"If
you're alarming that, testing that, and you don't have a plan for
when you find something? Why are we out there in the first place?
Everybody go home. Forget the whole thing," said Kaltofen. “You
have to know what to do in advance of finding a leak. If you don’t
do that, how are you going to handle the rest of Hanford?”
St.
Louis Is Burning
An
underground landfill fire near tons of nuclear waste raises serious
health and safety concerns – so why isn't the government doing more
to help?
10
May, 2013
There's a
fire burning in Bridgeton, Missouri. It's invisible to area
residents, buried deep beneath the ground in a North St. Louis County
landfill. But the smoldering waste is an unavoidable presence in
town, giving off a putrid odor that clouds the air miles away – an
overwhelming stench described by one area woman as "rotten eggs
mixed with skunk and fertilizer." Residents report smelling it
at K-12 school buses, a TGI Fridays and even the operating room of a
local hospital. "It smells like dead bodies," observes
another local.
On a
Saturday morning in March, one mile south of the landfill, several
Bridgeton residents have gathered at a small home in a blue-collar
subdivision called Spanish Village. Concerned citizens Karen Nickel
and Dawn Chapman are here to answer questions posed by four of their
neighbors. "How will I ever sell my house?" "Am I
going to end up with cancer 20 years down the road?" "Is
there even a solution?"
In
February, the landfill's owner, Republic Services, sent glossy fliers
to residents within stink radius claiming the noxious odor posed no
safety risk. But official reports say otherwise. Temperature probes
reveal the fire has already surpassed normal heat levels. Reports
from the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS)
indicate dangerously high levels of benzene and hydrogen sulfide in
the air. In March, Missouri's Department of Natural Resources (MDNR)
– which has jurisdiction over Bridgeton Landfill – quietly posted
an Internet notice cautioning citizens with chronic respiratory
diseases to limit time outdoors. A month after Republic distributed
its potentially misleading flier, the state attorney general sued the
company on eight counts of environmental violations, including
pollution and public nuisance. And this week, as part of a settlement
set to be announced Tuesday, Republic sent another round of fliers
offering to move local families to hotels during a period of
increased odor related to remediation efforts.
Nickel and
Chapman are stay-at-home moms; Chapman has three special-needs kids.
Neither of them wants to spend her time worrying about a damn
landfill fire. But until someone higher up the power chain
intervenes, they have sworn to call municipal offices, file Sunshine
requests and post notices to the community's Facebook group, no
matter how unsettling the facts they uncover. Scariest of all: The
Bridgeton landfill fire is burning close to at least 8,700 tons of
nuclear weapons wastes.
"To
have somebody call you at 11 P.M., and they're in tears, concerned
for their family, that's heartbreaking," Chapman tells Rolling
Stone. "We're doing this because we don't have a choice. If we
don't come together as a community and fight, no one's going to do it
for us."
America's
Nuclear Nightmare
West Lake
Landfill is an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund site
that's home to some of the oldest radioactive wastes in the world. A
six-foot chain-link fence surrounds the perimeter, plastered with
bright yellow hazard signs that warn of the dangers within. On one
corner stands a rusty gas pump. About 1,200 feet south of the
radioactive EPA site, the fire at Bridgeton Landfill spreads out like
hot barbeque coals. No one knows for sure what happens when an
underground inferno meets a pool of atomic waste, but residents
aren't eager to find out.
At a March
15th press conference, Peter Anderson – an economist who has
studied landfills for over 20 years – raised the worst-case
scenario of a "dirty bomb," meaning a non-detonated, mass
release of floating radioactive particles in metro St. Louis. "Now,
to be clear, a dirty bomb is not nuclear fission, it's not an atomic
bomb, it's not a weapon of mass destruction," Anderson assured
meeting attendants in Bridgeton's Machinists Union Hall. "But
the dispersal of that radioactive material in air that could reach –
depending upon weather conditions – as far as 10 miles from the
site could make it impossible to have economic activity continue."
In a
response offered to Rolling Stone, Republic Services says, "Mr.
