[CPEO-MEF] RADIATION: "Weldon Spring uranium plant contaminated Missouri lakes with radioactive waste"

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Weldon Spring uranium plant contaminated Missouri lakes with radioactive waste
Lakes and streams in August A. Busch Memorial Conservation Area were contaminated with uranium from refining efforts in Weldon Spring

BY ALLISON KITE, DEREK KRAVITZ AND KELLY KAUFFMAN 
MISSOURI INDEPENDENT
OCTOBER 25, 2023

Steve Allen and Eric Singsaas grew up hunting and fishing in August A. Busch Memorial Conservation Area and swimming in quarries along the Missouri River in St. Charles County, never knowing they were playing near nuclear waste. 

“Everything we did,” Allen said in an interview, “we did together.”

Allen said he and Singsaas even attended a tour of an old uranium plant nearby — put on by the federal government in 1991.

“For the most part, we trusted what the government told us,” Allen said, “and surely, in our brain, if there was something bad there, (the government) wouldn’t allow us to be there.”

Decades later, Singsaas woke up with a numb foot. Within a week, he found out he had three cancerous brain tumors. 

Two years later, he died. 

It’s unclear what confluence of factors may have caused  Singsaas’s cancer diagnosis and death in 2018, at the age of 50, or whether exposure to radioactive contamination played any part. But testing results from sampling conducted by the Department of Energy show that, in the 1980s and 1990s, three lakes within the Busch conservation area — almost 7,000 acres of some of the busiest fishing lakes and hiking trails in the state — contained higher-than-natural levels of uranium and radioactivity. 

…

For the entire article, see
https://missouriindependent.com/2023/10/25/weldon-spring-uranium-plant-contaminated-missouri-lakes-with-radioactive-waste/

--

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
A project of the Pacific Studies Center
LSiegel@cpeo.org
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650-961-8918
http://www.cpeo.org





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