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Tuesday
Oct272015

Floods, fires, explosions, and earthquake fault lines threaten radioactive waste dumps

As reported by CBS This Morning, the underground garbage dump fire at the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton, Missouri, creeping ever closer to illegally buried Manhattan Project radioactive wastes in the Missouri River floodplain, has local residents deeply scared. Radioactivity has already leaked into the surrounding community, as in public parks, over the 42 years since the radioactive wastes were illegally dumped there in 1973. As CBS This Morning reported, the risks include not only the underground fire, but also a nearby earthquake faultline.

Beyond Nuclear board member Kay Drey of St. Louis has long watchdogged this illegal dumpsite, nearby and upstream from major metro St. Louis drinking water intakes. In March 2015, Drey and colleagues in St. Louis published a pamphlet entitled "Remove the radioactive wastes NOW! Protect Metro St. Louis' water and air from West Lake Landfill's radioactive contamination!" It includes a map, showing that the radioactive wastes at West Lake Landfill are upstream of the drinking water intakes for North County and the City of St. Louis, on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. The pamphlet urges readers to "Please go to www.moenviron.org to sign a letter asking U.S. Senators Claire McCaskill and Roy Blunt and Congress members William Lacy Clay and Ann Wagner to work to transfer responsibility for West Lake’s radioactive wastes to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers."

As Beyond Nuclear put out in its weekly email bulletion on October 22, 2015:

"Thousands of tons of nuclear weapons wastes are near an underground fire at the West Lake Landfill in north St. Louis County. The radioactive wastes originated in the 1940s and 1950s when Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, near downtown St. Louis, processed uranium in secrecy for nuclear weapons. The wastes were illegally dumped at the landfill in 1973." Radioactive wastes have leaked into the local neighborhood and residents in areas adjacent to the landfill have childhood brain cancers 300 times higher than expected and cases of appendix cancer have been found. More  

SIGN THE PETITION calling for a "Declaration of Emergency" in the wake of the fire moving toward this waste.

And, along very similar lines, very heavy rains in Beatty, Nevada appear to have contributed to a series of powerful explosions, and a fire lasting 12 hours, in a so-called "low" level radioactive waste burial trench, that took place on Sunday, October 18th. The radioactive waste dump began operations in 1962, and was abandoned by U.S. Ecology in 1992.

As Dr. Marvin Resnikoff wrote in his 1987 book Living Without Landfills: Confronting the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Crisis, all seven so-called "low-level" radioactive waste dumps opened in the U.S., including U.S. Ecology's dump in Beatty, Nevada, leaked.

And, as CBS This Morning reported above about the earthquake risks at the Bridgeton, MO West Lake Landfill, Beatty, Nevada is in a very seismically (and even potentially volcanically) active area.

The State of Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects has compiled the extensive media coverage that has accrued, including a 40-second video of the series of explosions, showing the smoke clouds from the underground fires billowing out, into the air. See the compilation links below, in reverse chronological order:

 Sunday, October 25, 2015
3News - Nuclear dump near Beatty has history of problems, lax oversight - By Ken Ritter, Associated Press

Friday, October 23, 2015

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Monday, October 19, 2015

Follow continuing news updates by visiting the State of Nevada Agency for Nuclear Project's What's News page.

DateOctober 27, 2015 | Print ArticlePrint Article | |