Nuclear Waste, Byproducts From World War II-Era Found In US Lake's Groundwater

Crews cleaning up the West Lake Landfill in St. Louis County discovered contamination in nearby groundwater, prompting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to investigate the potential spread of radium from the site, reported Missouri Independent.

In a recent update to nearby communities, the EPA announced plans to install additional groundwater monitoring wells around the site, located in Bridgeton, about a mile from the Missouri River. This expansion follows the detection of contamination at the landfill's boundary and aims to determine if the contamination is migrating from the site and potentially reaching the river. Radium levels near the site are slightly above drinking water limits, though the radioactive element naturally occurs in rock formations and aquifers.

Originally, the EPA expected to have all necessary groundwater wells installed by August 2022, according to Snehal Bhagat, the project manager for the groundwater remediation at West Lake, during a briefing in December.

"But the detections in offsite locations required a significant expansion of the network to delineate exactly where the impacts are found," Bhagat said, "so a lot more wells were put in. We're still putting them in as we chase the edges of the impacts."

According to media reports, the West Lake Landfill is one of several sites in the area that is contaminated by decades-old nuclear waste. Reportedly, St Louis was pivotal 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 given to the World War II-era nuclear weapons program. 

After the war, radioactive waste from downtown uranium plants was transported to the St. Louis airport. Along the way, the waste often spilt from the trucks and was dumped, unprotected, on the ground next to 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 waste remained at the airport for years before being sold and relocated to a property in nearby Hazlewood, also next to the creek. In the early 1970s, after valuable metals were extracted, the waste was illegally dumped at the West Lake Landfill, where it remains today.

Now, the landfill is a Superfund site undergoing EPA cleanup. In recent years, the agency has found that the contamination is more widespread than previously thought. Despite community outcry, the EPA relied for years on a decades-old radiation reading from a helicopter to locate the waste.

Currently, the EPA is working to determine the "size and mobility of the plume." "To date, no conclusions have been made about the source(s) of the radium in off-site groundwater because data collection is ongoing," Kellen Ashford, a spokesman for the EPA's regional office, told Missouri Independent.