. Louis airport, where it was stored at the end of the war; a monthslong move of the waste to industrial sites on Latty Avenue in suburban Hazelwood and a quarry in Weldon Spring, next to the Missouri River; an illegal dumping of waste at the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton in the 1970s by a private company; and the declaration of the landfill as a federal toxic Superfund site in 1990.

The documents have a familiar cadence: Year after year, decade after decade, government regulators and companies tasked with cleaning up the sites downplayed the risks posed by nuclear waste left near homes, parks and an elementary school. They often chose not to fully investigate the potential harms to public health and the environment around St. Louis.

Bob Criss, a now-retired geologist and geochemist, studied St. Louis’ history with nuclear waste at Washington University in St. Louis and wrote a report in 2013 critical of the EPA’s stewardship of the West Lake Landfill Superfund site.

In an interview last month, Criss said the waste changed hands so often and was overseen by an assortment of lightly regulated private companies, resulting in what he called a “ridiculous chain of events…driven by irresponsibility.”

“The government should have been responsible for this material,” Criss said.

The Department of Energy has assisted with the costs of remedial studies at West Lake under a legal agreement called a consent decree since 1993. It referred questions about the landfill’s history and other contaminated sites to the Department of Justice, which did not respond to a request for comment, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Presented with details of the newly-revealed documents, Dave McIntyre, a spokesperson for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said in a statement that the agency conducted numerous investigations and studies at the West Lake Landfill over a period of almost 20 years that were “extensively documented.” It transferred authority to the EPA in 1995 and directed further questions to the agency.

The EPA has jurisdiction only over the West Lake site. Staffers for the agency acknowledged cleanup at the site had been slow, but there has been progress toward designing an excavation plan and placing a cap on the landfill.

St. Louis becomes vital piece of Manhattan Project war effort

The St. Louis region proved pivotal to the development of the first atomic bomb in the 1940s.

Old downtown factories, suburban storage sites and the landfill represent some of dozens of properties that were contaminated in pursuit of the nuclear bomb.

The West Lake Landfill is one of well over 1,000 EPA Superfund sites across the country. The Department of Energy, too, is the steward of other nuclear sites, like a complex in Hanford, Washington, on the banks of the Columbia River, in desperate need of cleanup.

Mallinckrodt Chemical Works processed uranium for the Manhattan Project, the name given to the effort to build the bomb, in downtown St. Louis. Uranium from the Mallinckrodt plant was used in the first sustained nuclear reaction in Chicago, a significant breakthrough.

By the end of the 1940s, there was already a risk of contamination, the new records show.

An internal Mallinckrodt memo from 1949 shows the company was storing highly radioactive residue called K-65 in deteriorating steel drums at the St. Louis airport near Coldwater Creek. The material was so dangerous, the memo said, that Mallinckrodt couldn’t simply put it in new containers because “the hazards to the workers involved in such an occupation would be considerable.”

Mallinckrodt, which still exists as Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, declined to comment for this article. By 1960, the company had more than 1,000 employees at its uranium processing facility in St. Louis. It took some measures to protect its workers, such as putting them on timed shifts to limit exposure, but it determined possible pollution of Coldwater Creek was far less “serious and immediate” than the threat handling the waste posed to workers.

As the nation’s oldest radioactive waste of the atomic age, many details about Mallinckrodt and other private companies’ storage and maintenance of nuclear waste have been well documented, first as part of a grassroots civic effort in the 1970s by environmental activist Kay Drey and then as part of a seven-part series published by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1989.

More recently, the issue was the focus of a 2017 documentary called “Atomic Homefront” and a 2022 book, “Nuked,” by Linda Morice, who grew up near Coldwater Creek.

But the new documents reveal government agencies were plainly aware of the risks posed by prolonged storage and seepage of waste into soil, groundwater and the creek — and yet dismissed concerns about them.

Following the war, material from Mallinckrodt was trucked to a site next to the airport, which would later become the center of some of the region’s most populated suburbs. At times, waste fell out of trucks and spilled onto public roadways, only to be picked up by a single worker carrying a shovel and broom and loaded back onto the bed of a pickup truck. It was then left for years in the open, without a cover, where wind and rainwater dispersed it.

After a few years, the Atomic Energy Commission, which was later replaced by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, began looking for a buyer for the waste. A private company would purchase the waste, process it to obtain any valuable materials — such as copper, nickel or cobalt — and dispose of the rest.

