Inside EPA's Doug Guarino has won a set of awards from the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ)-Washington Dateline for his series of articles that show how EPA and other government agencies still lack clear policies for how to address the risks of radiation from nuclear power plants and other sources, decades after construction of the first reactors. At the SPJ awards ceremony June 14, Doug not only won first prize in SPJ's newsletter category for which he had been nominated, but he was also selected at the judge's discretion for SPJ's Robert D.G. Lewis Watchdog Award, which is awarded for an entry "that best exemplifies journalism aimed at protecting the public from abuses by those who would betray the public trust." Read both award winning stories here, including the Nov. 10, 2010 "Agencies Struggle to Craft Offsite Cleanup Plan for Nuclear Power Accidents."
Beyond Nuclear board of directors member Kay Drey in St. Louis, Missouri, has written Doug Guarino to congratulate him on his awards. She wrote "As an example of your journalistic excellent, your three articles on West Lake Landfill here in St. Louis were absolutely basic in alerting our political leaders to the hazards and history of the radioactive wastes that were illegally dumped into the Missouri River's urban floodplain back in 1973." Kay has long watchdogged the West Lake Landfill and the Belgian Congo uranium tailings from the Manhattan Project dumped there. That radioactive waste dump is now again at risk, given the historic flooding happening on the Missouri River.