- 1990, '91, Senator Glenn
introduced legislation that, for the first time,
would guarantee workers a lifetime health insurance
if they met a risk profile, if they were working around radiation or exposed to beryllium
and other nasty substances. You have to understand, in order to make the most destructive nuclear
weapons in the world, you had to handle the world's
most poisonous substances in large quantities, and the people who were doing
that were these workers, and they weren't
necessarily being protected. If you don't protect your workers, you don't protect the public. It's that simple. And all of this has been
lost on this profession because it was confined in this world of secrecy, isolation, and privilege of the
national security imperative associated with the
production of nuclear weapons during the Cold War. And we're still sort of trying
to recover from that problem. - Oh, my gosh, how are you? Oh, my gosh, thank you for coming.
- You've done a very good job. - Well, thank you. It always makes me nervous but it's so fun to do it.
- You did great. - Well, thank you. Thank you so much for coming. You have your medal, good. - [Woman] Good to see you. - Just wanted to say thanks. - [Denise] Well, thank
you so much for coming. - Yeah, oh. - I'm still working on this, Denise. - I have your picture up on my board, and an older picture, too, I
have that up there, so, hi. Thanks, I'm all right. - [Narrator] During the late 1930s, while America and the world
continued its recovery from the Great Depression, Asia and Europe were slowly
descending into violent chaos. (guns firing)
(dramatic music) (explosions rumbling) In Germany, Adolf Hitler
had been elected chancellor as leader of the Nazi party, and secured his position as
Germany's unchallenged dictator. The world would later learn
of Hitler's horrifying crimes, of methodically murdering millions of Jews and other innocents as part of his master plan
to conquer Europe and Russia. On September 1st, 1939, Hitler began his quest by invading Poland, and in the process, launched World War II. (marching music) Across the Atlantic Ocean, physicists Leo Szilard and
Eugene Wigner drafted a letter for the signature of their
friend, Albert Einstein. The letter was addressed to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and told of the potential
for the development of extremely powerful bombs of a new type. In their letter, Szilard and Wigner urged the acquisition of
stockpiles of uranium ore and for the acceleration of research into sustained nuclear reactions. After hearing of the
pioneering work in fission being done in Germany by chemists like Otto
Hahn and Lise Meitner, Szilard, who had fled
Germany after Hitlers' rise, warned the president
that this work could fall into the hands of the Nazis, and suggested the United States speed up its own experimental
work in this field. Roosevelt was persuaded, and soon, the Manhattan Project was born. Manhattan Project was the
code name for the operation to successfully achieve a
sustained nuclear reaction. From a modest beginning, the project grew to employ 130,000 people for research and production
work at more than 30 sites across the U.S. and Canada. Massive amounts of high
quality uranium ore were needed for the Manhattan Project. - The pitchblende uranium is
the highest density of uranium. It's the most pure uranium around. In other words, there's
more uranium per pound than in any other form of uranium that you would get out of
Canada or out West or whatever. - [Narrator] Arthur Holly
Compton, who had been appointed chairman of the National
Academy of Sciences committee, was tasked with finding someone capable of purifying the uranium
for the Manhattan Project. After being turned down by
several major chemical companies because they were either too busy or fearful of the dangers
involved in such a mission, Compton turned to Edward Mallinckrodt Jr., who ran a relatively
small chemical company in St. Louis, Missouri. - Edward Mallinckrodt was on a path that was somewhat round
and about to nuclear work, but in many respects,
that path turned out to be perhaps inevitable, given his
interest, and given the course of his early scientific research career. So he picked, as an area
of focus as a young man, the manipulation of ether. And ether is a very interesting substance because it's explosive, it's
very necessary in surgery, but it tends to degrade if
it's not handled properly. And because he had so
many years of experience thinking about ether, which
turned out to be fundamental in the processing of
uranium and purifying it, he was well situated to be brought into the Manhattan Project. - [Narrator] Mallinckrodt
would process uranium dioxide and uranium tetrafluoride,
also known as green salt, at a building never designed
for such operations. Plant Four was hastily converted from the St. Louis Sash and Door Works. Since these operations were only expected to
last six to eight months, extensive dust control
equipment was not provided. The inability to control radioactive dust would prove to be a
challenge for Mallinckrodt and the entire nuclear
industry for years to come. - My mother and father started
working at Mallinckrodt before I was ever born. I believe it was 1945,
and my mom had only worked for about a year, but my father
worked close to 15 years. Started there thinking that
it was a great paying job. Even had doctors and nurses there. So, it was very exciting
for him and for her because they were able
to actually pay bills, and back then, it was
considered a very good job. (jazzy music) - [Narrator] Another person
who considered it a good job was Paul Mitchell, who had started working at
Mallinckrodt a year earlier. - Well, I started at 19,
I was a messenger boy, running errands for Thayer,
who was the vice president. A guy that I used to rabbit hunt with, he was electrician at the
main plant, Mel Picker. And he told me, he said, "Why don't you go to trade
school there at Ranken, "and then when they need
an opening for a trainee, "you could get in." And that's what I did. - There were different
attitudes, down at Mallinckrodt, for instance, about how
much workers should know and whether things were dangerous. And the government did
create certain standards and regulations saying that, well, we'll let the workers be exposed to a lot more radiation than we'll let a member of the
general public be exposed to. Sometimes, they would use the word safe, but really, the word
to use is permissible, and, you know, it's
what they would permit, not what was safe for the
workers or for the environment, the levels of radioactivity. - I'd walk in in the morning,
there's a guard there. He gives you a badge that
you pin on your shirt, and you give him your
regular street badge, and he'd give you that, put on. You'd go back to your locker, hang your clothes in the
locker, hang 'em in there, bare naked, you'd walk down
and go through a turnstile and go by another place where they'd pitch you your coveralls, and then you'd take that down to where you had a foot locker, and they'd already measured you for shoes. They furnished your shoes and underwear. Put your shoes and underwear
on, and put the coveralls on. Then you'd go on, go out to work. - My mother would actually
transport liquid uranium, it was in packages, and she would actually get on a streetcar. Now, at the time, she
didn't know what that was. It was just a package and
somebody at work told her, "This is what you need to
do," she worked in a lab. She wasn't really certain
what they were doing. She just knew that she had
to take this package there. Well, it wasn't until probably 2001, 2002, when we actually started
digging into this, that she actually figured
out what that was, and that was actually
through some other folks, health physicists and such
that did what they call a site profile and let
her know what that was. - [Interviewer] They
didn't try to inform you about the potential dangers? - Oh, no, nobody never,
ever, never, never, never. I wouldn't have worked there and I don't think anybody else would. Nobody even knew what uranium was. They might as well said they was producing coffee down there, I wouldn't have known any difference. - At the time, there were only about two grams of pure uranium
metal on the planet. Pure uranium metal, and they needed tons in order to be able to
show that they could have a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, where one atom would be split and then it would give off
a neutron and split another, and this chain reaction would continue. And they needed to know how to do that in order to be able to make atom bombs. - Mallinckrodt originally would process it into uranium metal, and it would go up to The
University of Chicago, that was its first destination. - [Narrator] Waiting in Chicago for the arrival of
Mallinckrodt's purified uranium was physicist Enrico Fermi. Fermi headed a team of some of the finest
scientific minds in the world, gathered together to solve the puzzle of creating a self-sustained
nuclear chain reaction. Originally, the work was slated to be done some 20 miles outside the city on what is now the site of
Argonne National Laboratories. But a dispute over working
conditions threatened delays, and the decision was made
to move the operation to the campus of The
University of Chicago. Beneath the west stands of Stagg Field were long abandoned racket courts. It was here Fermi and
his fellow scientists would build the world's
first nuclear reactor. It was called Chicago Pile One. Fermi described the apparatus as a crude pile of black
bricks and wooden timbers. It had neither radiation shielding, nor a cooling system of any sort. Historians from the
Atomic Energy Commission referred to the gamble of conducting a possibly
catastrophic experiment in one of most densely
populated areas of the Nation. But the existential
threat of losing the race for atomic weaponry with
Germany won the day, and the work proceeded. A successful self-sustaining
nuclear chain reaction was achieved on December 2nd, 1942. (somber music) By may of 1945, Hitler's war
machine had been defeated by the Allied forces, as American and Russian
troops met in Germany, ending the war in Europe. But in the Pacific,
Japan continued fighting, refusing an unconditional surrender. (guns firing) with the self-sustaining
nuclear chain reaction achieved, and the ongoing production
of tons of purified uranium proceeding apace at Mallinckrodt and various other sites around the Nation, all eyes turned to the delivery
system: the bomb itself. - The quality of the uranium
that was produced in this area was so good that it was
the preferred uranium for just about every single national lab. It was used in the Trinity explosion. - [Narrator] Heading up the Trinity test was Robert Oppenheimer,
who had been appointed scientific director of
the Manhattan Project by General Leslie Groves. Oppenheimer would later
clash with other scientists over the use of the bomb
on civilian populations. Scientists like Leo Szilard. Szilard and fellow Manhattan
scientist, James Frank, were now circulating a petition
cautioning President Truman against using the weapon on Japan. A petition signed by more than 70 Manhattan
Project scientists. - Bob Wilson, who later became
the director of Fermi Lab and who had been a graduate
student at the time, was one of the most outspoken
before the bomb was dropped. And confronted Oppenheimer on this, saying, "We need to tell,
we've seen what this is like. "We need to test it first
or drop it on an island, "have the Japanese come and see it. "But it is really a horrible weapon." - [Narrator] No demonstrations of the awesome power of our
new atomic weaponry were given. And when the Japanese rejected
the Potsdam Declaration, President Harry Truman made the decision to drop an atomic bomb on the
Japanese city of Hiroshima. The bomb detonated on August 6th, 1945. Three days later, on August 9th, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The Japanese surrendered on September 2nd. - Health physicists and others from the University of Michigan who actually went into
Hiroshima and Nagasaki several days after the
