Source: https://www.neimagazine.com/, July 2, 2024

US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) workers cleaning up the West Lake Landfill in St Louis County detected contamination in nearby groundwater, obliging EPA to investigate whether radium might have migrated from the site, the Missouri Independent reported.

St Louis was part of a geographically scattered national effort to build the nuclear bomb. Much of the work in the area involved uranium, where Mallinckrodt Chemical Co was a major processor of uranium concentrate near downtown St Louis. In 1946, the government bought land near the airport and began trucking nuclear waste there from the Mallinckrodt facility. Mallinckrodt stored barrels of K-65, a radioactive residue at the St Louis airport in deteriorating steel drums. Read more.