Dawn Chapman and Karen Nickel, who lead the activist group Just Moms STL, said they’re optimistic but not letting up.
Author: Jim Salter (Associated Press)
Published: 11:58 AM CDT August 11, 2023
Updated: 11:58 AM CDT August 11, 2023
ST. LOUIS — St. Louis-area activists have been fighting for years to get government compensation for people with cancer and other serious illnesses potentially connected to Manhattan Project nuclear contamination. This week marked a major victory, with support coming from the president.
Uranium was processed in St. Louis starting at the onset of World War II as America raced to develop nuclear bombs. In July, reporting as part of an ongoing collaboration between The Missouri Independent, the nonprofit newsroom MuckRock and The Associated Press cited thousands of pages of documents indicating decades of nonchalance and indifference for the risks posed by uranium contamination. The government documents were obtained by outside researchers through the Freedom of Information Act and shared with the news organizations.
Since the news reports, bipartisan support has emerged to compensate those in St. Louis and elsewhere whose illnesses may be tied to nuclear fallout and contamination. On Wednesday, that support extended to President Joe Biden.
“I’m prepared to help in terms of making sure that those folks are taken care of,” Biden said during a visit to New Mexico.
[…]
St. Louis is far from alone in suffering the effects of the geographically scattered national nuclear program. Advocates have been trying for years to bring awareness to the lingering effects of radiation exposure on the Navajo Nation, where millions of tons of uranium ore were extracted over decades to support U.S. nuclear activities.
Months after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Mallinckrodt Chemical Co. in St. Louis began processing uranium into a concentrated form that could be further refined elsewhere into the material that made it into weapons.
By the late-1940s, the government was trucking nuclear waste from the Mallinckrodt plant to a site near Lambert Airport. It was there that the waste was dumped into Coldwater Creek, contaminating a waterway that was a popular place for kids to play. Just last year, Jana Elementary School, which sits near the creek, was shut down over possible contamination, even though studies conducted by the Army Corps of Engineers found none.
In 1966, the Atomic Energy Commission demolished and buried buildings near the airport and moved the waste to another site, contaminating it, too. Documents cited by AP and the other news organizations showed that storage was haphazard and waste was spilled on roads but that mistakes were often ignored.
Uranium waste also was illegally dumped in West Lake Landfill, near the airport, in 1973. It’s still there.
[…]
Still, in 2019, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry issued a report that found people who regularly played in Coldwater Creek as children from the 1960s to the 1990s may have a slight increased risk of bone cancer, lung cancer and leukemia. The agency determined that those exposed daily to the creek starting in the 2000s, when cleanup began, could have a small increased risk of lung cancer.
Many of those with direct connections to illnesses are far more convinced. Kyle Hedgpeth’s young daughter and niece both were diagnosed with cancer in 2020, within a month of each other. Both have since recovered.
Hedgpeth’s wife and her brother grew up near a creek that flows from the St. Charles County site. He believes they picked up something from exposure to the creek and passed it down to their girls.
Read more at ‘It’s a great day’: St. Louis activists encouraged by Biden’s support for radioactive waste victims via KSDK.com