bombs actually dropped, to collect biological information. So, when the U.S. dropped the bombs, not only did they leave behind
the tale of radioactivity, but the United States popped
lots of people immediately over there to do these biological surveys. So, they got information very early on about the radiological
effects of dropping the bomb. So it wasn't just dropping it, it was also a scientific experiment to see what would actually happen if these high levels of radioactivity had exposed individuals,
plants, animals, and so forth. - [Kennette] I think what's
important to understand is that the beginnings of the atomic
age were at a time of war, when our thinking about human life may have been slightly different. And when we came out of the war, I think we felt much of the evidence of what had happened there was suppressed. Photographs were suppressed. Much of the information
that we might have needed to understand what went on
was completely suppressed. So, in terms of understanding what this material or very
powerful technology can do, we actually don't know
as much as we should. And one of the reasons that the atomic scientists
were so outraged is because they saw the military
drawing a veil of secrecy across all of what we could
know about the experiment. - My father was a chemical operator. And I don't know how much they knew. I mean, in the earlier years, some of the documents that I have actually indicated that the
workers weren't told anything. I mean, they were put in harm's
way without their consent, without their knowledge,
without proper protective gear. And I think that was across the board at all 300 and something facilities across the United States. - They really exposed individuals when they could have protected them. There's absolutely no excuse
for not protecting individuals as early as 1942 against radiation associated with this work. - [Narrator] Having worked his way up from messenger to electrician,
Paul Mitchell would routinely find himself in the most
hazardous areas of the plant. - I went down in the furnaces
where they melted that, and you had it with
heating elements in there. Well, those heating elements
would burn out, you know, the ends of them must
on your electric dryer. The heating cord would burn out. I had to pull 'em out,
take 'em to the welder, get 'em rewelded, and
then put 'em back in. But I was down in the
furnace where they melted it. Hell, that thing was
as hot as hot could be. A Geiger counter would
have went off the charts. And why it didn't kill me, god only knows. I am very, very fortunate. - [Narrator] In January
of '51, Merril Eisenbud, who had been made the first
health and safety chief of the AEC, sent a memo
to Wilbur E. Kelley, manager of the New York
office of the commission. Eisenbud addressed liability concerns of Mallinckrodt employees, who were overexposed to
radioactive materials. (gentle piano music)
(typewriter clicking) - [Merril] About a year ago, you asked if it would be possible for us to estimate our potential liability among the long term
Mallinckrodt employees. As I explained at that time, you presented a rather
knotty problem, one which, in the state of our present. Estimates of the doses
to the critical organs of all Mallinckrodt employees during the period July
1942 to October 1949. The report shows that
there are 17 employees whose lungs have had more
than 1,000 rem of exposure. - You know, it's sort of odd. Like, now I'm 87. You didn't think nothing
about it, you'd be 40 or 50, and there'd be somebody
down there you'd know, they'd say, over in plant six, did you know so-and-so died of cancer? And I'd say, yeah, well,
hell, he was 40 years old. You're thinking, hell,
the old man, I guess. No wonder he died, he was up in the age. You thought nothing of it. The one that got to me, though, there was a guy down
there I played golf with. He was a chemist. He was always out in the plant, all around the engineers
or the chemical engineers. All at once, I saw him,
and he was skin and bones. And I got to the point when I'd see him, I'd have to go the other way. I couldn't stand to look at him because he was skin and bones. But there would be people who would die, you'd think nothing, what the hell? People die all the time, you know. And it couldn't be from
what we're doing down there. - Most of the workers were transient, what they call transient workers. They would go area to
area, plant to plant. But the reason that a lot of
these workers were transient was because they were
hot, they were made hot. And so, there were times when my father, if he came up hot on his badge
or through a breath radon, the company knew it, then all of a sudden, they would move him to another area. And then when they thought
they cooled off, radioactively, then they would put him
back into the hot area. My mom said that she noticed
he was sleeping a lot. My mom and my sister said that he slept just an unusual amount. And my mom said he was putting
in a water heater one day, replacing a water heater, and my dad was very stocky
built, very muscular, in very good shape prior to this, and she said he began
to become very winded while putting this water heater in. She made him a doctor
appointment, and he went in, and that's when they
found a spot on his lung and realized at that point
that he did have lung cancer, and I believe he was just
like 40 years old at the time. So they did a full pneumonectomy, removed the entire left lung. (solemn music) I remember how sick he was. I can remember hearing my mom
cry herself to sleep at night. Sorry. He was really sick. And they never complained. They lost their house,
they lost their car. He wasn't able to work because it just took everything they had. - [Narrator] Chris Davis lost
his battle against cancer on April 27th, 1978. - During the Cold War, there
was this sense of urgency about the fate of the world. And people really believed
that there was this battle between good and evil, with the United States
on the side of good, and the Soviet Union, evil. And people believed that there was going to
be this major battle, or we at least had to be prepared for it. So the whole atomic
energy program was imbued with this sense of patriotism,
the sense of urgency. And the government, whether it was the
Republican party in power or whether it was the
Democrat party in power, truly believed that this
fight against Communism was the most important
mission of the country. And so, things like atomic
energy were wrapped up in this, and this pursuit of superior weaponry really trumped other concerns. - [Narrator] As the Cold War ramped up, so did the demand for refined uranium. The newly created Atomic Energy Commission that was formed to manage nuclear energy for military and civilian applications turned to Mallinckrodt. While Mallinckrodt had
successfully delivered the processed uranium
that helped win the war, some of its early practices
would need to change. Their buildings had become contaminated with radioactive dust. While dust levels began to
decline by the late '40s, they would never reach
a satisfactory level, an issue Mallinckrodt and
the Atomic Energy Commission hoped to solve with a new plant they nicknamed The Clean One. - They actually looked
at 21 different sites throughout the Metro East St. Louis region to figure out where they
could get enough property and out far enough to be able to create the
Feeds Material Plant. - [Kay] Mallinckrodt Chemical
Works opened a facility for the Atomic Energy
Commission over at Weldon Spring in St. Charles County in about 1956, '57. - This was already federal land. It was land that was owned
by the federal government that could be acquired by
the Atomic Energy Commission. It had adequate supplies of power, adequate supplies of water. All of those things made it an ideal site. - [Narrator] The land had been used by the United States Army, who ran a TNT and DNT plant
on the property until 1944. - One of the rationales behind
the creation of Weldon Spring would be not only to improve production, but also to achieve the
most perfect control of radioactive materials that
had been achieved to date. Weldon Spring, when it was
conceived in the middle 1950s, it was designed to be the most
advanced uranium purification handling facility in the world. And it was that. That was the idea behind it, to improve safety and improve
production at the same time. - It didn't appear, working out there, that there was any problems. My job was safety for the electricians. How to conduct yourself safely. - [Interviewer] Did you
have to wear a badge all the time that you worked there? - Two badges. One of them was for regular uranium, and one of them was for
enriched, though similar badges. And they were taken to the
lab every night after work. If they were normal, they were in a box when
we came in the plant. If they weren't normal, we
didn't have badges to wear, so you put on a blue uniform. You weren't allowed in
any of the process areas 'cause the process areas
required you to wear badges and a white uniform, coveralls. - [Interviewer] So, if it wasn't normal, what did you think about that when you came in and they say,
you're gonna wear blue today? - Took it for part of the job. You got a job to do,
that's part of the job. Somehow or another, they had an accident and released an enormous
amount of hydrofluoric. And, of course, hydrofluoric
when it hits the atmosphere, it just boils, so it had a
huge cloud in the atmosphere. And the wind was blowing
probably southwest direction, through the TNT area. Later on, you could see
a path where it went through the woods and it
just killed everything. - [Interviewer] Were there
neighborhoods around at the time? I mean, when something like that happens. - The only neighbor we
had was the high school. Close neighbor. - [Interviewer] And it
didn't go to the high school? - It went the opposite
direction, thank god. Or there would have been
a serious situation. - [Narrator] By the early '60s, the Weldon plant was producing 16,000 tons of refined uranium a year, three times the amount
that it was designed for. Over time, the walls, ceilings,
and floors of its buildings became contaminated with radioactive dust, as its downtown predecessor had. - I had a chiropractor
that took care of me all through my years because
I had a lot of situations where you didn't do
pole climbing everyday. If you did that for three days in a row, you had a sore back. So I relied on him to treat me, and that's when he discovered
my first skin cancer. - [Interviewer] When it began, did you connect it with
your time working at Weldon? - Yes, it was in the process then. It was reported. - To put together a facility that would truly protect workers, and put together a health physics program to truly protect workers,
it's very costly. I mean, protecting workers isn't cheap. - [Interviewer] Why was it abandoned? What happened? - In many respects, the level
of demand for uranium changed by the middle 1960s, and
it was decided in 1966 that uranium purification and production would be consolidated, and that
Weldon Spring was redundant. Mallinckrodt had helped
create its sister plants. Weldon Spring had a sister plant that had opened in the early
1950s at Fernald in Ohio. So, after December 1966, Weldon
Spring was placed on standby and that standby was finally lifted and made a permanent closure
in the middle of 1967, and that brought production
at Weldon Spring to a close. - After the plant closed, then there was a lot of
complications that came up because, prior to that, you
couldn't report anything. You couldn't say you had skin cancer from the plant, from working at the plant. I couldn't even talk to my wife. You weren't allowed to mention
anything about your work. And then the funny part
was when the plant closed, you couldn't leave the
country for three years. - [Interviewer] Why was that? - I don't know, they had their reasons. (Clarence laughing) That's the Atomic Energy
Commission rules and regulations, and we gotta believe what
our government tells us. What the heck, it's the best country in the world. I still think it is. - [Narrator] Mallinckrodt
would also purchase land 50 miles south of St.
