Early Atomic Waste Lingers in St. Louis Suburbs : Environment: The radioactive residue from work on the first A-bombs is scattered across several sites. Officials are seeking a lasting solution.

The Manhattan Project that produced the atom bomb was launched in 1942, but the federal government--and worried citizens of St. Louis County--still are trying to figure out what to do with the radioactive waste.

For almost half a century, the waste has been, literally, scattered around St. Louis, where the uranium was processed. It is in giant piles at a site near the airport. It is spread along industrial roads where trucks once hauled it. It is in a creek that flows through a nearby neighborhood and into the Missouri River.

The nearly 1 million cubic yards of radioactive residue that has been stored here--for years rather haphazardly--make this by far the nation’s largest low-level radioactive site in a heavily populated urban area, critics contend.

The Department of Energy, which says the material does not pose a health hazard, at one time favored permanently storing it here in a bunker to be built near Lambert International Airport. Now the DOE is conducting a long-range study to determine what ultimately should be done, but citizens and local officials upset by the radioactive waste have mounted a campaign to have it removed.

“Studies have been going on for the last 10 years,” said William Miller, mayor of Berkeley, a St. Louis suburb where much of the waste is stored. “I’m very concerned that they hope everybody will forget about this and then they’ll come back and say this is the best suitable site.”

The waste was produced by Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, a St. Louis company that, under contract with the U.S. government, processed impure natural uranium to produce pure uranium trioxide and other uranium- and thorium-containing compounds from 1942 to 1957. The compounds were used in the race to produce the atomic bomb in World War II and in the subsequent Cold War push to make more nuclear weapons.

It was the frenzy of the arms race that in part accounted for the haphazard way in which the radioactive waste was handled, acknowledged David G. Adler of the Department of Energy’s Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program.

“That activity took place during a war effort,” he said, “when the primary consideration was on the production side and less emphasis was placed on waste management.”

He added, though, that in the 1940s and 1950s, standards for the handling and disposal of nuclear waste were not as stringent as they are now, and the storage sites were in largely undeveloped areas. Because the material was handled and stored with so little concern for safety, the DOE has spent $75 million and more than a decade simply determining the extent of the problem.

Most of the development that has taken place around the sites since the 1940s has been industrial. But Mayor Miller points out that some Berkeley residents live half a mile from the radioactive storage sites. And for more than 20 years the St. Louis suburb, five miles from the city, operated a baseball field across the street from a 21-acre site originally used to store the waste.

“No one was aware of the contamination,” Miller said. “DOE says we can still use (the field). For it to harm us we would have to eat the dirt.

“But our contention is that when the atom bomb was exploded many, many years ago, people stood and watched it, it was such a pretty sight. Now we know that was a dangerous thing for them to do. They now say (the field) is not dangerous. But in 20 or 30 years from now will they still say that?”

The ball field was permanently closed about four years ago.

Berkeley and Hazelwood, a suburb seven miles outside St. Louis where more radioactive waste is stored, have populations of 16,000 and 9,000, respectively. Moreover, Miller noted, a quarter of a million people live within a three-mile radius of the waste.

“We would like to see them move it to a less populated area,” he said.

An added worry is Coldwater Creek, which flows along the edge of a waste site and then on through residential areas before emptying into the Missouri River about four miles upstream of its confluence with the Mississippi River. Despite concern that radioactive waste in the sediment in the creek could contaminate drinking water, the DOE and city officials contend it is safe because the radioactivity is of such a low level and is so greatly diluted in the rivers.

According to a government report, the Manhattan Engineer District, a predecessor of the Atomic Energy Commission and Department of Energy, acquired a 21-acre tract to store the radioactive residues in 1946. “Most of the residues were stored in bulk on open ground,” the report said. Some of the contaminated materials were buried, and the site was fenced “to prevent casual entry and limit direct radiation exposure to the public.”

Some of the uranium ore residues and uranium- and radium-bearing waste generated by Mallinckrodt also have been kept at the company’s chemical plant north of downtown St. Louis. Not until last year, however, was it determined that the near-downtown site actually is the largest single radioactive waste site in the area. This disclosure further fueled concern because it means large quantities of radioactive waste will have to be transported through the heart of the city.

In the past, when waste was hauled from one place to another, spills occurred. As a result, industrial roads near the sites still are contaminated above federally approved levels.

A recent study showed that 194,000 cubic yards of radioactive waste is on roads in north St. Louis County along which the waste was hauled in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. According to the study, 288,000 cubic yards of waste is stored at the Mallinckrodt plant; another 250,000 cubic yards is at the airport site, and 211,000 cubic yards is at a nearby site in Hazelwood, Mo.

In 1966, most of the waste stored at the airport site was moved to an industrial section of Hazelwood after the waste was purchased by the Continental Mining and Milling Co. of Chicago.

The company subsequently sold much of the 115,000 tons of radioactive waste to other firms that then shipped it to Colorado for commercial use. Some of the remaining waste and contaminated topsoil was disposed of in a St. Louis landfill. Other contaminated materials were stored in gigantic piles at the Hazelwood site, where they have been sealed and covered.

In a non-binding referendum Nov. 6, St. Louis County residents overwhelming opposed construction of an airport bunker to store the waste permanently.

At a daylong public hearing held by the Department of Energy in December, 119 of 120 speakers opposed the bunker, with St. Louis County Executive-elect George R. Westfall calling the plan “insane.”

Opponents said the site was unsuitable because it is in a flood plain, an earthquake zone and a heavily populated area.

“It is irrational and immoral to place such materials in the midst of a living human community,” the Rev. Ben Martin, a Presbyterian minister, told DOE officials at the hearing.

Adler said studies conducted so far indicate that the New Madrid fault zone does not appear to pose much of a threat. “However, it still needs to be rigorously evaluated,” he said.

Other factors that will affect the decision will be the site’s proximity to environmentally sensitive areas such as flood plains and wetlands, natural containment afforded by the soils and clays at the proposed site and the relative cost of storing the waste at the airport or moving it to another site.

Studying and containing the waste “is certain to cost tens to hundreds of billions of dollars,” Adler said.

About the bunker proposal, he said: “The department hasn’t made any decision to create a storage cell one place or another,” and a decision isn’t likely to be made before late 1994.

“We are evaluating the possibility of on-site storage (at the airport),” he added. “However, it’s being evaluated on equal footing with a range of alternatives such as taking it somewhere else in the state of Missouri or taking it off site, out of state, for disposal and any other feasible alternatives for controlling the problem.”

The City of St. Louis owns the land where the bunker would be built, even though the land is located in Berkeley.

Miller said he is concerned that if the federal government took over the land and established it as a storage site, the DOE might eventually bring radioactive waste from other parts of the country to St. Louis to store it.

“If this becomes a federal site, there’s not a state or local government that can do anything about it,” he said.

“If we let up, they eventually could complete the study and in fact do what they’ve wanted to do all along.”