While the waste awaited purchase, a 1965 government report found drainage from the 20-foot-tall mounds of material — including almost 200 tons of uranium — had produced “some minor contamination in Coldwater Creek.”

The document doesn’t specify the level of radiation in the creek at the time, but it says the levels are “well within permissible and acceptable limits.”
Within a few years, most of the waste was sold and moved just up the road to a site on Latty Avenue in Hazelwood where it, again, sat exposed to the elements and adjacent to Coldwater Creek.

But despite the move, the airport would remain contaminated for years to come.

Between 50 and 60 truck loads remained buried there, and in the late 1970s, uranium, radium and thorium were found in the drainage ditches along a public road next to the site.

According to a draft report uncovered as part of the document release, four members of the health and safety research division of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee tested the airport site in 1976 at the request of the Energy Research and Development Administration, which would become the Department of Energy.

The results showed onsite radiation sources were as high as 8.8 millisievert per year, five times the typical dose of radiation humans receive in a year, and nine times the EPA’s limit for water pathways, according to an expert who calculated the annual dose for the Independent and MuckRock. The reading was 220 times higher than the EPA’s limit for drinking water pathways.

Though the federal government knew about the contamination, the public wouldn’t find out until 1990.
“These site doses are deadly because there is no safe dose of radiation,” said Kristin Shrader-Frechette, professor and PhD with the University of Notre Dame’s Biological Sciences Department and Environmental Sciences Program, who reviewed the 1976 study’s findings.

The runoff sources next to Coldwater Creek, Shrader-Frechette said, are “far higher than what is allowed. The only question is whether any scientific studies have documented these health problems.”

In 1979, the Department of Energy acknowledged the site was eroding, carrying contamination into the drainage ditch and Coldwater Creek. But a planned meeting that November, with representatives of multiple federal agencies and local elected officials, was abruptly canceled after then-U.S. Rep. Robert Young openly fought with the federal agencies over a lack of funding for the cleanup.

In a description of a meeting between Young and a Nuclear Regulatory Commission official, the congressman railed against the federal government, saying St. Louis and its airport had been “hoodwinked” into taking ownership of the radioactive waste, which he described as a “Pandora’s Box.”

The airport site wasn’t fully cleaned up until 2009.

In 1986, then-St. Louis City Health Commissioner William B. Hope Jr. wrote to a city alderwoman that he had been “quietly” testing Coldwater Creek and city water supplies, to ensure the city’s drinking water wasn’t contaminated. It wasn’t, he found, but he offered a blunt assessment of the federal government’s nuclear waste program in the St. Louis region.

“Sufficient information was known about the radioactive contaminants to have warranted a different type of decision regarding their disposal,” he wrote. “These materials should not have been deposited near populated areas and certainly not in areas where geographically the material could migrate into the water table or into adjacent areas as a result of erosion over time.”

Illegal dumping of radioactive waste

When the Atomic Energy Commission sold the remnant nuclear waste, it anticipated being able to get rid of the more than 100,000 tons of toxic residues without spending any money.

The first company to purchase the waste, Continental Mining and Milling Co. of Chicago, borrowed $2.5 million to buy it in 1966 and then, shortly after, went bankrupt. Continental’s lender, Commercial Discount of Chicago, re-purchased the waste at auction for $800,000 and, after failing to get a bidder at a second auction, sold it to the Cotter Corp. To turn a profit, Cotter would ultimately dry the material and ship it to its uranium mill plant in Cañon City, Colorado.

By 1972, most of the valuable metals in the waste had been identified and shipped. Cotter was now looking to dispose of remaining waste that had little or no monetary value — 8,900 tons of worthless leached barium sulfate and “miscellaneous residues and debris.”

But the cost estimates to properly dispose of the waste were pricey: $150,000 ($1.1 million in 2023 dollars) to bury it onsite at Latty Avenue near Coldwater Creek or about $2 million ($15 million in 2023 dollars) to ship it hundreds of miles away to a commercial site in West Valley, New York, and bury it there.

A third location was proposed: A pit at the Weldon Spring quarry in St. Charles County, which was already a disposal site for other radioactive waste.

The Atomic Energy Commission had initially planned to allow it to be dumped in the Weldon Spring quarry, just outside the banks of the Missouri River, when it was looking for a buyer for the waste in 1960, government records show.

But on the advice of the U.S. Geological Survey, the Atomic Energy Commission reversed course on the quarry plan. Among other issues, the agencies said there was a “high probability of contaminating the Missouri River shortly above the intakes for the St. Louis City and St. Louis County water supplies.”