Louis in Hematite, Missouri for a facility that would
provide enriched nuclear fuel for the Navy's nuclear submarines. Obie Young had started at
the downtown plant in '48 after returning home from the war. He would move his family to Hematite and take a job as a chemical
operator in the new plant. By 1961, United Nuclear
Corporation became the new owners. Not much changed for Young until he was exposed to a
high dose of radioactive gas. - Now, in this short order,
they sent me over for the doctor in Crystal City, it was our
company doctor, for an exam. And just a couple weeks later, they told me that they was
going to eliminate my job, that they was closing, cutting back, that was an excuse they made right then, And they was gonna eliminate my job and give me severance pay for six months. And if I went looking for another job, they'd automatically
shut it off, you know, 'cause they knew if I went
looking for another job, they was gonna ask for samples, you know. Like, blood and urine and so forth. They didn't want me to do that because they knew if I
did, it would show up, and then right away,
somebody else would know that I had too much radiation. - [Narrator] After years of abandonment, questions began to rise
about the Weldon site and a quarry that sat nearby. The Army had been using the quarry to dispose of TNT residues for years. When the feed material plant took over, they continued using the
quarry as a dumping area. - I started learning about
the history of the site, and I learned a little bit more about the Manhattan Project downtown, and Mallinckrodt was
purifying uranium there, really, really pure
Belgian Congo pitchblende, and the radioactive tailings
were dumped at Weldon Spring. So, by the time it got out there, you had a lot of incredibly
radioactive toxic waste, more than 7,000 curies. So, I got curious, and I
wondered how much would be at a major research university, spread across hundreds of labs when they did their very careful, safety-protected experiments, and that was probably two curies. This was more than 7,000. - [Narrator] The quarry overlooked the St. Charles County well field that had been built by
the Army in the '40s to provide water for ordnance work. It would eventually provide
as many as 70,000 residents with their drinking water. A group of concerned
citizens calling themselves St. Charles Countians
Against Hazardous Wastes began demanding that the site
and quarry be cleaned up. - It was largely a number of
really concerned housewives that were adamant about
the cleanup being done with the Francis Howell High School being a half mile downwind from the site. So they were concerned, reasonably so, that there might be particulates,
airborne contaminants. I heard some students
actually swam in the quarry right here, which would be a
real pathway of contamination. - [Narrator] As concerned as
Garvey was about the school, his main focus was the well field and its close proximity to the quarry. - There's vectors where
contamination can go to the public. And when you have a well field
that's just down gradient from a quarry that has
both TNT, DNT, and uranium, you have a condition whereby
the hydraulic head of the water that's sitting up on the
bluffs, and the pumping wells can draw the contamination
directly to the well field and to the public. So that was the reason why, through pressure from the citizen group, that the Weldon Spring
site became, originally, a Superfund site. - [Narrator] The EPA
would head the cleanup and hold meetings to allow the public to
voice their concerns. (upbeat music) one voice that was determined to be heard was that of longtime
nuclear activist, Kay Drey. Kay was no stranger to conflicts, and having fought against
segregation in the '60s, she was battle tested. - They have a hearing out
there and they expected, I don't know, I think they
had like 75 chairs set up, and I think we had 2,000
people who showed up. - The citizen group
really was instrumental because this was before the
Department of Energy was used to communicating with the public at all. They didn't have a need to. And the early meetings with
the Department of Energy were weak at best. (acoustic guitar music) - [Narrator] The plan to
clean up the Weldon site was to dismantle the contaminated
chemical plant buildings, excavate and remove the
contaminated bulk waste from the quarry, then dredge and process the
sludge from the raffinate pits. Radioactive contaminated
materials were to be placed inside a 45 acre containment cell designed to hold these
materials for 1,000 years. In 1986, demolition crews
arrived to begin the cleanup of one of the most contaminated
sites in the country. - They just said it was a
hazardous waste cleanup, and that's really about it. Well, first off, we had to dig some ponds out back behind this rock pile, and they were called sludge ponds. And we dug those, and dug
trenches around the buildings, and so all the water would, you know, we actually sprayed the
buildings with water as we demoed them. So, all that water and
contaminant would follow the little streams down
into the sludge ponds. We had Geiger counters, and they just, you pretty much shut those
off because they were, no matter where you went,
they were just going nuts. - I got a call out of the blue
from a priest I did not know. It was Father Gerry Kleba, and he said he was about
to bury the seventh infant at Immaculate Conception. He said that he had never seen so many sick and dying children
in his 35 years as a priest, and that the parish had decided, as their social action committee,
to try and figure out why. - Well, when I was in Weldon
Springs, first of all, there were seven children who died during my year and a half there. So I was curious about
this Superfund cleanup site at Weldon, to the extent that
I called them and asked them if we could kind of have
a tour or an explanation of what was going on there. - He told me that he'd looked
into a lot of possibilities. I think they were trying
to be open minded and fair. But for years people
had been telling stories about that site. The old timers talked about
thick yellow foggy smoke from when they used to
purify uranium there. The creek used to run red with TNT. They used to have laundry hanging out and have to dust off this gray
ash from the incinerators. So, they pretty quickly
turned to Weldon Spring. - About 25 people were curious
enough to go with me there on a Saturday morning and get an hour and a
half, two-hour explanation, not much of a tour of the place, exactly, because they didn't have
the cell all encapsulated, and people were working there
wearing moon suits and stuff, which was always interesting to me because the office is one
side of a chain link fence, and on that side, people could come in
slacks and a sport shirt, or skirts and high heel
shoes, and they were all safe because they were on that
side of the chain link fence, but the people on this side
of the chain link fence had moon suits on because this
was dangerous nuclear stuff. - There was a great big building here in between the mountain and this road. And it was the largest
structure on this site. And our trailers were just on
the other side of the fence. And when this big building collapsed, it was a just a big dust storm. And you know what's funny
is that they say that on this side of the
fence, it's contaminated, but on this side of the fence, it isn't. So when the building,
everybody's got their full PPE and respirators over here
when the building's falling. We're eating lunch on
this side of the fence, which is 30 feet away,
and an entire dust cloud went over the buildings, over 94, and it wouldn't surprise
me if it made it to 40/61. I mean, it was a big, big dust cloud. - [Interviewer] Did you
clean your cars off each day? - No, none of that was required. - [Interviewer] Not required,
but you were worried about the dust that might have gathered. - You know, they told
us it wasn't harmful. We were on the protected
side of the fence. (Gary laughing) - And so, then later on, they
wanted to reopen the place to make Agent Orange
during the Vietnam War, and they decided that it
wasn't a healthy enough place to make Agent Orange. Now, you can just imagine
how unhealthy is something that's not a healthy enough
place to make Agent Orange. - The plant was abandoned. The various chemistry
aspects, the chemicals. Whatever was there that
one day just stayed there. - There was 55-gallon
containers stacked up. I'm sure it was neatly at the time, but over time, it looked
like just a big crust pile. There was white, yellow, greens coming down out of the
containers, out of boxes, coming down the walls. It was pretty horrific actually. - [Interviewer] So they
were just disintegrating, essentially.
