One of Missouri’s top Democratic officials asked the governor on Monday to call a special legislative session in response to news reports of the “unacceptable mismanagement” of radioactive waste in the St. Louis area.
“The problems related with this waste have festered for nearly 80 years,” House Minority Leader Crystal Quade said in a letter to Gov. Mike Parson. “It is well past time for us to begin the long process of finally resolving them for the sake of all Missourians.”
Quade, D-Springfield, is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor in 2024. Her comments follow a six-month investigation by The Missouri Independent, MuckRock and The Associated Press into radioactive contamination still lingering from World War II.
Uranium for the first atomic bomb was processed in downtown St. Louis, and radioactive waste was trucked across the region. Contamination from the effort still lingers in Weldon Spring, Coldwater Creek and the West Lake Landfill.
The newsrooms found that, for decades, federal officials and private companies either downplayed or failed to fully investigate the extent of radioactive contamination in St. Louis and St. Charles counties, allowing generations of families to be exposed.
Radioactive contamination in the St. Louis area has been extensively covered over the years, but new federal documents showed the way the federal government knew in the years after World War II that radioactive waste posed a threat to the environment and wrote off the contamination as “low-level” or “minor,” even as young families flocked to burgeoning suburbs surrounded by nuclear waste.
In a letter dated Monday, Quade asked Parson, a Republican, to call a special legislative session to appropriate money to a state program so the Missouri Department of Natural Resources can investigate areas of radioactive waste under a law passed in 2018.
Over the years, the state department has routinely pushed the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy for more extensive sampling and cleanup of radioactive waste, which Quade applauded.
“However, there is more that can and must be done by the state to protect the health and safety of our citizens,” Quade wrote in the letter.
According to the letter, the state can develop its own sampling and analysis plan, including sampling residents’ homes if they agree.
Parson’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
Rep. Tricia Byrnes, R-Wentzville, who grew up in the area and, as a teen, swam in a quarry she didn’t know was contaminated in Weldon Spring, has researched the issue extensively. She led efforts this spring to pass a resolution to require the state’s attorney general to seek compensation for residents who have become ill from exposure to radioactive waste.
The resolution passed the House but did not receive a Senate vote.
Byrnes said she and other elected officials and activists from the area need the help of anyone who wants to be involved, regardless of party. But Byrnes and a Missouri Senate Republican leader questioned Quade’s motivations as she campaigns for governor.
Byrnes said the area needs support, “not political moves during an election.”
“Any politician that wants to stand in the blood of my community for a moment in the spotlight will be called out,” Byrnes said.
Dawn Chapman, who co-founded Just Moms STL, which advocates for the community around the West Lake landfill in Bridgeton, said she’d like to see elected officials in Missouri put pressure on the Department of Energy to take responsibility for the contamination.
“I don’t think the state necessarily needs to do its own investigation because I think the Department of Energy’s numbers and documents are out there that say how bad this is,” Chapman said.
State Senate Majority Leader Cindy O’Laughlin, R-Shelbina, said she thought there was likely a “more methodical way” to approach the issue. She said there’s a lot of work to be done talking to affected parties and researching before calling a special session, which would cost a lot of money.
“I think people sometimes tend to call for a special session prematurely,” O’Laughlin said. “I’m not going to say that she’s doing that, but she is running for governor and it is a way to kind of get yourself out there in the headline.”
Byrnes said she has been in contact since the spring with the offices of U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican, and Rep. Cori Bush, a St. Louis Democrat.
Last week, Hawley successfully attached an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would expand a federal program that offers compensation to people who have become ill after exposure to radioactive waste from the federal government’s weapons development and testing programs.
Under the amendment, St. Louis-area residents would be eligible for compensation. It also expands coverage to the long-overlooked “downwinders” in New Mexico, and affected residents in a handful of other states and regions, who developed cancers and other illnesses from exposure to the testing of the first atomic bombs.