Cotter asked the government to bury the waste at Weldon Springs multiple times, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but were rebuffed each time, meeting minutes show.

So, over a period of 2 ½ months in the summer and fall of 1973, Cotter took the problem into its own hands, without telling government regulators.

The company mixed the radioactive waste with tens of thousands of tons of contaminated soil from the site and illegally dumped it in a free, public landfill called West Lake, under three feet of soil and other garbage.

Within months, the Atomic Energy Commission discovered what Cotter had done.

Government records show staffers from the commission visited the site as part of a routine inspection in April 1974 and were told about the illegal dumping. Internal memos and letters show AEC staffers believed Cotter’s actions violated agency regulations and were misled about the amount of the waste involved.

Internally, the AEC struggled with how to respond to Cotter’s illegal dumping.

While noting Cotter was “clearly in violation” of a federal law “in that [the company] disposed of licensed material in an unauthorized manner,” “the large numbers involved need to be brought into prospective (sic).”

Cotter had mixed enough topsoil with the radioactive waste to, in theory, render it harmless, the agency concluded.

AEC’s enforcement division found that the waste in the West Lake Landfill was now “virtually unidentifiable and nonrecoverable.” Still, Cotter should provide evidence that the waste “does not constitute an undue hazard to the public or the environment.”

A draft letter by the AEC to Cotter was drawn up, requiring the company to study the potential environmental and health consequences of dumping the waste at the West Lake Landfill and propose solutions.

But that requirement was cut from the final letter, without explanation. The decision to let Cotter off the hook was not revealed to the public.

Cotter subsequently informed the AEC that it had finished processing the waste and decontaminating the property and asked the government to terminate its license and release it from responsibility over the site.

The AEC released Cotter from its St. Louis permit without immediate sanctions in 1974, but the company is partially responsible for the cleanup costs at the site.

Cotter’s parent company, General Atomics, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

By most government accounts, the human health risk at the West Lake Landfill is remote. Lee Sobotka, a chemistry and physics professor at Washington University in St. Louis, has studied the radiation levels at West Lake Landfill site and noted that the waste is diluted enough to be considered “low-level.”

Despite the low risk of illness, Sobotka said the government, and by extension the surrounding communities, are left with a never-ending cleanup and maintenance problem. Federal and state agencies will have to be a “custodian in perpetuity” at West Lake.

“Looking back at history, you find a litany of mistakes by companies and contractors and so you can get very upset about that,” he said.

Looking forward, Sobotka said, “it’s not something you seal and forget.”

‘Tip of the iceberg’

In 1999, when Robbin Dailey moved into Spanish Village, a neighborhood of only a few dozen homes with its own park less than a mile from the back side of West Lake Landfill, she had no idea she was living next to a Superfund site.

When the EPA decided initially in 2008 to cap the waste at West Lake and leave it in place, Dailey never heard about the plan. Two years later, in 2010, she was alerted to the radioactive waste when a “subsurface smoldering event” — a type of chemical reaction that consumes landfilled waste like a fire but lacks oxygen — sent a pungent stench into the air around her home.

Dailey and her husband had their house tested and found thorium in the dust at hundreds of times natural levels. They sued the landfill’s owners, Republic Services, as well as the Cotter Corp. and Mallinckrodt.

Dailey said she and the companies had “resolved” their legal issues, but she, like all of the residents in North St. Louis County, was still in the dark about where within the landfill site the waste actually was.

Court records reveal a bevy of lawsuits against the private companies involved, at various times, with the West Lake Landfill. Not only that, but the landfill operators sued Mallinckrodt in an attempt to force the maker of the radioactive waste to pay for part of the cleanup.

Since the late 1970s, federal regulators repeatedly failed to uncover the true extent of contamination at West Lake.

In October 1977, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission used a helicopter to take hour-long passes back and forth over the landfill from an altitude of 200 feet. The goal was to measure gamma radioactivity coming from the site using specialized equipment.

While the effort correctly identified two areas with high levels of radiation, it had serious limitations, experts say. A survey of that type can miss contamination if it’s buried deep underground or if the ground is obstructed by vegetation.

And it did.

Despite the shortcomings of that sort of test, the government’s conclusion that the radioactive waste was confined to two areas of the West Lake Landfill would stand for more than 40 years.

