EPA unveils cleanup plan for troubled Missouri landfill

Manhattan Project’s nuclear waste went to dump in 1970s.

ST. LOUIS — Some of the illegally dumped nuclear waste buried near a long-smoldering underground fire at a Missouri landfill will be dug up and the rest will be capped under a federal plan announced Thursday.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s remedy comes a decade after its initial cap-and-monitor proposal at suburban St. Louis’ West Lake Landfill was met with so much opposition that the agency went back to the drawing board. The partial excavation proposal was initially recommended by EPA in February.

The project is expected to take a little over four years and cost $205 million, a price tag that will be shouldered by the landfill’s owner and other parties deemed responsible for the contamination. A preliminary proposal announced in February was similar, but this one is $30 million cheaper and will take a year less to complete.

The plan faces opposition from Republic Services, which owns West Lake Landfill and the Bridgeton Landfill, just a few hundred yards away and where the underground fire has smoldered since 2010. Republic Services has spent millions of dollars to ensure that the fire and the nuclear waste don’t meet.

The nuclear waste, remnants from the Manhattan Project, was dumped there in the 1970s.

The company says partial excavation creates unnecessary risks and takes longer than its preferred remedy of capping and monitoring the site.

The EPA said the West Lake remedy addresses all of the radioactive material that could pose “unacceptable risks” to public health. The plan would dig at varying depths of 8 to 20 feet, removing about 70 percent of the landfill’s radioactive waste, which will be shipped to an out-of-state disposal site. The specific disposal site has not been determined.

A cover will be placed over the rest of the landfill’s radioactive material.

Remediation at West Lake has proven a vexing problem. The EPA’s 2008 proposal to cap the site and leave the radioactive material in place was met with strong opposition from environmentalists and neighboring residents.

The Missouri Coalition for the Environment and St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger, a Democrat, were among those advocating for excavation of all of the nuclear material. The EPA said complete excavation would cost nearly $700 million and take 15 years to complete.

Leaving all of the waste in place and capping it would have cost about $75 million.