- Disintegrating, yeah. And you could see it
running across the floor into the ground, running
out of the buildings. - So, all those things were
just floating around my mind, and then, children started to die. These children were children
who were stillborns, two children who were
six and seven years old whose diseases were diagnosed
as some kind of leukemia. - And then I looked into
the state health records, and for that county,
the St. Charles County had higher incidences
of cancer than the norm. Higher incidences of cancer
of all kinds in children, but lower incidences of
heart disease or accident. And for adults, higher
incidences of lung cancer, lung disease, colorectal cancer, all of which had
environmental possible causes. - When I first started working
here, for, I would say, the first six, eight months I worked here, every day I worked out
here I had a bloody nose. And I went to my supervisor and told him, my nose just won't quit bleeding. He says, "Well, if you tell
anybody, you're gonna be fired." so, I didn't tell anybody. I have to pay bills like everybody else. - I mean, I was saying some
things about things about what's the water like here? Or some other people who are
involved in the environment said that some of the lakes
at the Busch Wildlife Center were contaminated and
nobody should ever eat fish out of them. But all of that was saying
to people, this isn't Eden. And, you know, so, I
never said this to people, but in their own mind, they could say, if word gets out this isn't Eden, my house doesn't depreciate. You know, I'm in over my
head, but I'm in over my head with the hopes that the property
values are gonna gonna up. So, the self-accusation, the
financial aspects of this, made this more unattractive
for anybody to think about. - Public health officials
need really dramatic results. They want a smoking gun and a bullet hole. And what you get with toxic waste problems is more like scattered
shot from a shotgun. They're not statistically
significant huge numbers because you're talking
about a very small area that could be contaminated. And so, you're dealing with a small pool, the numbers aren't huge. Toxic waste kind of seeps out slowly and in different amounts
at different times. It affects different people differently, and there's something
called the body burden, where it's cumulative. It shows up in somebody's body over time. And you also, at Weldon Spring, had so many different contaminants. You had TNT, you had PCBs,
there was thorium, and mercury, and lithium, and chromium,
and lead, and arsenic, and more heavy metals than I can name. So they interact and we
don't know how they interact. And that gets confusing to trace. It's hard just to just tease it out and figure out what's causing what. - If somebody said to me, what was I really hoping
to get out of this? I would have said, there's
$5 million in the budget for this Weldon Springs nuclear site. That is to be paid to do an extension so a spur off the Katy Bicycle Trail that would leave its river route so that it could wind its way up the hill and get to the Weldon
Springs nuclear site. Nobody needs to take their kids to walk to the top of
a nuclear waste site. I mean, just bizarre nonsense
when it's just no place to be. And, of course, you put it there, what kid doesn't climb a hill? So once you ride your bike over
there and you got your kids, you don't say, oh, you can't climb that. They just should never put
that kind of enticement there, and they should have saved that
money to do a medical study of people who lived around
there for most of their life. - [Narrator] 15 years after its cleanup, Professor DeGarmo took took
us on a tour of the quarry. - [Denise] Okay, here we go. Now here's the Hall Road. - Okay.
- Right here. - [Interviewer] So this
is the road they used to-- - [Denise] To move all
the materials from-- - [Interviewer] From the Weldon site down here?
- Down here. - Okay.
- Yeah. - Were there no guidelines
as to what you needed to store nuclear waste? They could just say we'll take this quarry
and we'll just use it? - I think it was hit and miss, not necessarily because they
were abiding by any laws. But, I mean, this makes sense. It's out, it's about two,
three miles down from the site. It's a natural quarry, pretty abandoned. We're now into the quarry itself. - And this was all filled in? - [Denise] This had all
sorts of materials in it. It had barrels, it had building pieces. When they did the first
remediation downtown in the late '50s, all of those
building parts and pieces came out here. - [Narrator] During the
remediation of the quarry, crews would drain and treat over 70 million gallons
of contaminated water. Bulk waste was removed
and driven by truckloads up the old Hall Road to
be placed in the cell. It would take close to 12,000 round trips. Having removed some 120,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil and materials, residual contamination of
groundwater remains to this day. - So, beneath us is radioactive waste? - [Denise] Yes. - And we're following you--
- Yes, you're following me. (solemn music) Whenever you have the kind of high levels of radioactive materials
in any one location, the actual remediation to make it suitable for human habitation is quite extensive. You can do less cleanup,
still do a remediation, but not to the degree that would be needed for human habitation if you
claim it's a nature preserve. The idea, I guess, is that
some of these materials would absorb the radiation. In this case, it's buried low so it wouldn't be problem
if it wasn't disturbed. And so, this is a long policy that not only the Soviets used, but the United States seems
to have adopted as well. And a lot of these sites that should probably
undergo further remediation, they don't have to because of
the nature preserve quality. - [Narrator] Unfortunately,
some of these materials have not stayed put. They've migrated into the groundwater beneath and beyond the
walls of the quarry. - It's a pretty bike ride.
- It's beautiful. But, I mean, you know, if you just don't know what's going on and you're riding your bike and you didn't look at
the little placards, I don't know that I would, I wouldn't know what these,
- No, I would have no idea. - [Denise] I've seen these all my life and I've never known what they were till I started doing this work. And now I'm thinking, my god. - They're everywhere.
- They're everywhere. - [Narrator] Well 1007. One of the many monitoring wells the Department of Energy has drilled to track the movement of these materials. A 2011 report on Weldon showed
that over the last decade many of the monitoring wells have far exceeded the targeted goal of 300 picocuries per liter. Some hitting levels as high as 1,219, 1,286, or even 2,776. Samples taken from the pumping wells in the St. Charles well
field from 1991 to 2001 showed gross alfa levels
exceeded the standard of 15 picocuries per liter three times. Finished water samples
that went to the public from this timeframe were
within the EPA's guidelines. After the passage of the Safe
Drinking Water Act in 1974, the EPA was required to determine safe levels of
contaminants in drinking water. They believed the ideal
maximum contaminant level goal for radionuclides such as
gross alpha, beta particles, and uranium were zero. But enforceable levels, known
as maximum contaminant levels, are based on cost and the
ability of public water systems to remove contaminants. - We forget, we start, okay,
we've cleaned it up now. That's all we worry about. They don't look at the
history of that 40 years that it sat there, full of stuff, radiating into the community, radiating into the environment around it. The same thing with Weldon,
it sat empty for years. Well, we're not worried about
that, we've cleaned it up. Well, okay, we may be at less impact now, but what about the people
who lived here, worked here all those years? The school that's a mile away sat there within realm of that radiation. It's the whole story, not
just a piece of the story. Okay, you came and you cleaned it up. And you got it down to
an acceptable level, but that doesn't account for
all the damage that was done prior to the cleanup. And that's the history
we don't wanna look at. We wanna pat ourselves on the back for being technologically savvy, say, oh, look at what we've done. But we're not taking
responsibility for the years prior to that. - [Narrator] The Weldon Spring site would fall under the
Department of Energy's Office of Legacy Management. They would set an annual
budget of 1.4 million dollars for long term surveillance and maintenance for an area that could remain hazardous for thousands of years. The Fernald site that succeeded Weldon would become Fernald Preserve after one of the largest
environmental cleanups in the Nation's history,
costing over $4 billion. There are currently 87
Legacy Management sites with another 55 pending. By chance, Denise would see a news story about the Energy Employees
Compensation program introduced by Senator John Glenn. Under the act, the
worker or their survivors could receive a tax free
lump sum from the Government. Brock sought a claim
on her mother's behalf. - Filing the claim and
the entire claim process was not quite what it was cracked up to be or what I perceived it
to be, I should say. It was much more difficult
that one could even imagine. From the initial filing,
the paperwork itself, to even proving his employment,
my father's employment, because at the time, we didn't
even file a claim for my mom, we just hadn't even really
talked about her working there. I called Mallinckrodt because I knew you had to
have proof of employment, so I called Mallinckrodt,
and according to them, my father never worked there. Going through the process
itself was more than burdensome. It was very difficult,
and there were times when she said she was just gonna give up. She would cry because she
felt like she was so close, and then somebody was pulling