Nathan Anderson, a director of natural resources and environment for the federal Government Accountability Office, said the federal government often fails to compile complete and reliable information in environmental cleanups.

“We’ve done a number of these evaluations where there is contamination that the federal government is on the hook for cleaning up,” Anderson said. “And we’ve found that oftentimes, it’s the tip of the iceberg.”

In May, almost 50 years after the waste was dumped at West Lake, the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged what many residents had long feared: Radiological waste was spread throughout the West Lake Landfill, not confined to two specific portions as officials had long maintained.

Bob Jurgens, the EPA’s superfund and emergency management division director for the region, announced at the community meeting in May that the health risk “remains unchanged.”

The additional radioactive waste is largely underground, he said, so “we believe that is protective at this time to the folks that are outside.”

EPA officials said the contamination was found all over the property — in some areas at the surface and, in other areas, at great depths.

The agency looked at the dates on newspapers above and below the radioactive waste in two areas of the site previously thought to be uncontaminated to approximate when it was dumped, said Chris Jump, the EPA’s lead remedial project manager for the site.

It’s likely been there the whole time.

In one area where contamination was at the surface, the EPA moved quickly to add gravel and rocks to cover it. The waste had migrated outside the fence line in some areas, the EPA said.

Readings showed contamination in a drainage ditch along a public road bordering the landfill. It migrated right under the EPA’s nose.

While the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry did not find any causal link between the West Lake Landfill and illnesses in and around Bridgeton, it said in a 2015 report that radon concentrations appeared higher than typical. It encouraged further testing using long-term monitoring devices.

Dawn Chapman, who left her job and co-founded Just Moms STL to advocate for the community around the landfill, said the EPA used to treat her and other activists like their fears were hysterical.

“We spent more time fighting them as an agency than we did the g—–n polluters,” Chapman said.

EPA officials, in an interview last month, acknowledged the flyover and previous testing missed considerable areas containing radioactive waste. But they said they did not need to test soil over the whole site before deciding on a partial excavation strategy.

“It doesn’t change anything about the remedy itself. It doesn’t change anything about the risks that the site poses,” said Tom Mahler, a remedial project manager for the EPA. However, Mahler said finding all of the contamination was important for the next step of the work at the site: designing and executing the excavation.

State pleads for help

By the time the EPA listed the landfill on the National Priorities List in 1990, state officials had already been sounding the alarm for years.

A staffer with the Missouri Department of Natural Resources wrote in 1980 that contamination at the landfill was more severe and widespread than previously thought. In 1986 and 1990, onsite sampling showed possible radiological contamination in the groundwater in areas outside the sections of the landfill thought to be radioactive.

In 1987, the state classified the landfill as a hazardous waste site. The radioactive waste was in direct contact with the groundwater, the agency said in its annual report.

“Based on available information, a health threat exists due to the toxic effects of chemicals and low-level uranium wastes buried at the site and the possibility that off-site migration of these materials might occur,” the agency wrote.

The next year, Missouri began lobbying the EPA to designate the landfill as a Superfund site, contending that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission knew the site needed to be cleaned up but had no intention of taking action and the Department of Energy said the site didn’t qualify for its cleanup program.

Yet there was little movement from the federal agencies – despite growing evidence.

A 1982 study commissioned by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission showed that, as the waste in the landfill decays, radium activity will increase by nine times over 200 years.

Despite that finding, as of 1984, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission believed stabilizing the waste and leaving it onsite was the best solution, in part, because of the high cost of alternative solutions, such as excavating the site or new construction to control groundwater.

A Nuclear Regulatory Commission report from 1988 shows radioactivity in the groundwater on site anywhere from two to 30 times levels it would occur naturally.

“Based on monitoring-well sample analyses, some low-level contamination of the groundwater is occurring,” the report says, “indicating that the groundwater in the vicinity is not adequately protected by the present disposition of the wastes.”

Even after the Superfund declarations, Missouri and the EPA sparred over how the contamination was quantified.

The Missouri Department of Natural Resources told the EPA in 1997 that it feared the extent of the contamination was underestimated. Until disagreements around how to calculate the severity of the contamination and whether sampling showed false positives were resolved, the agency said, “we cannot concur with the conclusion that the…extent of the contamination has been defined.”

Ryan Seabaugh, project manager for the West Lake site for the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, said in an interview that the state agency asked the EPA to do more testing or provide information to confirm the boundaries of the contamination.

