St. Louis radioactive waste: Coldwater Creek, West Lake...

The uranium that fueled the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was purified in downtown St. Louis. On December 2, 1942, Enrico Fermi's team achieved that reaction at Chicago Pile-1, and the material came from Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, which had agreed earlier that year to refine uranium for the Manhattan Project. That work was foundational to the atomic age. The waste it generated is still being dug out of a residential creek and still sits, decades later, in a suburban landfill next to an underground reaction that has smouldered since roughly 2010.

This is a story with two distinct crises, two different federal agencies, and one long record of contamination underestimated, timelines slipping by decades, and costs escalating. It is also a story where the government eventually acknowledged the harm it created, funded a real cleanup, and, as of July 2025, agreed to compensate the people who lived with the exposure. Both of those things are true at once, and the primary record supports keeping them side by side.

What was made here, and where the waste went

Mallinckrodt processed uranium at what is now called the St. Louis Downtown Site (SLDS) from 1942 to 1957, according to the National Park Service, which administers the Manhattan Project National Historical Park. A precise point matters here: Mallinckrodt purified and refined uranium. It did not enrich it. Enrichment happened at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Some secondary sources loosely call the St. Louis plant a "uranium enrichment facility," and that is wrong. In 1957 the processing work moved to Weldon Spring.

The waste is where the harm began. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which now runs the St. Louis cleanup under the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP), documents the movement chain. Manhattan Project waste was stored at the St. Louis Airport Site (SLAPS), north of Lambert airport, from 1947 into the late 1960s. It was then hauled roughly half a mile to a site on Latty Avenue. Improper storage at those sites let radioactive material, including uranium, radium, thorium, and their decay daughters, wash into Coldwater Creek, a creek that runs through residential North County neighborhoods where children played.

A separate batch of that legacy waste ended up somewhere else entirely. In 1973, according to the EPA and Missouri Department of Natural Resources record, about 8,700 tons of leached barium sulfate residues, radiologically contaminated, mixed with roughly 39,000 tons of soil, were hauled from the Latty Avenue area (the Hazelwood Interim Storage Site) and used as cover and fill at the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton. That dumping was illegal. West Lake was added to the Superfund National Priorities List in 1990.

From that single origin, two present-day cleanups branch apart, and they are easy to conflate. Keep them separate:

Coldwater Creek is a residential creek. Its remediation is run by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers under FUSRAP.
West Lake Landfill is a Superfund site overseen by the EPA.

Different waste path, different agency, different legal authority, different cleanup. Conflating them is the most common error in coverage of this episode.

Coldwater Creek: a cleanup that keeps growing

Congress transferred FUSRAP authority for these sites from the Department of Energy to the Army Corps of Engineers in 1997. The Corps has since removed more than one million cubic yards of contaminated material from the St. Louis area and shipped it to licensed out-of-state disposal, according to USACE figures reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. That is real, physical work, not a study.

But the schedule and the price tag both moved the wrong direction. Earlier estimates targeted completion around 2022. The current target is 2038. A nuance is worth stating precisely: 2038 is the date for full transfer of the site to DOE Legacy Management, with the physical remediation of the remaining areas projected for roughly 2035 and turnover by 2038. Either way, the earlier target slipped by more than a decade.

The cost estimate grew alongside the schedule. An October 2023 Government Accountability Office report found that the federal government's estimated environmental liability for the St. Louis-area FUSRAP work rose from about $177 million in 2016 to about $406 million in 2022. The driver was newly discovered contamination that expanded the cleanup into the creek's 10-year floodplain. Two cautions on that figure: these are estimated liability numbers, not final expended cost, and the same GAO report put all 19 FUSRAP sites together at $2.6 billion, up roughly 63 percent over seven years. The St. Louis figure is a subset, not the total.

The health study that finally arrived

For years, residents along Coldwater Creek reported clusters of illness and were told there was nothing to it. In May 2019, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), part of the CDC, released a final public health assessment that gave those concerns official standing. It found that people who lived along or played in the creek in past decades, roughly the 1960s through the 1990s, may have had an increased risk of lung cancer, bone cancer, or leukemia, and that more recent residents may have a slightly increased lung cancer risk.

