Wednesday, April 29, 2015

When The Manhattan Project was top secret


Nobody could know
what was being done if you didn't have the requisite "need to know". Add to that the lack of knowledge about what they were working with and you have thousands of good people working diligently to win WW II and never knowing the deadly pollution they were planting across their own landscape. Even now seventy years after the fact, some of those sites are only becoming public knowledge.
Uranium ore used to make the atomic weapons used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was processed in downtown St. Louis, which hosted the country’s only uranium plant until 1951. In the decades following the end of WWII, hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive waste were haphazardly stored, shuffled around the region, illegally dumped, and sometimes left unaccounted for. As the metropolitan area expanded, suburban communities — such as the one Nickel’s parents moved their family to in 1973 — were built downwind or downstream from contaminated areas, government documents show.

After years of government reorganization, the contaminated sites in the St. Louis area have been targeted in cleanup campaigns lead by various government agencies, and officials have long maintained there is no immediate threat to human health. But many in the community disagree with that claim, pointing to a trail of rare cancers, autoimmune diseases, birth defects and infertility that span generations and are known to be linked to prolonged exposure to radiation — and some government agencies are starting to take notice...

For North St. Louis County residents of Nickel’s generation, Coldwater Creek was just a normal neighborhood creek — many didn’t even know its name. It was just “the creek” that kids would play in on hot summer days or cross on the way to school. It was the creek that would flood when it rained too much, turning neighborhood parks into giant puddles, dripping into basements and covering family vegetable gardens.

What many did not know was that they were living downstream from a 22-acre field acquired in 1946 by the long-gone Atomic Energy Commission. Hundreds of thousands of tons of waste — much of it radioactive — were dumped there, including some 60 tons of uranium-laced sand from Nazi Germany’s nuclear program that was captured by the United States en route to Japan near the end of WWII.

Soil samples taken by the Army Corps of Engineers in the late 1990s show that soils contaminated with forms of uranium, thorium and radium were found as deep as 20 feet in some places. The creek is near the westernmost boundary of the site and then flows nearly 20 miles through St. Louis County municipalities such as Florissant, Hazelwood and Black Jack .

Radioactive materials were carried into Coldwater Creek when it rained, according to the Army Corps of Engineers. In the late 1990s, the Corps found radioactive waste approximately five miles downstream from the storage site during a bridge renovation project.
The creek doesn't glow in the dark and neither do the victims, but years of constant low level exposure to deadly radioactive materiels has done the damage. And all those years of neglect have allowed the problem to spread far and wide among an unsuspecting population.

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