“We just had concerns that there might be a little bit more,” said Seabaugh, who has overseen the site for the state for eight years. “We were pretty surprised at the relatively large extent that we did find.”

It wasn’t until around the time the EPA settled on a plan to excavate parts of the site in 2018, Seabaugh said, that the federal agency started “listening” to its Missouri counterpart.

After several studies, the EPA designated the groundwater at West Lake as its own “operable unit” to be investigated and, potentially, remediated. That work is ongoing.

Still, even by the EPA’s admittedly slow process for classifying and cleaning up toxic sites, the West Lake Landfill timeline was glacial. For Superfund sites listed in 1996, it took an average of more than 9 years from discovering the site to placing it on the National Priorities List. Cleanup took an average of 10 ½ years, a Government Accountability Office review found.

The West Lake Landfill contamination was discovered in 1974. It was designated a Superfund site in 1990, and there is still no date certain for when the cleanup will begin.

John Madras, who worked for the Missouri Department of Natural Resources at the time it was asking the EPA to classify West Lake as a Superfund site, said that, even among slow-moving government cleanup projects, West Lake stands out: “They’ve given us a new understanding of what a really long time is.”

Back to the drawing board

EPA’s first plan for the site would not have included moving the radioactive waste at all.

In 2008, the Environmental Protection Agency approved a plan for the landfill’s “primarily responsible parties” — the government and private contractors responsible for the site — to place a cap over the landfill and leave the waste in place.

Following criticism from the surrounding communities, EPA asked the Department of Energy, the Cotter Corp. and the landfill’s owner, Republic Services, to test the site again.

In the meantime, an underground fire brought a new level of scrutiny.

Starting in 2010, the Bridgeton Landfill, which sits adjacent to the West Lake Landfill, has been experiencing a subsurface smoldering event.

The smell from the heated trash got the attention of the Bridgeton community when it worsened in 2013. The situation also caught the attention of then-Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster, who sued the landfill’s owner, Republic Services, for its track record at the Bridgeton Landfill.

And as Koster’s office investigated the site, it too became concerned the EPA was underestimating the risk. Testing performed in preparation for a fire barrier to keep the reaction from reaching the radiological contamination, Koster wrote, appeared to demonstrate that the waste was not confined just to where the EPA thought.

Koster’s office would release additional findings as part of its investigation for the lawsuit against Republic Services, including reports in 2015 that radioactive waste had been found in vegetation offsite and the fire was moving closer to the onsite contamination, which the EPA dismissed as “unhelpful” at the time and continues to dispute.

In the midst of strife over the stench and studies conducted in search of a new plan, the owners of the landfill decided to fence off one of the two areas then thought to contain the radioactive waste.

But as it turned out, they were digging in close proximity to radioactive waste.

After construction of the fence began, the Missouri Department of Natural Resources visited the site in June 2013 with a portable radiation reader. State officials found radiation at levels 35 to 50 times what is normal in the tire ruts leaving the site and just a short distance from the post holes dug along the planned fence line.

The department flagged the finding for the EPA, the documents show.

“Elevated readings indicated an area of radiologically contaminated soils located within close proximity to the new fence installation and also in close proximity to the exit route from the landfill,” Shawn Muenks, then the project manager for West Lake for DNR, wrote in an email.

Muenks warned the contaminated soil could be spread by trucks leaving the site. A consultant for the government and private companies wrote back, saying crews realigned the fence so the contamination would be contained within the boundaries. The consultant’s email said testing along the new fence line showed no elevated levels of radiation.

“Therefore no ‘track out’ or erosional transport had occurred,” the email said.

But since then, testing in preparation for the remediation at the site has uncovered radioactive contamination all along that fence.

“Knowing what we know now based on the new EPA findings, I don’t see how they couldn’t have been digging in it,” said Christen Commuso, a spokesperson for the nonprofit advocacy organization, the Missouri Coalition for the Environment.

The EPA has said the additional contamination found along that fenceline is below the surface.

The depth and severity of the new contamination the EPA found is not yet clear. The agency is preparing to release a report that will include the readings, a spokesperson said. A remedial design portion of the project is underway, the last step before the excavation begins.

But EPA doesn’t have a date certain as to when work on the project might start.

Curtis Carey, a spokesperson for the EPA, said despite decades of delays, the agency is planning next steps for the landfill “with a great deal more information because of our purposeful approach than was available 10, 15, 20 years ago.”