the rug out from under her. You'd get one piece in order
of what they asked for, they being the Department
of Labor and NIOSH, and then, all of a sudden,
they needed something else. You had to have proof of
this or proof of that, and it was so difficult. - [Narrator] The process began
to take a toll on Evelyn. She would reach out one final time with a letter to the Advisory Board describing what her
family had been through. - [Evelyn] Good afternoon,
my name is Evelyn Davis. I would just like to take the opportunity to say a few things. My husband's name was Christopher Davis. He was employed by
Mallinckrodt Chemical Company, Destrehan Street, St. Louis. In 1967, my husband was
diagnosed with lung cancer. That day, our whole family's
world turned upside down. Our lives as we knew them
were never gonna be the same. My husband had his left lung removed and could no longer work. I cannot even begin to tell you the emotional and physical
distress that caused him. I had to juggle working everyday, raising two small children, who were six and seven at
the time of this diagnosis. We eventually lost our home, and I could no longer
afford to pay tuition for my two younger children
to attend Catholic school, nor pay a babysitter to keep them long hours I had to be gone. I had no choice but to relocate. I have an older daughter, Sharon, who at the time of my husband's
diagnosis was newly married and had two small children of her own. That daughter had to carry the burden of watching her younger brother and sister while I worked and went to
the hospital with my husband. This was a long, horrible illness. He suffered tremendously. He would be up at night in so much pain. His legs eventually turned black. They looked charred. He had to wear these elastic stockings, and when I would take them off of him, his skin would just rip off. The doctors were going
to amputate both legs. All of this affected his self-esteem, he felt emasculated. He was very frightened at this time. Eventually, my husband was told that there was nothing
more that could be done. On April the 27th, 1978
while I was at work, my husband died in our son's arms. To this day, I feel so guilty that I couldn't find a way
to be in two places at once. I would have been home, my son wouldn't have had
that horrific experience. It isn't just the loss of a loved one, it's the loss of a family, a home, life experiences for everyone. I will be 80 years old in April. I live on Social Security,
and up until a month ago, I worked full time. My health won't no longer
permit me to do that. I've had a quadruple bypass
and I'm in poor health. My husband gave all that he had to that company and this government. He was one of the Cold War
warriors, or were they victims? Originally I thought that
this compensation program would bring some quick relief. There is nothing quick about it. And trying to come up with medical records and employment records, many of which have long been destroyed, just makes a program that is
rough justice even harder. I received a letter stating
that dose reconstruction could take months, even years. Do you think I should
work until I'm 95 or 100 waiting to see if I might get compensated? Or maybe everyone should figure if they have to wait that
long for this mere pittance, maybe they should just wait
for a class action lawsuit to be settled. (keyboard clicking) - [Narrator] Denise would
finally help guide her mom through the difficult process, and receive compensation
for the loss of her dad. But her journey would not end there. - I thought about all the
people that were out there that maybe didn't have
the help that my mom had. And I, I actually fell in love
with these workers. It's kind of hard to explain. I uncovered all these documents, maybe 8,000 documents or
more, that actually showed how they were dose
reconstructing these workers or processing their
claims was not accurate. - [Narrator] After
meeting activist Kay Drey, who had been collecting documents
on the nuclear industry, and Mallinckrodt in particular, Brock filed a Freedom
of Information request to get recently declassified documents on Mallinckrodt's work
during the Manhattan Project. Among the many boxes were
letters written by Mont Mason. Mason had been brought on
by Mallinckrodt in 1947 to teach health and safety
at the downtown plant. Some plant workers had
already been working with radioactive material, so when Mason began
implementing new safety rules and holding meetings to explain
the possible health effects of the work, many workers were
learning for the first time of the risks they had been exposed to. Mason would later describe
some of their reactions as near panic. Mason had been conferring
with Doctor Thomas Mancuso, who was a professor of
occupational medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. Under pressure from the
scientific community, the Atomic Energy
Commission hired Dr. Mancuso to conduct a health
study of nuclear workers at various sites around the country. - Mancuso held his contract since 1964, and was collecting information. And he realized that
you have to be patient because these diseases take a long time to express themselves. - [Narrator] With plans
for new power plants to provide nuclear energy on the horizon, the commission hoped that Mancuso's study would ease concerns about the dangers of working with these materials. - A medical officer in
the state of Washington did an epidemiologic
study of the workforce of Washington state, and
discovered that the workers at the Hanford site were experiencing these significant increases in
diseases, especially cancers. And he sent this to Mancuso, and the system had sort of panicked. This was the Atomic Energy Commission, because this was getting out. So they read a press
release that they drafted, they wanted him to sign off on, where he would be the author
of the statement saying there's absolutely nothing going on here, these workers are very healthy, whatever. And he said, "Absolutely not. "And I think it's premature
for me to say any of this." So right then and there,
they decided to fire him. - [Narrator] The
Commission ordered Mancuso to turn over his records. He refused, and instead, joined forces with Dr.
Alice Stewart of England. Stewart was well known for
her pioneering research linking childhood cancer to x-rays. Their research would conclude that the risk of dying from
radiation induced cancer was nearly 10 times greater than assumed protection standards. In October of '72, Mason
would write to Mancuso about the removal of 34
employees from further exposure at Mallinckrodt, and how
upon advice from attorney, the company had never
prepared a formal report on this study that could be pulled apart by the scientific community, or undermine employee
confidence in safety. - And that memorandum we're talking about, relative to Mallinckrodt,
basically laid out what has been the long held view. So the underlying principle
behind where you drew the line in terms of protecting workers
or keeping them in the dark. If they know about what's
going to happen here, and if we admit we sent
them into harm's way, and we knew this, and we weren't taking the
necessary precautions, these workers are going
to demand more pay, they're going to demand compensation, and we're not gonna necessarily
be attracting more workers to work here. - [Narrator] The National Institute for Occupational Safety and
Health conducts research and makes suggestions to keep workers safe from injury or illness in the workplace. - When they do a dose reconstruction, they actually use numerous things. They'll use what they call a site profile, which is, basically, a
recreation of that site itself. - [Narrator] But Brock
quickly became convinced that an accurate site
profile from Mallinckrodt could not be achieved. - I ended up uncovering
additional documents that actually showed record fabrication. They were actually altering records and putting in point zero zero zero. So, when NIOSH would do
the dose reconstruction, garbage in, garbage out, these workers were gonna be
denied on falsified records. - [Narrator] Armed with
documents that she believed showed misconduct at Mallinckrodt and her determination
to help other workers and family members like herself, Denise filed a Special
Exposure Cohort petition. - It is, basically, a title they will give a particular facility. It's an acceptance that it
was so bad at that facility and our records are so incomplete that we are no longer gonna require you to go through the dose
reconstruction process. - [Narrator] An employee would qualify if they had at least one
of the 22 specified cancers and worked at an SEC site
for the required time period. But there were only four SEC
sites that had been written into the original legislation. Mallinckrodt was not one of them. Denise's petition would
mark the first time workers from a site other
than the original four would receive this special status. She would first file legislatively by teaming up with
Missouri Senator Kit Bond and Iowa Senator Tom Harkin. The Bond Harkin amendment
would die in the House. Undeterred, Denise filed
a separate petition before the Advisory Board
on Radiation Worker Health established by President Bill Clinton. The Board ruled in Denise's favor, and Mallinckrodt was given SEC status. Denise would be called to
testify before Congress in an attempt to thwart the momentum. But as the media got wind of the story, efforts to derail future
petitions began to fade. Denise had won the fight
and cleared the path for thousands of nuclear workers and their families across the country. As of 2015, more than 90 sites
have been given SEC status, and over 11 billion paid to
workers and family members. - After World War II, beginning in 1946, the federal government
acquired a plot of ground just to the north of Lambert Airport. It was just under 22 acres, and that became the formal
site for disposition of waste from Mallinckrodt's production downtown for many years after that. - [Narrator] The St. Louis
