{"id":3248,"date":"2013-05-13T07:24:39","date_gmt":"2013-05-13T11:24:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/therationalprogressive.com\/cms\/?p=3248"},"modified":"2013-05-13T07:24:39","modified_gmt":"2013-05-13T11:24:39","slug":"st-louis-is-burning-st-louis-landfill-fire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/therationalprogressive.com\/cms\/2013\/05\/st-louis-is-burning-st-louis-landfill-fire\/","title":{"rendered":"St. Louis Is Burning | St. Louis Landfill Fire"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Landfill-packer\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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 \u2013 oversights that would lead to\u00a0disproportionately\u00a0high 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.<\/p>\n

Today, West Lake’s radioactive waste \u2013 all 143,000 cubic yards of it \u2013 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 \u2013 or “garbage juice” \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

MORE:<\/strong> St. Louis Landfill Fire | Politics News | Rolling Stone<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[257,22],"tags":[1678,1680,1679],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/therationalprogressive.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3248"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/therationalprogressive.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/therationalprogressive.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/therationalprogressive.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/therationalprogressive.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3248"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/therationalprogressive.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3250,"href":"http:\/\/therationalprogressive.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3248\/revisions\/3250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/therationalprogressive.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/therationalprogressive.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/therationalprogressive.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}