The following people contributed reporting, writing, editing, document review, research, interviews, photography, illustrations, analysis and project management. Chris Amico, Dillon Bergin, Kelly Kauffman and Derek Kravitz of MuckRock; Jason Hancock, Allison Kite and Rebecca Rivas of The Missouri Independent; Michael Phillis and Jim Salter of The Associated Press; Sarah Fenske, Theo Welling, Tyler Gross and Evan Sult of the Riverfront Times; EJ Haas, Madelyn Orr, Sydney Poppe, Mark Horvit and Virginia Young of the University of Missouri; Katherine Reed of the Association of Health Care Journalists; Liliana Frankel, Erik Galicia, Laura Gómez, Lauren Hubbard, Sophie Hurwitz and Steve Vockrodt; and Gerry Everding and Carolyn Bower of the original St. Louis Post-Dispatch team that published the seven-part “Legacy of the Bomb” series in 1989.

A photo taken in 1960 of deteriorating steel drums containing radioactive residues near Coldwater Creek, by the Mallinckrodt-St. Louis Sites Task Force Working Group (State Historical Society of Missouri, Kay Drey Mallinckrodt Collection, 1943-2006).

The Missouri Independent and MuckRock spent months scouring thousands of pages of government records about St. Louis’ involvement in the race to build an atomic bomb during World War II and decades of environmental contamination that followed.

Journalists sought to lay bare the degree to which government officials knew of the spreading contamination and the danger it posed to St. Louis County residents.

While the contamination at the West Lake Landfill and in Coldwater Creek has been covered extensively for decades, documents obtained by the newsrooms revealed the way federal officials failed to take stronger measures to protect the health of St. Louis-area residents.

You can read the full investigation here.

Here are five key takeaways:

A company that refined uranium for the Manhattan Project knew as early as 1949 that radioactive residue could pollute Coldwater Creek

Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, which refined uranium in downtown St. Louis, stored barrels of K-65, a radioactive residue, at the St. Louis airport in deteriorating steel drums. In 1949, a Mallinckrodt memo shows, the company was aware the broken drums could result in runoff pollution to Coldwater Creek. But it determined the threat to workers from attempting to move the drums would be worse.

A draft survey commissioned by federal government in 1976 showed dangerous levels of contamination running off into Coldwater Creek

A report from a 1976 site visit and survey found rainwater run-off had eroded the soil and formed a large ditch at the edge of the St. Louis airport storage site, carrying contamination into Coldwater Creek. Tests showed elevated concentrations of radionuclides in the creek sediment, though the creek water was within permissible levels.

An expert who reviewed the document for The Missouri Independent and MuckRock said the 1976 dose readings at the site were “far higher than what is allowed.”

The Cotter Corp. pushed the Atomic Energy Commission to let it dump radioactive waste at a quarry in Weldon Spring before illegally dumping it in the West Lake Landfill

After World War II, the Atomic Energy Commission sought a buyer for radioactive waste. It planned to let a company extract valuable metals from the residue and dump the rest in a quarry in Weldon Spring just outside the banks of the Missouri River.

The U.S. Geological Survey discouraged the dumping plan because it would likely contaminate the river just upstream from where residents’ drinking water was drawn. When the AEC backtracked on the plan, the Cotter Corp., which had dried and shipped valuable materials to its uranium mill in Colorado, was left struggling with how to dispose of the leftover residue and asked to dump it in the quarry or bury it at a site in Hazelwood. The company ended up taking it to the free West Lake Landfill and illegally dumping it there in 1973.

Despite warnings that further testing was needed, federal officials believed the contamination at the West Lake Landfill was confined to two areas because of a 1977 flyover test

In the late 1970s, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which replaced the AEC, flew a helicopter over the West Lake Landfill. It used gamma readings in an attempt to determine what parts of the landfill were contaminated with the radioactive waste the Cotter Corp. dumped there.

The test correctly identified two contaminated areas but missed huge areas of the landfill.

Despite warnings from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources and activists that the contamination was likely more widespread, the NRC’s conclusion stood for more than 40 years.

This spring, the Environmental Protection Agency announced the contamination at the site was more widespread than previously thought.

Radium activity at the West Lake Landfill is expected to increase in the coming years

Testing performed in the 1980s and a more recent analysis by a former Washington University researcher concluded that radium activity is expected to worsen over time because the radionuclide is out of balance with thorium and uranium at the site.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission wrote that this means the health and environmental hazards from radium at the site will get exponentially worse over the ensuing 200 years.