The causation discipline here is essential and comes straight from ATSDR. The finding is probabilistic, describing increased population-level risk, not proof that any specific person's cancer was caused by the creek. ATSDR stated plainly that the estimated increases "would not likely result in detectable increased cancer rates in the community as a whole" and that there is no way to tell whether any particular cancer came from this exposure rather than another factor. The assessment validated long-dismissed concerns. It did not, and could not, adjudicate individual cases.

West Lake: a Superfund site next to an underground reaction

The West Lake story is defined by a slow remedy and a nearby hazard.

EPA listed West Lake as a Superfund site in 1990. It did not issue a final excavation remedy until September 27, 2018, when Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler signed the Record of Decision Amendment. That is a 28-year gap between listing and final remedy. The remedy itself is a partial excavation, not a full removal: it calls for excavating Radiologically Impacted Material (RIM) above 52.9 picocuries per gram, generally to 12 feet and optimized down to about 20 feet in places, with off-site disposal, and an engineered UMTRCA cover over the remaining RIM above 7.9 pCi/g that stays on-site. EPA's estimate was $205 million, with the work taking about three years after construction begins. Large volumes of radioactive material will remain in place under the cover. It is a defined, funded remedy, but it is not a clean sweep.

Complicating everything is the neighbor. The adjacent Bridgeton Landfill has had a "subsurface smouldering event" burning since roughly 2010, more than 14 years as of 2025. It is not an open fire. It is a heat-generating underground chemical reaction that occurs without oxygen or open flame. The concern is proximity: the reaction is in the adjacent Bridgeton Landfill, and the worry is that it could reach the radioactive material at West Lake. It has not reached that waste. The risk is that the two sit close together.

In January 2025, that proximity became a public dispute. In a letter dated January 15, 2025, the Missouri Department of Natural Resources warned of a "high likelihood" of radioactive material in the Bridgeton portion sitting closer to the smoulder than previously known, and asked EPA to take oversight. EPA responded that it had "no new evidence" of RIM elsewhere in Bridgeton. This is an unresolved state-versus-EPA dispute, not settled fact. It should be read as exactly that: a state agency raising an alarm and a federal agency saying its data does not support the alarm, over a radioactive Superfund site next to an underground reaction.

The money that finally reached the affected

For most of this history, the people exposed had no compensation path. The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), which had long covered atomic-test downwinders and uranium workers in other states, did not cover St. Louis-area exposure to Manhattan Project waste. That changed in 2025.

The RECA expansion was enacted as part of the reconciliation bill signed into law on July 4, 2025. According to the office of Senator Josh Hawley, it covers 21 Missouri ZIP codes across St. Louis, St. Louis County, and St. Charles County, and it was the first time RECA reached Missouri's Manhattan-Project-waste exposure. The benefit is a one-time payment of $50,000 or documented out-of-pocket medical expenses, whichever is greater, for affected-area residents with qualifying cancers. A deceased claimant's surviving spouse receives $25,000, then children $25,000.

One year in, the numbers are substantial and worth stating carefully. First Alert 4 (KMOV), reporting Department of Justice RECA program data on July 8, 2026, put the totals at nearly 15,000 Missouri claims filed, with more than $150 million paid out. The distinction between filed and paid matters: of those nearly 15,000 claims, only about 3,300 were approved as of that reporting, with the rest pending. A program sponsor projected that total Missouri payouts could eventually exceed $4 billion, but that is a projection of potential future payouts, not money already spent.

The honest failure critique and the honest mission defense

The efficiency case against this record is straightforward, and the government's own auditors make much of it. The waste was created in the 1940s and stored improperly by the 1960s. DOE did not commit to cleanup until 1990. Congress did not move creek-cleanup authority to the Army Corps until 1997. The Coldwater Creek FUSRAP work, once projected to finish around 2022, is now targeted for 2035 to 2038, and GAO documented the estimated liability more than doubling from $177 million in 2016 to $406 million in 2022 as newly found contamination pushed the scope into the floodplain. At West Lake, EPA let a Superfund site sit from its 1990 listing until a September 2018 final remedy, and that remedy leaves much of the radioactive material on-site under a cover while an underground reaction smoulders next door and state and federal officials disagree about how close the danger sits. The pattern the record shows is consistent: contamination underestimated, timelines slipping by decades, and community health warnings validated only after generations of exposure.

