When Diane Scheig’s father, Bill, came home from work at the Mallinckrodt factory in St. Louis, he would undress in the garage and hand his clothes to her mother to be washed immediately, not daring to leave the house with the residue to contaminate his work.
Mr. Scheig, an ironworker who helped build the city’s famous arch, never told his family exactly what he was doing at the plant where scientists first began processing uranium for the Manhattan Project in 1942. But by the age of 49, he had developed kidney cancer, lost his ability to walk, and died.
Decades later, Diane’s older sister Sheryle, who years earlier had given birth to a baby boy with a softball-sized tumor in his stomach, died of brain and lung cancer at age 54. Her neighbor two houses away died of appendix cancer at the age of 49. So many of her classmates have died of cancer that a large round table with their pictures is now a fixture at their high school reunions.
“I know it myself, I was grateful when I turned 49,” said Ms. Scheig. “And I was grateful when I turned 54.”
The Mallinckrodt facility processed the uranium that allowed University of Chicago scientists to trigger the first man-made controlled nuclear reaction, paving the way for the first atomic bomb.
But the factory — and the program it served — left another legacy: A plague of cancer, autoimmune diseases and other mysterious illnesses has affected generations of families like Ms. Scheig’s in St. Louis and other communities across the country were haunted by the materials used in the nuclear arms race.
Now Congress is working on legislation that would allow people harmed by the program but previously excluded from a federal law enacted to help its victims — including in New Mexico, Arizona, Tennessee and the state Washington – to receive government compensation.
A toxic legacy
When workers produced 50,000 tons of uranium in the 1940s to feed the country’s burgeoning nuclear arsenal, the factory also spewed out lots of nuclear waste.
Over the next decades, hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive waste stored in open steel drums were transported and dumped throughout the city. The waste seeped into large layers of earth, including areas that later became ball fields.
And it flowed into Coldwater Creek, a tributary that winds for 20 miles through backyards and public parks where children play and catch crabs. Flooding in the creek regularly occurs during severe storms.
Similar stories exist across the country, among Navajo workers in New Mexico and Arizona who were sent into mines with a bucket and a shovel to dig up uranium and were never informed of the dangers; the children of workers at uranium processing plants in Tennessee and Washington state; and the downwinders in the Southwest who breathed in the fallout from the mushroom clouds of above-ground testing.
None of these communities are eligible for aid under the only federal law intended to compensate civilians who suffered serious illnesses as a result of the country’s nuclear weapons program. That law, passed in 1990, was narrowly written to help some uranium miners and a handful of communities present during surface testing. Applicants, who may include children or grandchildren of those who would have benefited from the program but have since died, will receive a one-time payment of $50,000 to $100,000.
The Senate passed legislation earlier this month, led by Sen. Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, and Sen. Ben Ray Luján, Democrat of New Mexico, that would update the law and dramatically expand it to thousands of new participants, including Missouri families like the Scheigs.
If Congress does not pass the bill before June, the law will expire entirely, closing the fund to those currently eligible and blocking access to and continuation of cancer screening clinics in neighborhoods severely affected by radioactive contamination are dependent on federal funds.
Reading their laws means imagining a map of the physical and psychological consequences that the legacy of the country’s nuclear weapons has left in communities across the country, years after the first nuclear test at Los Alamos.
“It shows how enormous the burden is,” Mr. Hawley, a conservative Republican who is up for re-election this year, said in an interview. “It is a testament to the heroism of these people who, in almost all of these cases, have borne the burden themselves for over 50 years. Some of my colleagues complained about the cost. Now, who do you think will bear the costs now?”
For years, momentum to expand the nuclear compensation program sputtered intermittently on Capitol Hill, taken over by various lawmakers who inched forward on the program but failed to reach a vote in either the House or Senate.
But there was a boost when Mr. Hawley took up the issue, drafted legislation with Mr. Luján and used his position on the Armed Services Committee to attach it to the annual defense policy bill.
When the measure was removed from the final version of the bill after Republicans objected to the high price tag, which Congress estimates could reach $140 billion, senators went back to the drawing board. Mr. Hawley and Mr. Luján dropped sweeping new provisions that would have forced the federal government to cover victims’ medical costs and also added new communities, enticing more senators to support the bill because it would now benefit their states would.
When the measure finally came to a vote in the Senate last month – after some horse-trading between Mr Hawley and Sen. Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican and minority leader – it voted 69-30.