Airport Project Site, or SLAPS, was bordered by James McDonnell
Boulevard, Banshee Road, and a small stream of water
known as Coldwater Creek. - Now, it's important to
know that waste materials, what we consider nuclear waste, wasn't necessarily defined in that way. At the moment that it was created, what most federal observers saw when they looked at the
waste from uranium refining was a mineral-laced product that contained traces of uranium, traces of other minerals
that might be valuable at some point in the future, and that's why they were
stored instead of disposed of as something akin to trash
or something unwanted. - They would just throw the
materials in the back of a truck and it would blow around, and
it wasn't necessarily covered. - The trucks would be filled up, some was like radioactive dust,
some was sludges, wet stuff, different kinds of textures. But they took it out in dump
trucks and the stuff flew off, and that's why we have a lot of what they call vicinity properties between downtown and the
St. Louis airport site. Stuff spilled all over
the place onto the road. - This material was really rich
in this particular isotope, thorium 230, which has been well known, it was well known in 1950s
how dangerous it was, because they said, "This is
like handling plutonium." - The piles, many of them
reached 40 feet in height, 30 feet in height, and they would move the
piles around the storage area with a CAT earth mover. And it was separated from
the surrounding landscape by a chain link fence. And tens of thousands of
barrels accumulated there, other unwanted material. And beyond the fact
that there was a fence, beyond the fact that
the site was attended, the disposition and monitoring
of where wind and rain and runoff might be pushing
pieces of this piles or traces of them wasn't really something
that was a consideration. - [Narrator] But waste
may not have been limited to this small tract of land, as airport workers watched trucks enter the south side of the
property near the main terminal. - First, you'd be wondering what the people was doing down there in the middle of the night. They would come in the gate down towards the east end of the airport, there was a gate down there. - And they used to bring those trucks, and they had radioactive signs on them. They would drive in here at midnight, and they would dump
along this runaway here. - It was liquid, there was drums of stuff. And there was hard material, like nuts and bolts and stuff like that that you'd see laying around
down there and everything. - Any time that rained out there, we used to have water
running a couple inches thick on the ramp out there. That stuff all floats to the
top, any time you got oil, it floats to the top of water. And baggage handlers, they would take your bags off the airplane and set 'em down in that water. - There was drains that, big, big drains, that you could crawl around in down there, and it would drain all
that from the east side over towards Coldwater Creek. And I know that because
if we had a fuel spill or something like that, Allied would have to put down oil dry, and then they would send
people down to Coldwater Creek to put booms across, oil booms across to keep the jet fuel from going down Coldwater Creek any further. Coldwater Creek runs underground
through the airport here. One day, one of the fuelers said, "They come in and cleaned
up that dumper yesterday. "They brought a Caterpillar
in and dug a hole "and dumped it in there." But now, that's all I know about it. I don't know if they came
in and hauled it out, or if it's still there or what. - [Narrator] We could
find no official record of a cleanup of this area. In 1966, much of the stored
materials at SLAPS were sold to Continental Mining and
Milling Company of Colorado, who moved the materials to a storage area on Lattey Avenue in North County. The buildings at SLAPS were
torn down and buried on site along with other materials. With the possibility of a
police academy driving school being built on the site, Oak Ridge National Laboratories
conducted a survey at SLAPS and the surrounding property. Their report was released in '79 and it would find elevated
levels of uranium and radium on site, and in drainage
ditches bordering the site. Concerns about materials that had drifted into Coldwater Creek over the years would lead to analysis of
potential pathways of exposure. With inhalation of the
materials in the creek eliminated as a pathway, models such as consuming two
liters of creek water a day would be used. In this scenario, an
individual would receive an estimated 200 millirems a year. An average American receives
620 millirems per year. As focus turned to the
cleanup of SLAPS itself, Kay Drey would come across EPA documents that referred to airborne releases. - They were fat documents. I happened to open it up. I was thumbing through
pages, and found a page and this document about air
emissions from abandoned sites where radioactive waste is in our country. And it said that the
St. Louis airport site was giving off more
radioactivity into the air than any other site in the United States where there were abandoned uranium wastes. - [Narrator] The airport site
would ultimately be placed on the National Priorities List and become part of the
Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program, whose purpose is to
address contaminated sites created during the
making of atomic weapons in the '40s and '50s. - What you essentially
do is you sample an area and identify the locations of soil that contains those contaminants at levels higher than
what you need to clean to. And then you go in and
you start removing it. And when you think you've got
it all based on your design, you go back and you sample again to make sure you've got it all. And if any of those samples
exceed your cleanup goals, then you go back and clean
it up again and sample again until you get to a point where
everywhere you've sampled meets those goals. And at that point, you backfill
everything and you're done. - In 2005, for the North County sites, it was understood that the
places that were accessible, those would be cleaned to a standard that was fairly acceptable
for unrestricted use, but there were going to
be places under roads, maybe on the foundation of
buildings, under foundations, that you could not clean,
that you could not get to. And so, there, our
traces are gonna persist even after the cleanup is finished. - But all of us with any
kind of life experience know that roads and
bridges don't last forever. They don't last as long as
this waste is gonna last. And so, my question to them was when the Highway Department comes in and decides they need to widen this road or replace this bridge,
who's gonna be responsible for telling the workers what's under it? - There's very few companies
in the United States that have the expertise to do the kind of
remediation that's required. It's not unusual for a company to come in at the beginning stages, and
then after five or six years, change their name and become a new company so that they are not
being held accountable for the activities that
the previous company, even though they're the same,
they have two different names, and therefore, seen as
two different entities. So, it's not unusual to see
companies change theirs names two, three, four times just
to avoid responsibility. And I think that by changing their name, it also helps prevent them
from being sued by workers who may be in the area doing
something and getting exposure. - [Narrator] A driving school was never built on the SLAPS site. 36 years after the Oak Ridge survey, remediation work continues to this day. The SLAPS material on Lattey
Avenue would be purchased by Cotter Corporation in '69. They would hire local B&K Construction to ship the materials
to Canon City, Colorado. But as a local reporter would discover, much of the material would
never leave St. Louis. - Initially, everybody thought that there were very clear records about where this stuff
was, how much it weighed, who had handled it, what was happening. And as it turned out, nobody really knew. And until I kinda figured it out, nobody knew that anything was
in the West Lake Landfill. - Through August of 1973,
the B&K Construction Company, which was operating as a subcontractor for the Cotter Corporation, basically spread whatever
stuff they didn't want anymore, which they declared to
be barium sulfate cake, and then scooped it up along
with whatever was remaining in the other areas of the site, along with the topsoil, onto trucks, and dumped it into the West
Lake Municipal Landfill. - This is the wrong
place for the materials. Geologically, the site's
not only in a flood plane, flood planes are subject to liquefaction, this is a place of high rainfall. It has earthquake hazard
and liquefaction that can not only harm levees, but
make the landfill swamp. It has all kinds of geologic hazards. So, for all those geologic
and hydrologic reasons, this is a stupid place, and the landfill doesn't have
any of the protective barriers that are required for just
ordinary domestic waste, and certainly not for
this kind of material. (people chattering) - My name is Debby Kring. I serve as the community
involvement coordinator for the West Lake Landfill site. I've seen many of you before, and we welcome you here tonight. - [Narrator] After
investigating West Lake, the EPA had signed a
record of decision in 2008 that recommended placing a cap over the contaminated areas of the site and monitoring the groundwater. On this evening, they
would confirm the presence of contaminated material in the site, but not commit to removing it. This did not sit well with some. - You say that these
potentially responsible parties are conducting this investigation. Well, why is it that DOE
gave 'em a grant to do this? This, to me, is like paying kids to
write their own report card. - Amen.
- I'm sorry. And paying them to do it.
