Nuclear Waste in an Elementary School?
Squat brown brick exterior, flat roof, small parking lot filled with teachers’ cars, a flagpole with a waving American flag grounded outside large, and a mid-sized marquee sign announcing that Jana Elementary School is hosting parent teacher conferences in October. It looks like every other suburban elementary school across the nation. Except for one thing — this school is contaminated with radioactive waste.
On January 27, 2022, the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers (USACE) notified the Hazelwood School District that low levels of radiation were found in the soil by Coldwater Creek, located next to Jana Elementary School. In August, the school board notified the parents, and by October the school had transferred indefinitely to online learning. How did the creek come to be contaminated? And how is it connected to the Manhattan Project?
In 1942, the St. Louis-based Mallinckrodt Chemical Works was selected to process uranium ore for the Manhattan Project. This processing proved vital to the project’s success, but St. Louis is left grappling with its consequences nearly 100 years after the detonation of the first atomic bomb.
Mallinckrodt, which also has close ties to WashU, spent the next 24 years manufacturing “more than 100,000 tons of purified natural uranium materials” in downtown St. Louis, before moving their operation to Weldon Spring in St. Charles County. In 1946, “the federal government acquired a 21.74-acre property near the airport and began dumping radioactive wastes there”. During this time, authorities failed to properly store the materials, specifically radioactively contaminated dirt, which allowed the wind and rainwater to spread waste into a creek that meandered through a developing suburb and its elementary school. The carelessness of the disposal led to hundreds of parents watching their children play in the creek, unaware they were exposing them to radiation. In 1949, Mallinckrodt authored a memo that indicated the radioactive material they stored at the government-owned airport site could pollute the nearby water, but the material was too dangerous for anyone from Mallinckrodt to risk replacing the steel drums. So, the radioactive material sat in these crumbling barrels polluting Coldwater Creek and Jana Elementary School until 1966, when another company, the Cotter Corporation, moved the waste to a new site in Hazelwood to extract any remaining valuable materials. This new site was also located by Coldwater Creek, and the radioactive material continued to pollute the water and the grounds of Jana Elementary School.
Mallinckrodt, who also has close ties to WashU, spent the next 24 years manufacturing “more than 100,000 tons of purified natural uranium materials” in downtown North St. Louis.
In 1973, after the radioactive waste was stripped of all valuable materials, 8,700 tons of waste containing uranium were left. Cotter offloaded this waste in the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton, Missouri (about a ten-minute drive from Wash U). However, next to the West Lake landfill sits another landfill, known simply as the Bridgeton Landfill.
In 1989, radioactive material was publicly reported, for the first time, to be in and around Coldwater Creek, and a string of cancer cases was linked to the radioactive waste. In 2015, the USACE confirmed that low levels of radioactivity were found in neighborhoods near and alongside Coldwater Creek, including Jana Elementary School, and the creek itself was still contaminated for about fourteen miles.
This continued contamination led to increased cancer risks, specifically “increased risk of developing bone cancer, lung cancer and leukemia” for people exposed to Coldwater Creek during the contamination periods. The area around Coldwater Creek also experiences higher rates of “[c]hildhood brain and nervous system cancer,” though the Centers for Disease Control did not recognize this risk until 2018.
Missouri politicians from both parties, notably St. Louis Representative Cori Bush and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley have pushed for federal resources to assist with clean up and compensation for the victims. However, it remains to be seen if these funds will come to St. Louis.
Later investigations conducted by the USACE and private companies found the levels of radioactivity around Jana Elementary School were safe, or no higher than normal. In August and September of this year, the USACE stated that they had removed over 300 truckloads of contaminated soil from Jana Elementary School’s Property. Despite this work, the school district, after extensive pushback from students’ parents, decided to permanently close the school, and the students were transferred to other schools in the district.
Cleanup of Coldwater Creek is projected to take until 2038 to complete. Jana Elementary School will remain indefinitely closed. Countless people have and will develop cancer due to this exposure to radiation. St. Louis will feel the effects of the first atomic bomb for decades to come.
Emily Woodruff ‘24 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at ewoodruff@ wustl.edu.