“bleed through”
The radioactive fate of St. Louis was decided over lunch at the elite Noonday Club in the city’s downtown in 1942, when Arthur Compton, a top Manhattan Project administrator and former head of physics at Washington University, met with Edward Mallinckrodt Jr., a scientist, who ran his family’s chemical and pharmaceutical company. Three other companies had already rejected Mr. Compton’s request to begin refining uranium to develop the bomb. Mr. Mallinckrodt, a long-time friend of Mr. Compton, said yes.
Eight decades later, the consequences of that decision are immediately apparent when driving through St. Louis. Cleanup of the creek is expected to take until 2038, according to The Missouri Independent.
At the site of the old airport, where the plant’s first radioactive waste was stored, workers in white Tyvek hazmat suits and bright yellow boots can be seen from the highway, digging into the ground behind fences decorated with yellow warning signs digging next to train cars loaded with contaminated soil.
A few miles further down is the West Lake Landfill, a pit containing thousands of tons of radioactive waste from Mallinckrodt that was illegally dumped in an area now surrounded by chain restaurants, warehouses and a hospital. In 2010, a growing underground fire was discovered about 1,000 feet from the radioactive material.
Around the same time, Kim Visintine, an engineer-turned-physician, began to realize in conversations with friends that the rate at which her families and classmates were developing serious, rare cancers was “historically far above the norm.” She said. Ms Visintine’s son, Zach, was born with glioblastoma – the most aggressive type of brain cancer – and died aged 6.
She started a Facebook page called “Coldwater Creek – Just the Facts” and began mapping reports of serious illnesses linked to radiation and coloring hard-hit neighborhoods in shades of red. Soon there were thousands of examples.
“It just looked like it was bleeding through,” Ms. Visintine said of the red on the cards.
Thumbs up or thumbs down
The diseases have spread throughout the city and penetrated deep into the family trees.
Carl Chappell’s father, a chemical worker, walked to work at the plant in the early 1950s until he began working at the company’s sprawling Hematite plant, where scientists researched and manufactured highly enriched nuclear fuel. His father was exposed to a radiation disaster there in 1956.
“We didn’t know it was radioactive,” Mr. Chappell recalled in an interview. “All we knew was that he was exposed to a toxic chemical spill and was down there in the hospital for a few days or several days until he was released to come home.”
Eight years later, his father was diagnosed with kidney cancer. Within another eight years he was dead. He was 48.
Decades later, at age 40, Mr. Chappell’s son Stephen was diagnosed with a rare type of mucosal cancer that started in the appendix and spread throughout the abdomen. He died at the age of 44.
For some families, developing cancer seems inevitable. Kay Hake’s father Marvin was an engineer at the Mallinckrodt factory and survived bladder, prostate and skin cancer. Her husband, John, who worked as a heavy equipment operator, was part of a team of workers sent years ago to help clean up toxic waste from another Mallinckrodt uranium plant. Sometimes he was given protective gear to wear, but sometimes not.
“Every time we get sick, we think it’s probably cancer,” Mr. Hake said in a recent interview over coffee. “Sometimes we plan for the future and think, ‘Let’s not over-plan and try to enjoy our lives more.’ Because we don’t know if we’ll make it.”
“It’s not like it’s going to happen,” Ms. Hake added. “It’s when.”
Christen Commuso, who grew up near the creek and has worked hard to expand the program through her work with the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, finds some small comfort in the hope that her family’s suffering will end with her .
After Ms. Commuso developed thyroid cancer, doctors removed her thyroid, adrenal gland, gallbladder and eventually her uterus and ovaries. At first, Ms. Commuso said in an interview, “she really mourned the loss of my ability to have children of my own.”
“But at the same time, part of me feels good, maybe it was a blessing,” she added. “Because I didn’t pass anything on to a new generation.”
She was on the Senate floor in March when lawmakers passed legislation to expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act to Missourians like her. The provision in existing law to fund screening clinics for survivors alone would help, she said, since she sometimes skips medical appointments when she can’t afford them.
“I wanted to clap and scream and shout” when it was over, Ms. Commuso said.
But she also found it jarring to see how nonchalant senators were as they voted on her fate – giving the usual “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” to the Senate secretary.
“Seeing people give your life a thumbs up or a thumbs down – and does your life matter to them? It’s like: What do you have to say and do to convince people that you matter?”
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2024-04-06 12:46:03
www.nytimes.com