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Monday, February 15, 2016

West Lake story: An underground fire, radioactive waste, and the legacies of nuclear militarization, from Congo to Mallinkrodt to West Lake

West Lake story: An underground fire, radioactive waste, and governmental failure

Robert Alvarez - Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

On July 16, 1973, 28 years to the day after the first nuclear weapon was exploded at Alamogordo, New Mexico, a line of dump trucks containing the detritus from the uranium used to make plutonium for the test bomb showed up at the West Lake landfill in Bridgeton, Missouri. Assuming the trucks were loaded with clean fill, the landfill superintendent waved them through without charging a dumping fee. A truck driver said later that he and others used the black stuff in their home gardens. By October several thousand shipments were illegally dumped at the landfill in north St…. READ the article here.