(participant clapping) - You would think from a PR
aspect, you would clean up the very first nuclear waste in the world. (participants applauding) - It is simply not possible to
conceive of a worse location in which to leave highly radioactive waste than in the flood plane of the
flood prone Missouri River. - And you have not been able
to keep track of your waste, your waste, my taxpayer-paid-for waste, It's not our waste, it doesn't belong to the
citizens of Bridgeton. The federal government generated
this waste, paid for it. We've suffered with it, move it out. - [Narrator] A submerged
fire has been discovered burning in the landfill, and
there are public concerns that the fire could reach the waste. The EPA is evaluating plans for the construction
of an isolation barrier to block the fire. - It's gonna cost a lot to clean it up. It's gonna cost more a year from now. And the year after that,
it's gonna cost more, and the year after that,
it's gonna cost more. It is never gonna get cheaper than now. It would have been cheaper to never dump it there in the first place. It would have been cheaper
to clean it up in 1976. It would have been cheaper
to clean it up in 1978, and 1980, or '85, or '87,
or '88, or '95, or '94, 2000, or 2005 than it is today. - Those entities that bought the waste made a quick buck off of it. They dumped it illegally in
violation of federal rules. The federal government
allowed it to happen with no sanctions. They did not provide the workers with a safe working environment,
could not guarantee it. They did nothing about it. And suddenly this is a Superfund program. It's in the hands of
potentially responsible parties, the Republic Landfill? They have to pay for this? The EPA Superfund program has no funds to compensate for the absence of funds that the private parties
would bring to bear to bring about remediation. And if the remediation
proves to be too costly, company just goes bankrupt, walks away. We need to have the federal
government in there, and the only way that's gonna happen is for the congressional
delegation to make it happen. The president can ask for it, but the Congress
ultimately has to okay it. It's above everybody's pay grade. - [Narrator] Just across
the Mississippi River, near the small community
of Venice, Illinois, sits a one million square foot plant that was metal products division
of Dow Chemical Company. In '57, they would become subcontractors for Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, shaping uranium metal and
straightening uranium metal rods for the AEC's nuclear weapons program. - I went to work there
in September of 1961. I used to run aluminum
and to run magnesium, that's all I knew. - We were supposed to
have protective clothing, badges, and all that. We were supposed to have urine samples. They never did none of that. - [Narrator] The plant
would change ownership several times over the years. But what wouldn't change were
the questions about safety. - They were wanting to know, well, what was reading on your badges. There wasn't anyone wearing
badges or anything else when we were around it. Only had to wear a badge one time, and that was when the
government was in there. And when they left, so did our badges. They dumped them in a
barrel, they didn't count, or send them off to be
tested or anything else. And a month later, they
just threw them away. - [Narrator] Oak Ridge National Laboratory conducted a survey of the
plant in March of '89. They would discover
uranium and thorium dust on overhead beams as high as 13 times the Department of Energy's guidelines. - Well, when we started having
a large amount of cancer reported in our plant, in the '60s, that's when Bill Hoppe
and myself got involved, and we started getting all
kind of information on it. And we done a study on the
amount of employees we had and the cancer rate, it was higher than any other
place that we're around. - We knew we ran radioactive materials, but they'd always bring out
a Geiger counter and said, "See, there's no readings. "You could lay on that
stuff for 1,000 years "and it wouldn't hurt ya." - In 1975,
(coughing) I had cancer on my ear three times. Two different doctors operated on me. And in 1999, I was diagnosed
with bladder cancer, and had to have my bladder removed. - Just as the sun was going down, we would get this fog, or
dense smoke kind of thing. And when you're driving down
from the end of College Street, you could just see, it was
just blankets of smoke. And you knew that that's
between seven, 7:30, or eight, you know, that was coming from the plant, they were opening up
whatever they were opening up and letting that all
dispense into the air. - [Bill] The smoke'd be so bad,
it'd come down through here, across here, and they
had to shut the mill down because they couldn't see on account of being so smoky in that. If it's high humidity
out, it would be terrible. So, you know, all this area
would be catching it also. It all depends on what
wind would be blowing. - When it became evident that
something was going on was, by this time, my brother was in college, he had a green Volkswagen Beetle. - '75 Volkswagen Beetle,
I was really proud. My very first car. And kept it polished and
shined, as a teenager would. But you find that this dross, these particulates that would
be billowing out this company, the factory smoke stack, would be displayed on top of my car. - And he would go out in the
mornings after the nightfall, and he'd brush off, there was
a white covering on the car. And you become conscious of
what's taking place here. As we were growing up, for years, one of the things that we
always had was a garden. It wasn't unusual for us
to have all kinds of beans, and vegetables, and things like that that we had gotten from the garden, and that's what we ate off
during the winter months. - My dad, he died of a very
aggressive brain cancer. And he died at the age of 54, which is, to me, a very young age. Particularly since the
history of the family was such that none of us had, or his
brothers or sisters, or anybody had that type of cancer in the family. - [Diane] Is that what we had ingested when we were taking in this food? Was that some of the causes of the problems that we're having today? Maybe. You never know. - [Narrator] Canal Co.
would take over the plant in the early '70s and begin dumping thorium
slag from commercial work in a 40-acre lot on the plant's property. - We dumped that sludge
and slabs in there, and the maintenance foreman
stood right there watching us. And we put about 155 barrel
drums of sludge in there to get rid of it. - [Narrator] Over 100,000 tons of material containing thorium 230 and 232 would be removed from the lot,
having sat there for decades. - [Calvin] When we first caught wind that they were cleaning up that dump site, it was after the fact. We saw trucks going up
and down the street, but we had no knowledge of
what they were cleaning up. - Not in 100 years would I think, okay, radioactive, I need to jump on this. 'Cause you would think that no one could be that irresponsible in dealing with the
people in the community. - [Calvin] It started with just me asking, why are my family members sick? And taking that across the
street, asking neighbors, are they experiencing any sickness? Do you think it just stopped
at the company's gate? - [Narrator] Calvin would join forces with former plant worker Larry Bergen, and together, they would
compile a list of illnesses that plagued residents
living near the plant. They would find over 70 cases of cancer on Calvin's street alone, and 114 within the surrounding blocks. - If the radiation and the
hazardous materials that were a couple of feet away from
residential homes, our homes, whether or not this dross
material from the smoke stacks that plumed and billowed
out over the community have affected my health and
others like me in the community. - No one wants to take the responsibility to admit what has occurred. And then you move on. You go into another community
and you do the same thing. You know, at some point, this has to stop. They come in poor,
unsuspecting neighborhoods, and they do their damage,
and then they move on. And that's sad. It's very, very sad. - [Narrator] By the mid '90s, a new generation of workers
would start at the plant with little or no
knowledge of its history. - I was hired on, I just
thought it was a steel factory. I grew up around the area, and they didn't tell me
anything about radiation. Right now, you get on the computer and you type in Spectrulite,
and it tells you all about it. But back then, I didn't
know nothing about it when I hired on. They didn't tell me, either. - [Narrator] In June of 2000,
the Army Corps of Engineers would begin decontaminating
the inside of the plant. - They usually have a
shutdown every summer that they do a cleanup,
just to clean the place up while everybody's gone,
and I never worked one. So, this summer, I decided to work, and I thought something was funny. They told us to switch locker
rooms from our locker room over to the rolling room locker room. But I didn't think much about it. And then when it was
time to come into work, they had everything taped off. People wearing them suits,
and they had the showers, decontamination showers and everything, So, when I seen that, I knew
something wasn't right, but. They had all these ribbons
hanging from the ceilings, and guys were up there vacuuming
or scraping the rafters, and when I walked in and
seen that, I was like, man. Right then, I said,
man, if I ever get sick, I'm gonna think about seeing
this, you know what I mean? Because it would just be
like if you worked in a place for all six years,
like, if you're a doctor and work in an office,
and you come in one day, and they're just ripping everything where you've been working. I just couldn't believe it. I was like, man, you gotta be kiddin' me. - [Narrator] Like many of
his coworkers before him, Jason would also find himself
in a battle with cancer. - They cut a big old
chunk out of my tongue. And I did radiation there in Rolla, 36 treatments in my mouth and neck. I was out for six months. Thank god my parents helped me out. Then that April, I got a lump in my neck. Needed a radical neck dissection. I've been good ever
since, but like I said, I had to fight it twice so far, so. - [Narrator] While the plant would receive Special Exposure Cohort status in 2007, NIOSH would focus mainly on the timeframe of the Atomic Energy Commission's contract that ended in 1960. Workers who started after that,
like Bill, Don, and Jason, would have to go through
dose reconstruction. They were denied compensation based on hours worked
around the materials, even though commercial work with thorium would continue well into the late '80s and uranium from early AEC work would be removed as late as 2006. To date, the program has paid over 22 million in compensation
to workers from this plant. - The cleanup's what really got to me. I don't know how you can do that, man. Not tell people. It's really kinda criminal
if you think about it, but. When you're hired on,
people should tell you. If they knew that stuff was in there, they should at least let
us know so we had a choice. We didn't have any choices. - [Narrator] We decided to travel outside of the St. Louis area to compare conditions
nuclear workers face today with those of the past. Metropolis, Illinois. The official hometown of Superman. And also home of Honeywell's
Metropolis Works Plant. The plant was opened in
1959 by Allied Chemical, and provided refined uranium to Paducah's Gaseous Diffusion Plant just across the Ohio River. In 2010, safety concerns at the plant were a top priority for workers and the United Steel Worker
