When Diane Scheig’s father, Bill, would come home from work at the Mallinckrodt factory in St. Louis, he would undress in their garage and give his clothes to her mother to wash immediately, not daring to contaminate the house with the remains of his efforts. .
Mr. Scheig, a blacksmith who helped build the city’s famous arch, never told his family exactly what he did at the plant, where scientists first began processing uranium for the Manhattan Project in 1942. But until age 49, 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 born with a softball-sized stomach tumor, died of brain and lung cancer at age 54. So many of her classmates have died of cancer that a large round table covered with their photos is now a staple of her high school reunions.
“I know for myself, I was grateful when I turned 49,” Ms. Scheig said. “And I was grateful when I turned 54.”
Mallinckrodt’s plant processed the uranium that allowed scientists at the University of Chicago to produce the first man-made controlled nuclear reaction, paving the way for the first atomic bomb.
But the plant — and the program it served — left another legacy: A scourge of cancer, autoimmune diseases and other mysterious illnesses has engulfed generations of families like Ms. Scheig’s in St. Louis and other communities across the country exposed to the materials used to fuel the nuclear arms race.
Now Congress is working on legislation that would allow people harmed by the program but so far excluded from a federal law enacted to help its victims — including in New Mexico, Arizona, Tennessee and Washington state — to receive federal compensation.
A Toxic Legacy
In the 1940s, as workers extracted 50,000 tons of uranium to fuel the country’s nascent atomic arsenal, the plant also spewed out piles of nuclear waste.
Over the following decades, hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive waste stored in open steel barrels were transported and dumped across the city. The waste seeped onto large areas of land, including land that later became ball fields.
And it drained into Coldwater Creek, a tributary that cuts through the metropolitan area for 19 miles through backyards and public parks where children play and catch crawfish. In heavy storms, the creek usually floods.
There are similar stories across the country, among Navajo workers in New Mexico and Arizona who were sent into mines with a bucket and a shovel to dig for uranium and were never told about the dangers. the children of uranium processing plant workers in Tennessee and Washington state; and those downstream in the Southwest who breathed in the mushroom clouds of above-ground testing.
None of these communities qualify for aid under the only federal law to compensate civilians who suffered serious illness from the nation’s nuclear weapons program. Passed in 1990, this statute was narrowly crafted to help some uranium miners and some communities present for above ground testing. Claimants, who can include children or grandchildren of those who would have benefited from the program but have since died, receive a lump sum payment of $50,000 to $100,000.
The Senate earlier this month passed legislation led by Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, and Sen. Ben Ray Luján, D-New Mexico, that would update and dramatically expand the law to include thousands of new participants, including their families Missouri like the Scheigs.
If Congress doesn’t pass the bill before June, the law will expire entirely, closing the fund for those who qualify and cutting off access to cancer screening clinics in neighborhoods hit hard by radiation exposure that rely on federal money to continue operating.
To read their legislation is to picture a map of the physical and mental tones that have pervaded the nation’s nuclear weapons legacy in communities across the country, years after the first atomic test at Los Alamos.
“It speaks to the enormity of the burden,” Mr. Hawley, a conservative Republican who is running for re-election this year, said in an interview. “It speaks to the heroism of these people who, for 50-plus years, in almost all of these cases, carried the weight themselves. Some of my colleagues complained about the cost. So who do they think is bearing the cost now?’
For years, the momentum to expand the nuclear reparations program had veered into fits and starts on Capitol Hill, picked up by various lawmakers who put it forward but couldn’t secure a vote in the House or Senate.
But it fell flat when Mr. Hawley took up the issue, working with Mr. Luján to draft legislation and using 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 law after Republicans objected to its hefty price tag, which congressional estimators estimated could reach $140 billion, senators returned to the draw. By deleting new expansionary provisions that would have forced the federal government to cover victims’ medical bills, Mr. Hawley and Mr. Luján also added new communities, enticing more senators to support the bill now that it would benefit their states.
When the measure finally passed on the Senate floor last month – made possible after some horse-trading between Mr Hawley and Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader – it passed 69 to 30.
‘Bleeding Through’
The fate of St. Louis was decided over lunch at the elite Noonday Club downtown in 1942, when Arthur Compton, a leading administrator of the Manhattan Project and former head of physics at Washington University, met Edward Mallinckrod Jr., a scientist. who ran his family’s chemical and pharmaceutical company. Three other companies had already refused 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 visible on a route in St. Louis. The creek cleanup is expected to last until 2038, according to the Missouri Independent.
At the site of the old airport, where the first radioactive waste from the plant was stored, workers dressed in white Tyvek hazmat suits with pale yellow boots can be seen from the highway digging in the ground behind fences adorned with yellow warning signs and next to railroad cars loaded with contaminated soil.
A few miles 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. By 2010, a growing underground fire was discovered about 1,000 feet from the radioactive material.
Around the same time, Kim Visintine, an engineer turned medical professional, began to realize in conversations with friends that the rate at which families and classmates were getting serious, rare cancers “was historically way beyond the norm.” . he said. Ms Visintine’s son Zach was born with glioblastoma – the most aggressive type of brain tumor – and died aged 6.
He started a Facebook page called “Coldwater Creek — Just the Facts” and began charting reports of serious radiation-related illnesses, coloring the hard-hit neighborhoods in shades of red. Soon there were thousands of examples.
“It just looked like it was bleeding,” Ms. Visintine said of the red on the maps.
Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down
Diseases have spread throughout the city and run deep into the family trees.
Carl Chappell’s father, a chemical operator, used to walk to the plant in the early 1950s, until he began working at the company’s sprawling hematite facility, where scientists researched and produced highly enriched nuclear fuel. There, in 1956, his father was exposed to a radioactive leak.
“We didn’t know it was radioactive,” Mr. Chappell recalled in an interview. “All we knew was that he had been exposed to some toxic chemical spill and was hospitalized for a few days or several days down there until he was released to go home.”
Eight years later, his father was diagnosed with kidney cancer. Within another eight years, he was dead. He was 48.
Decades later, aged 40, Mr Chappell’s son Stephen was diagnosed with a rare type of mucosal cancer that started in his appendix and spread throughout his abdomen. He died at 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 among a group 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 it’s like, ‘Let’s not plan too far and try to enjoy our lives more.’ Because we don’t know if we’re going to make it.”
“It’s not if it’s going to happen,” Ms Hake added. “It’s when.”
Christen Commuso, who grew up near the creek and has lobbied extensively to expand the program through her work for the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, found small comfort in hoping the suffering in her family would stop with her.
After Ms Commuso developed thyroid cancer, doctors removed her thyroid, adrenal glands, gall bladder and eventually her uterus and ovaries. At first, Ms. Commuso said in an interview, she “really mourned the loss of my ability to have my own children.”
“But at the same time, there’s a part of me that feels good, maybe it was a blessing in disguise,” he added. “Because I didn’t pass something on to a new generation.”
She was on the Senate floor in March when lawmakers approved legislation to expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act to cover Missourians like her. Only the provision in the existing law to fund screening clinics for survivors would help, she said, because she sometimes skips doctor’s appointments when she can’t afford it.
“I wanted to clap and scream and scream” when he passed, Ms. Comuzzo said.
But she also found it disturbing to see how indifferent senators were as they voted on her fate – with the usual thumbs up or thumbs up to the Senate clerk.
“Seeing people give your life a thumbs up or a thumbs up — and does your life matter to them? It’s like, what do you have to say and do to convince people that you matter?’