Anderson made his statement without any proof or evidence, and he
ignored the fact that ongoing evaluation by MDNR, EPA and local
authorities have confirmed that the increased heat at the Bridgeton
Landfill has not impacted West Lake and does not pose a threat to the
materials at West Lake." Republic Services also denies that it
is dealing with a "fire" – the company prefers the
euphemism "subsurface smoldering event." Under orders from
the state, Republic is drilling holes to contain this "smoldering
event." Republic estimates it's already spent over $20 million –
about 0.25 percent of its 2012 revenues – on such mitigation
efforts, "not because we have to, but because it is the right
thing to do."
When
Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster sued Republic Services on
March 27th, outlining a host of alleged odor pollution and public
health violations at Bridgeton Landfill, he described the risk of the
fire contacting the nearby radwaste as a mere "remote
hypothetical." But many residents are far from reassured.
The story
of West Lake's radioactive waste goes back to April 1942, when a St.
Louis company called Mallinckrodt Chemical Works began purifying tens
of thousands of tons of uranium for the University of Chicago as part
of the Manhattan Project. Mallinckrodt's workers did not receive
adequate safety protections and had little knowledge of what they
were dealing with – oversights that would lead to
disproportionately high cancer death rates among workers, as
documented in books, dissertations and journalistic accounts,
including a groundbreaking seven-part series from the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch in 1989. Over the next 25 years, the company's uranium
processing also created huge amounts of radioactive waste, much of
which was secretly dumped at sites throughout the St. Louis
metropolitan area, including West Lake.
Today, West
Lake's radioactive waste – all 143,000 cubic yards of it – sits
on the outskirts of a former quarry with practically none of the
standard safety features found in most municipal landfills. No clay
liner blocks toxic leachate – or "garbage juice" – from
seeping into area groundwater. No cap keeps toxic gas from dispersing
into the air. This unprotected waste sits on a floodplain 1.5 miles
away from the Missouri River. Eight miles downstream is a drinking
water reservoir that serves 300,000 St. Louisans. Worst of all: The
materials dumped in this populous metropolitan area will continue to
pose a hazard for hundreds of thousands of years.
The EPA's
Region 7 is based in Lenexa, Kansas, about 250 miles west of St.
Louis. The agency operates from a glass-paned office building that
once housed the international headquarters of Applebee's. In an empty
conference room on the ground floor, Dan Gravatt, the EPA manager
tasked with handling West Lake, looks every bit the government
scientist in his blue work shirt, khaki pants and thin-framed
glasses.
In 2008,
the EPA decided to cap the radiotoxic material dumped at West Lake
and leave it there. Capping the site meant piling five feet of dirt
and rocks on top and implementing long-term monitoring for
contamination. Facing widespread public pressure, including a letter
from St. Louis mayor Francis Slay, the EPA postponed its decision
pending further studies.
Gravatt has
a smooth, rehearsed response to almost any question about the West
Lake landfill – a skill he put to use at a community meeting on
January 17th, when more than 300 concerned citizens gathered to hear
the results of those EPA studies. One person in attendance was Kay
Drey, an 80-year-old civil rights and anti-nuclear activist who's
been advocating for the removal of wastes from the St. Louis area for
more than three decades. "I was very disappointed," Drey
tells RS. "The evidence is clear. This is radioactively hot
stuff and it shouldn't be in the floodplain by the Missouri river.
And if they can't admit to that – well, it's incomprehensible."
Back at his
office, Gravatt insists that West Lake's radioactive wastes only pose
health risks for people who come in direct contact with the site,
adding that the nuclear dump "doesn't pose any current exposure
pathways to area residents as it stands now."
But Robert
Criss, a geochemist at Washington University in St. Louis who has
studied the issue closely, says the EPA is grossly underplaying a
host of risks surrounding West Lake – flooding, earthquakes,
liquefaction, groundwater leaching – that could pave the way for a
public health crisis. That's not to mention the recent development of
an underground fire nearby. Says Criss, "There is no geological
site I can think of that is more absurd to place such waste."
Digging
through old Nuclear Regulatory Commission studies, he recently
stumbled upon what he describes as an error with major implications.
For the last three decades, various government documents have
referred to the waste at the landfill as "leached barium
sulfate," a nearly insoluble compound generated from uranium
processing. But Criss says that the NRC's own data shows the material
dumped at West Lake contains far too little barium and sulfate to
compose barium sulfate – by factors of 100 and 1000, respectively.
