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Jan. 28, 2025 |  By: Allison Kite - Missouri Independent

Missouri lawmakers consider funds for radioactive waste testing in St. Louis

toxic waste

By Allison Kite - Missouri Independent

Missouri lawmakers are again considering legislation that would increase funding to allow local governments to test for additional radioactive waste around contaminated sites in the St. Louis region.

The Missouri House Special Committee on Intergovernmental Affairs on Monday discussed the bill sponsored by Republican state Rep. Mark Matthiesen of O’Fallon. It’s similar to legislation Matthiesen proposed last year but includes even more money for testing.

“There’s a lot of concern that the testing that has already happened…was not sufficient enough — that we need to go farther, that people are still in harm’s way right now, today,” Matthiesen said.

Matthiesen, whose district includes a nuclear waste disposal site supervised by the U.S. Department of Energy, proposed legislation in 2018 that established the fund, but money was never appropriated to it. This fiscal year marks the first time the state has allocated any funding.

Last year, Matthiesen proposed $300,000 a year for investigations, but this year’s bill would transfer $1 million into the fund each year. 

“I would throw any amount on this so that we can do the testing that’s needed,” he said. “However, realistically speaking, if a million got funded every year for a handful of years, we could address the most pressing concerns that a lot of people are having right now today.”  

St. Louis has struggled for decades with remnant radioactive waste from the World War II-era effort to build the world’s first atomic bomb.

Uranium was refined in downtown St. Louis for use in the development of the bomb. After the war, it was trucked to St. Louis County, often falling off of trucks along the way. It was dumped at the airport, susceptible to the wind and rain, and contaminated the adjacent Coldwater Creek.

As suburban neighborhoods sprung up along Coldwater Creek, generations of children and families were exposed to the radioactive waste, elevating residents’ risk of certain cancers.

The waste was sold and moved to a site in Hazelwood, also along Coldwater Creek, so that a company could extract valuable metals. Eventually, the remnant radioactive material was dumped in the West Lake Landfill where it remains today.

Coldwater Creek is being cleaned up by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers while the Environmental Protection Agency is overseeing the cleanup of the West Lake Landfill.

The EPA announced earlier this month that it expanded the area of the West Lake Landfill that requires remediation by 40 acres after discovering contamination was more widespread than the agency previously thought. Crews will need to dig up an additional 20,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil and debris. The cost of the project is now nearly $400 million, up from $229 million.

Following the EPA’s decision, the Missouri Department of Natural Resources wrote the federal agency warning of a “high likelihood” of radioactive contamination in the adjacent Bridgeton Landfill, which is experiencing a “subsurface smoldering event,” a chemical reaction that heats and consumes waste like a fire but lacks oxygen.

The EPA said it “has no new evidence or information to support any claim that radiologically-impacted material … is present anywhere else in the Bridgeton Landfill.”

Asked about the EPA’s statement, a spokesman for the Department of Natural Resources said the state agency and EPA “are in full agreement regarding the presence and location of radiological material at the Bridgeton.”