Nuclear waste and byproducts from World War II found in groundwater of a US lake
During the cleanup of the West Lake landfill in St. Louis County, nearby groundwater was contaminated. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency then investigated the possible spread of radium from the landfill, reported Missouri Independent.
In a recent update to surrounding communities, the EPA announced plans to install additional groundwater monitoring wells around the site in Bridgeton, about a mile from the Missouri River. This expansion came after contamination was detected at the boundary of the landfill, and is designed to determine whether contamination is migrating from the site and potentially reaching the river. Radium levels near the site are just above drinking water limits, even though the radioactive element occurs naturally in rock formations and aquifers.
The EPA originally expected to have all the required groundwater wells installed by August 2022, said Snehal Bhagat, the project manager for West Lake groundwater remediation, during a meeting in December.
“But the discoveries at off-site sites required a significant expansion of the network to pinpoint the impact locations,” Bhagat said. “So many more wells were drilled. We are still drilling more as we trace the edges of the impacts.”
According to media reports, the West Lake dump is one of several sites in the area contaminated by decades-old nuclear waste. St. Louis reportedly played a crucial role in the development of the world’s first atomic bomb in the 1940s. Uranium was used in experiments in Chicago as part of the Manhattan Project, the name of the World War II-era nuclear weapons program.
After the war, radioactive waste from the downtown uranium plants was transported to the St. Louis airport. Along the way, the waste often fell out of the trucks and was dumped unprotected on the ground beside Coldwater Creek. This creek, which flows through what are now bustling suburbs, became contaminated for miles, increasing the risk of cancer for generations of children who played along its banks and in its waters.
The garbage remained at the airport for years before being sold and moved to a property in nearby Hazlewood, also next to the creek. In the early 1970s, after valuable metals were extracted, the garbage was illegally dumped at the West Lake landfill, where it remains today.
Now the landfill is a Superfund site being cleaned up by the EPA. In recent years, the agency has found that contamination is more widespread than previously thought. Despite community protests, for years the EPA relied on a decades-old radiation measurement from a helicopter to locate the waste.
The EPA is currently working to determine the “size and mobility of the plume.” “To date, no conclusions have been drawn about the source(s) of the radium in the off-site groundwater because data collection is ongoing,” said Kellen Ashford, a spokesman for the EPA’s regional office. Missouri Independent.
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