Union that represented them. The union placed wooden
crosses outside the plant to represent workers who
either died from cancer or survive the disease. As negotiations broke down, workers found themselves
locked out by Honeywell. - In the latter years, I'm talking the last three to four years from '06, '07 on to the lockout, they created an atmosphere that really you was not supposed to
bring up safety issues. Salary never brought 'em up. They was dealt with,
I think, very harshly. The HR manager, which is HR generalist, mentioned the union
officials one time, he said, "You make sure people clock out "before they bring up safety issues." And that was his word to Darrell Lillie. Now, he backed off of that, but he sent that message out there. - The first two stages of the process which is ore prep and
green salt is a granular. Well, it's called green salt, it's 'cause it looks like green salt. And the uranium can dust out
of those pieces of equipment and get airborne and you can go and wipe your finger on any
piece of equipment, I-beam, anything in that building,
and you'll see results of it just by wiping your finger. So, we have a lot of airborne activity that gets up in the air that
you could inhale and ingest. - [Narrator] The challenges that early processing
plants faced in the past, of how to properly dispose of
nuclear waste, remain today. - It's very corrosive, and
it just eats the drums up. We've got drums that just
absolutely just disintegrated. Just absolutely eats 'em up. - [Narrator] Klinghammer approached the Nuclear Regulatory Commission over environmental and safety concerns. - They say, "You know, we can't
make 'em clean up anything." And I said, you can't make
'em clean up anything? Well, if you can't, who can? And I said, well, I'll tell you what. Your responsibility is to protect
the worker and the public. And I'll be at your next public meeting and tell them that you
don't have any power to make 'em clean up anything out there. And they said, "Well, now wait a minute, "we do have ways of
strongly suggesting things." And I said, well, I strongly
suggest you use that. - [Narrator] In April of 2009, EPA special agents searched the plant and found thousands of
illegally stored drums containing radioactive waste. Honeywell was sentenced to
pay a fine of $11.8 million. - I have seen probably
four or five releases. There were small ones which
didn't amount to much, you know, didn't get to of the feeds building. And there was a couple times that it got out of the feeds building. - Very few people know this, but there's only been two
nuclear incidents in this country that evacuated the neighbors. That's Three Mile Island
and Metropolis, Illinois. That's the only two there's been. - When they had releases or
anything in the main part, everybody had a station to go to, so they could have a head count. In my department, you kept working. And we was right in the wind direction of where mostly the release come to. And it took about eight
or 10 years for 'em to figure out that we needed a place to be so they could have a head count on us. - The behavioral safety factor is, to me, is a way that corporations
are trying to, of course, drive down their premiums. We all know healthcare is a cost. And we had the right way to do it, and they took it away from us, and now they're going with their way. When you see the crosses out front, a lot of those members
I knew, knew very well. I grew up with them. A lot of 'em were quite
a bit older than me, but a small community
here, I knew 'em all. What aggravates me now
is now they're saying that they wanna do away
with our retiree medical. And when you see what
has happened in the past and what you can contact as
far as sicknesses out here, that makes you wanna get up
and fight in the mornings. (band music) (children shouting) (crowd applauding) - We went up to Chicago in December of '06 and testified before the Advisory Board. And NIOSH even told the Advisory Board they could not make reliable
reconstruction doses in this plant because of lack of records. So the Advisory Board gave us the Special Exposure
Cohort status in this plant up to December of '76, and not beyond. Well, I had workers I represented
from the sampling plant that opened every drum that
come through that plant that had a qualified
cancer on the SEC status. But they didn't become
part of Allied Signal till July of '77, they
missed it by six months. And they got a qualified cancer,
but they cannot get paid. - I went through the
paperwork and the process. And it took about a year, and I got rejected. I went through the process
again, and I got rejected again. - We talked to the DOE, we've
talked to a lot of people about residual contamination. Because what is was set up for was nuclear weapons, not energy. And they say, after
December '76, all of our UF6 went toward energy, it was
also to utility companies. But you can't tell me
that at December of '76 all that stuff was out the pipes. - [Narrator] In the site
profile for Metropolis, NIOSH would call contamination
from previous weapons work indistinguishable from
later contamination work. - There is people out there
on that picket line right now that's gonna be in the same shape I'm in, or it will be worse. Yes, I'd say nine out of 10 that's gonna come up
with some kind of cancer or gonna have some bad health issue when they leave that plant. You know, we've all talked about it. Working at that plant, if you live 10 years after
you retire, you're lucky. - [Narrator] As of 2014, the program has approved 124 workers, and paid out over 21
million in compensation. 205 workers have been denied. - I'm never gonna give up because, honestly, it's their fault. - I went to a meeting in the mid 1980s, this was during the heyday
of the Reagan administration. This is before the appearance of Gorbachev and the sort of the beginning
of the end of the Cold War. My wife was a member of
the Health Physics Society, which are the people responsible
for providing protection from radiation in the
workplace and to the public, and they mostly work for the
nuclear industry, of course, and the nuclear weapons program. And the speaker was this attorney from the Department of Energy, and the speech was, Radiation,
the Offense and the Defense. And he, basically, got
up and gave this speech, and the gist of it was, he
put up a slide, a pyramid, and at the top of the slide was this, a segment said, compensation, the middle of the slide
said radiation standards, protection standards, and
the bottom of the slide was broken up into three segments, nuclear weapons, nuclear
power, nuclear medicine. He pointed to the top thing and said, "If we start granting
compensation to people "who claim they were injured by radiation, "this is gonna force us
to tighten our standards. "And this will effectively curtail "our nuclear weapons deterrent, "our ability to expand nuclear
power and nuclear medicine. "Therefore, you as health physicists "should learn to become expert witnesses "against plaintiffs in lawsuits. "And I am here to introduce you "to a Department of Justice
attorney to explain to you "that we're going too
start holding workshops "at the different chapters
of the Health Physics Society "to begin to train you, so
that you go in courtrooms "against workers and members of the public "who are seeking damages for harm "that might have been
caused by radiation." It gave me an insight into the, sort of this entrenched,
bureaucratic culture of how they operate, where
they drew the lines here. And if you went outside those lines, that was a career-ending gesture. - It just always seemed real tragic to me that men and women that
worked in these facilities over the course of World
War II and the Cold War, and even up till current
times in some locations were put in these facilities
unbeknownst to them, being exposed to radiation
and a ton of other toxins and chemicals that would
cause illnesses or cancer. It's two different stories. If it's the spouse, then
they almost to a T will say, my husband didn't talk about work. I have no idea what he did. All I know is I made him
a lunch, he went to work, and he paid the bills. The workers that were and are
still alive to talk about it, I think, generally, it was a job. And, in some sense, they were
being told that they were, especially the people
in the World War II era, they were being told that
it was a patriotic job, and it was a necessary job
for the war and the Cold War. And that era of men took that seriously. And because of that,
they were honorable men doing an honorable day's work. (Denise speaking faintly) - And then, you will just
lay that wreath on the stand up by the stage. Do you guys have a copy of the agenda? I am so honored to be
able to publicly recognize this unique and amazing workforce for a second year in a row. I welcome all of you. - My father, Arthur V. DeGarmo Jr., was discharged from the
Army Air Corps in 1945. He went on to work for the Heavy Military Electronic Division of General Electric in 1951, and he became the chief design engineer for the electrical systems associated with the Nike Missile system housed in White Sands, New Mexico, and was one of the chief design engineers of the Intercontinental
Ballistic Missile system. - And when I called my
cousin on Veterans Day to thank him for his
service to our country, my cousin, who got a Purple
Heart in the Mariana Islands in the Pacific as a Marine, he said to me, "Well, it's nice for you to call, "but I think that the real
heroes didn't come home." And I said, Bob, I believe
that anybody's a hero who offers themselves in
the service of others, and who commits themselves
with patriotism and loyalty to do the job and to risk not coming home. That makes you a hero. - As a result of being exposed
to radiological materials associated with his work, my father contracted a
rare form of bone cancer that took his life in 2001. - And everybody who did that and who took some oath of
secrecy, but were lied to, or misrepresented, that
duplicitous unexcusable behavior, that makes those people bold
print, capital letter heroes because they didn't know they were going to the Mariana Islands at Mallinckrodt. - St. Louis and the Metro
East are just a small piece of the larger nuclear weapons tale. But the health and
environmental legacies here are telling of the larger
tragedies nationwide. - Heal the sick and
strengthen and comfort them and their caregivers in their heroic, ongoing,
selfless assistance. May God be praised as we
offer Him this humble prayer. Amen. Amen. (solemn music) - [Photographer] One, two.
(camera shutter clicks) - [Narrator] In December of 2006, Denise became the ombudsman for NIOSH, a job that lets her assist
workers across the country with their claims for compensation. - I fell in love with the
workers and their families. And I learned things about my father that I would have never known had I not met these workers. It actually healed me in ways
that people would never know. By helping others, I
actually helped myself. (keyboard clicking) - People took great pains to make sure the cell would be
safe, that it would persist, that it would be put together well, in a way that it would
maintain its integrity. But 1,000 years is a long
time, it's a very long time. This is the unanswered question that's posed by the
storage of nuclear waste. Can you plan? Can you make a program that
is capable of persisting and handling problems
for another generation? A generation so far removed
from us in time that that distance is the
same as what separate us from people who couldn't write
over a millennia in the past. Will they understand what we've left? Maybe. Will they define problems in the same way? Maybe, it's hard to know. It's hard to know. (solemn music)
