in nearby Bridgeton, piling it in a heap, the commission said at the time.
In 1966, the Atomic Energy Commission demolished and buried buildings at the airport site. So the waste moved to new sites, contaminating more land, near more people. The rest of the Weldon Spring site was added two years later.Īlison Carrick, co-director of “The First Secret City,” a documentary about the region’s nuclear history, said after the war some companies thought that byproducts of the radioactive material could be sold.īut that didn’t work. Radioactive waste contaminated the area, including a large quarry that eventually became a Superfund cleanup site in 1987. In 1957, the Atomic Energy Commission opened a plant in Weldon Spring and Mallinckrodt moved its uranium processing there. Production there ended in 1945, but not before soil, sediments and some springs were contaminated. Meanwhile, starting in 1941, the government began making explosives at a new plant in Weldon Spring. In 1946, the government bought land near the airport and began trucking nuclear waste from the Mallinckrodt facility. 7, 1941, Mallinckrodt began processing uranium near downtown.
Just months after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. “This is an enterprise of heavy industry,” said Gwendolyn Verhoff, a historian at St. was a major processor of the element into a concentrated form that could be further refined elsewhere into the material that made it into weapons. Louis area involved uranium, where Mallinckrodt Chemical Co. Louis was part of a geographically scattered national effort to build a nuclear bomb that was tested in New Mexico. “We are a national sacrifice zone,” she said. What it did find were repeated instances where companies, contractors or the government could have addressed significant problems but didn’t.ĭawn Chapman of the activist group Just Moms STL - a group pushing for cleanup and federal buyouts in an area near the airport - said the region “saved our country” with its work on the nuclear program but paid a terrible cost. The AP review didn’t uncover evidence of criminal wrongdoing. The company, Continental Mining and Milling Co., said it was having trouble with the contractor - a lone man who used a shovel and broom to pick up the atomic waste and put it in a pickup truck. Louis County, which noted that “in a number of places along the roadway” material that later tested positive for radioactivity “appeared to have fallen from vehicles.”Ī follow-up inspection three months later found the material was still sitting on the road. The government documents were obtained by outside researchers through the Freedom of Information Act and shared with the news organizations.Ĭonsider a 1966 government inspection report on a site in St. This story is part of an ongoing collaboration between The Missouri Independent, the nonprofit newsroom MuckRock and The Associated Press. The AP examined hundreds of pages of internal memos, inspection reports and other items dating to the early 1950s, and found nonchalance and indifference to the risks of materials used in the development of nuclear weapons during and after World War II. A landfill operator is spending millions to keep underground smoldering from reaching nuclear waste illegally dumped in the 1970s.
A grade school closed last year amid radiation concerns. Federal health investigators have found an increased cancer risk for some people who, as children, played in a creek contaminated with uranium waste. Louis area in the mid-20th century were aware of health risks, spills, improperly stored contaminants and other problems but often ignored them, according to documents reviewed by The Associated Press.ĭecades later, even with much of the cleanup complete, the aftereffects haunt the region. LOUIS (AP) - The federal government and companies responsible for nuclear bomb production and atomic waste storage sites in the St.
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