"If I had this long to study something, I would be pretty
embarrassed if this is what I came up with," says Criss. "It
is inconceivable for these people to promote remedies when they don't
even know what they're dealing with."
In a
statement to Rolling Stone, the EPA disputed Criss' findings, but
declined to offer further explanation, instead deferring to the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Upon request for a chemical analysis
proving the waste is barium sulfate, the NRC sent RS the same 1982
report that Criss disputes.
So what
happens now? The EPA officially lists four potentially responsible
parties for the West Lake Superfund site. One is the U.S. Department
of Energy. A second is Cotter Corporation, a company whose
contractors secretly dumped nuclear waste at West Lake in the
Seventies, as uncovered soon after by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The others are Bridgeton Landfill LLC and Rock Road Industries LLC –
both subsidiaries of Republic Services, which currently runs the
landfill. Under Superfund law, these four parties must ultimately
foot the bill for any remedial actions ordered by the EPA; at the
same time, it is these same four parties that contract and pay for
all EPA studies leading up to a decision. This might seem like a
conflict of interest, but Gravatt insists it's all on the up and up:
"We tell them what to do." It must be a coincidence, then,
that the EPA's capping plan cost the potentially responsible parties
only $41 million, compared to up to $415 million required to actually
excavate the waste.
Missouri
State Representative Keith English has another idea to fix the mess
at West Lake. In February, English and 12 co-sponsors filed a
resolution with the state assembly to transfer control of the site
from the EPA to the Army Corps of Engineers' Formerly Utilized Sites
Remedial Actions Program (FUSRAP) – a proven success that has
already cleared more than one million cubic yards of atomic waste
from other sites in the St. Louis area, shipping the radioactive
contaminants to safe disposal cells in Utah and Idaho. A nearly
identical resolution filed by State Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal in
Missouri's other legislative body garnered three co-sponsors. "The
educated people that deal with this type of waste can see that
there's an issue with just putting a cap on top," says English.
Unfortunately,
anything that passes through Missouri's statehouses would only
represent a symbolic victory. Since West Lake remains under federal
jurisdiction, only an act of Congress could transfer the site to the
Army Corps. For this reason, many are looking to Missouri's U.S.
Senate delegation – Democrat Claire McCaskill and Republican Roy
Blunt – to lead on this issue. "I hope that our resolutions
pass and get to Senator Blunt and Senator McCaskill's office,"
English says. "Because they've been sweeping it under the rug
for the past several years."
The
Missouri Coalition for the Environment, which has advocated for the
removal of West Lake wastes for more than a decade, in part blames
Missouri's ties to the nuclear energy industry for the senators' lack
of action. Both McCaskill and Blunt, as well as Missouri Governor Jay
Nixon, have pushed for bringing more nuclear reactors to the state.
Any more attention to a hazardous radioactive dump might get in the
way of that messaging. "They won't touch this with a 10-foot
pole," says the Coalition's safe energy director, Ed Smith. "It
doesn't fit their narrative of clean nuclear power and 'jobs, jobs,
jobs.'"
Blunt has
yet to make any public statement on the issue, and his office has not
responded to requests for comment. McCaskill, meanwhile, supported
the 2008 cap-and-leave plan for the West Lake radwaste; on March 12th
of this year, she sent a response to several concerned citizens,
assuring them, "I will continue to monitor these situations and
ensure that any proposal put forward to address them provides a safe,
cost-effective solution for Missourians."
McCaskill's
reference to a "cost-effective solution" didn't sit well
with the activists in Bridgeton. "I don't give a flying fuck how
much it costs," says Chapman. "This is about my children."
Bridgeton's
underground fire was news to Ramona Herbert, who moved to Spanish
Village with her family last November. She and her husband, Joshua,
came here from St. Louis' inner city, hoping for a safer place to
raise their kids. When the Herberts signed a five-year lease for
their new home, no one disclosed to them that hot nuclear dumps sit a
mile north from their children's bedrooms. No one told the Herberts
that an ongoing landfill fire burns just down the street from their
local Bob Evans restaurant. After two months in her new home, Ramona
Herbert noticed an EPA flier on her door announcing a community
meeting, but it meant little to her.
