Underground fire burns ever closer to buried radioactive wastes near St. Louis drinking water intakes

As covered by regional and even national media, Beyond Nuclear board member, Kay Drey, has been actively concerned, as are many others, about the risk of a "nuclear fire" due to an underground landfill fire, inching ever closer to a decades-old radioactive waste dump at West Lake Landfill, just upstream from St. Louis drinking water intakes. The radioactive waste came from the processing, by Mallinkrodt Chemical Works in St. Louis, of Belgian Congo uranium ore during the Manhattan Project race to drop atomic bombs on Japan.

The crisis continues to garner headlines on a regular basis, as government officials at all levels, under pressure from area residents, struggle with what to do on this, the 40 year mark of radioactive waste first being buried there (the 70 year old wastes were stored elsewhere before being dumped in the West Lake Landfill). Kay has long led efforts to have the radioactive wastes removed from the Missouri River floodplain.

Paducah uranium enrichment facility suffers radioactive contamination incident 4 weeks after permanently shutting down

Paducah (uranium enrichment) Gaseous Diffusion Plant. Photo credit: U.S.E.C./U.S. Department of EnergyDespite being permanently shutdown on June 1st, the Paducah facility experienced a radioactivity contamination accident on June 28th, according to a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) incident report dated July 2nd. The radioactivity contamination accident stemmed from a water leak. Given the mountain of radioactive materials at Paducah, such radioactive contamination risks to the facility, the environment beyond, and the people who live there (some directly across dirt roads from the fence line, in a community already showing signs of significantly elevated cancer incidence and death rates) will continue far into the future, despite the facility's welcome permanent shutdown.

Paducah had operated since the 1950s. In its early years, enriched uranium from Paducah supplied the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal. In a very real sense, the entire Paducah complex is now a giant radioactive waste -- and toxic chemical -- site that needs to be dealt with.