The mission defense is equally grounded in the record. St. Louis's uranium work was foundational to the Manhattan Project and to the end of World War II, and this contamination is a byproduct of a national-security effort, not a private boondoggle. The FUSRAP program is doing genuine work: more than one million cubic yards of radioactive material removed and shipped to licensed disposal, with the 14-mile creek remediation continuing. EPA's 2018 Record of Decision is a defined, funded remedy after years of study, excavating the most concentrated material and capping the rest. ATSDR's 2019 assessment gave residents official acknowledgment of concerns that had long been dismissed. And the 2025 RECA expansion, the first to reach these Missouri communities, put roughly $150 million into the hands of affected families in its first year. These are belated but real admissions that the government created the harm and owes both the cleanup and the compensation.

Both verdicts hold. The cleanup is real and the compensation is real, and they arrived slower and cost more each time the scope was reexamined. Eighty years after the uranium was purified, the bill is still coming due.

Fact-check notes and sources

Mallinckrodt Chemical Works purified uranium for the Manhattan Project at the St. Louis Downtown Site, 1942 to 1957, and the material was used in the first self-sustaining chain reaction (Chicago Pile-1, December 2, 1942). It purified and refined uranium; it did not enrich it. National Park Service, Manhattan Project National Historical Park.
Waste was stored at SLAPS from 1947 into the late 1960s, moved about half a mile to Latty Avenue, and washed into Coldwater Creek; contaminants include uranium, radium, thorium, and decay daughters. FUSRAP authority transferred from DOE to the Army Corps in 1997. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, St. Louis District (FUSRAP); corroborating timeline at Missouri Coalition for the Environment.
West Lake Landfill contamination came from illegal 1973 dumping of about 8,700 tons of leached barium sulfate mixed with roughly 39,000 tons of soil, used as landfill cover; West Lake was added to the Superfund NPL in 1990. Tonnages are the consistently reported figures. U.S. EPA archive, West Lake Landfill.
ATSDR's May 2019 final public health assessment found creek exposure may have raised the risk of lung cancer, bone cancer, or leukemia; the finding is probabilistic and cannot attribute any individual cancer to the exposure. ATSDR/CDC news release; full assessment PDF at ATSDR/CDC.
The Coldwater Creek FUSRAP cleanup covers 14 miles, has removed more than one million cubic yards of material, and is now targeted for completion around 2035 with site turnover to DOE Legacy Management by 2038, slipping from an earlier ~2022 target. St. Louis Post-Dispatch (STLtoday), reporting USACE figures.
The federal government's estimated environmental liability for the St. Louis-area FUSRAP work rose from about $177 million in 2016 to about $406 million in 2022, driven by floodplain contamination; these are estimated liability figures, not final expended cost. October 2023 GAO finding, reported by Missouri Independent.
A subsurface smouldering event (heat, no open flame) has burned in the adjacent Bridgeton Landfill since roughly 2010. In a January 15, 2025 letter, Missouri DNR warned of a "high likelihood" of radioactive material closer to the smoulder than known; EPA responded it had "no new evidence." This is an unresolved state-versus-EPA dispute, and the reaction has not reached the West Lake waste. Missouri Independent / Missouri DNR.
EPA's West Lake final remedy (2018 Record of Decision Amendment) was signed September 27, 2018 by Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler; it is a partial excavation of RIM above 52.9 pCi/g, generally to 12 feet and up to 20 feet in places, with off-site disposal and an engineered cover over remaining RIM; estimated cost $205 million over about three years after construction begins. U.S. EPA news release archive.
The RECA expansion was enacted July 4, 2025 via the reconciliation bill, covering 21 Missouri ZIP codes; the benefit is $50,000 or documented out-of-pocket medical expenses, whichever is greater, with $25,000 for a deceased claimant's surviving spouse. Office of U.S. Senator Josh Hawley.
One year after the expansion, DOJ RECA data showed nearly 15,000 Missouri claims filed with about 3,300 approved (the rest pending) and more than $150 million paid; a sponsor's ~$4 billion total is a projection, not money spent. First Alert 4 (KMOV), reporting DOJ figures.

St. Louis radioactive waste: Coldwater Creek, West Lake, and the fire creeping toward Manhattan Project residue