"My
landlord said to me that we have a little sewage problem," she
recalls. "So I'm thinking the sewage system isn't working
right." But the stench only got worse, and she started having
trouble sleeping. Parents stopped letting 14-year-old Mateo Herbert's
friends shoot hoops in his neighborhood, because something in the air
was making their kids' eyes water. And Joshua Herbert, who boasted a
nearly spotless medical history, started suffering terrible
headaches.
Ramona
Herbert learned about St. Louis' nuclear waste legacy from a Rolling
Stone reporter. As soon as she found out, she got in touch with
Chapman, and she is now part of a growing coalition. Like hundreds of
other concerned citizens in North St. Louis, she wants answers. "When
were we going to be warned?" Herbert wonders, standing at the
door of her new home. "When is it too late?"
Nuclear
Power Falters, Engulfed by 'Cauldron' of Bad Luck
Once
touted as a successor, or at least a competitor, to carbon-based
power, the nuclear sector has taken a beating as the momentum behind
new projects stalls and enthusiasm for domestic fossil fuel
production grows.
13
May, 2013
Across the
country, plans to build nuclear plants have hit roadblocks recently—a
sharp turn for a sector that just a few years ago was looking forward
to a renaissance. These developments come as energy policy becomes
increasingly focused on oil and gas.
In recent
weeks, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ruled against a proposed
partnership between NRC Energy and Toshiba, citing a law that
prohibits control of a U.S. plant by a foreign corporation.
Elsewhere,
Duke Energy scuttled plans to construct two nuclear reactors in North
Carolina, while California officials warned that two damaged reactors
could be shut down permanently if the NRC doesn't take action to get
the plants back online.
Even the
most successful disruptors who shake up their industry don't always
get it 100 percent right. Find out the surprising thing Nobel Prize
winning physicist Albert Einstein said about the ability to harness
nuclear energy.
The change
in nuclear's fortunes is staggering, given that the U.S. is the
world's largest producer of nuclear power, according to the World
Nuclear Association. The country's 104 reactors account for more than
30 percent of nuclear electricity generation worldwide.
"Starting
about four years ago, the industry felt it was in the middle of a
renaissance" with applications for many new plants pending with
the NRC, said Peter Bradford, a law professor and a former member of
the commission. "They've gone from that high-water mark to a
point at which … we're actually seeing the closing of a few
operating plants,which was unthinkable even a few years ago."
With shale
and natural gas gaining currency and the cost of building plants
soaring, nuclear energy's stock is steadily being devalued. All this
is playing out against the backdrop of Japan's nuclear disaster two
years ago at Fukushima, which made policymakers think twice about
extolling the virtues of nuclear power.
Bradford,
who also served as a utility commissioner in New York and Maine,
cited a "cauldron of events" for bringing the nuclear push
to a standstill, including the use of cheaper and plentiful natural
gas to generate electricity, as well as soaring investment costs.
"Nuclear
is kind of the ocean liner of energy: Once it heads in a particular
direction it's hard to turn it," Bradford said. Some observers
had predicted that "many things could go wrong," he said,
"but I don't think there were many of us that forecast they
would all go wrong at once."
Just like
its counterparts in the solar industry, nuclear power is in the
throes of declining public policy support. Tax incentives and other
forms of public subsidy are being withdrawn as the risks and costs
associated with power plants rise.
The shift
dovetails with the lowered profile of climate change legislation in
Washington, according to some.
Sherry
Quirk, an attorney that leads Schiff Hardin's energy practice, noted
local and federal officials' shift and the lack of climate change
initiatives.
"Given
concerns about climate change and the thought there might be ... new
laws that would effectively make coal fire a thing of the past, they
launched a number of plans," Quirk said. Now, "on the basis
of price and risk analysis, the constructions of a number of nuclear
facilities have been called into question."
Although
nuclear power is touted as one of the cleanest forms of energy, only
three units are under construction, and only four to six may come
online in the next decade, according to data from the WNA.
That
appears to reflect an energy policy that increasingly de-emphasizes
alternative energy while placing a premium on fossil fuels.
"The
so-called all-of-the-above energy strategy was always nonsensical,"
said Bradford, even more so given that nuclear power has become too
pricey. "We don't fight world hunger with caviar, and we're not
going to fight climate change with outlandishly expensive energy
sources."
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