Radiation risksResidents of a St. Louis suburb worry about landfill containing nuclear waste

Residents of a St. Louis suburb are increasingly anxious over a potential nuclear threat buried in the ground. One landfill nearby contains nuclear waste, while in a second landfill, only 1,000 feet away, there is “hot spot” burning underground.

CBS This Morning reports that federal officials insist the “smoldering event” is contained, and not moving toward the nuclear waste in the first landfill.

The residents are not reassured, however, and on Monday hundreds of them demanded answers from the federal officials.

“You can’t 100 percent guarantee that we’re okay,” said one resident.

“We don’t go outside, we don’t open our windows,” said another.

St. Louis’ nuclear waste problems go back to the Second World War, when a local facility processed uranium for the U.S. first nuclear weapons. In 1990 one landfill was named a Superfund cleanup site, and it contains illegally disposed nuclear waste from the cold war era. The fire in the second landfill has been smoldering for five years.

The sites where the nuclear waste was stored have been cleaned, but low-level radiation has moved into neighborhoods.

“I don’t know why they ignored it for so long, I really don’t,” Dawn Chapman, who lives less than two miles away from the landfills, told CBS. Chapman was among the founders of the activists group to educate her neighbors.

“I cannot believe that somebody and anybody in their right mind would think that you can leave the world’s oldest nuclear weapon’s waste sitting on the surface of a landfill for over forty years and there not be a consequence to that,” Chapman said.

The state’s attorney general is now suing the landfill’s owner, Republic Services. The AG says the company has not handled the fire properly, and that state’s experts warn that the underground fire could reach the nuclear waste in three to six months.

Both the company and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reject these assessments. Republic has also spent millions of dollars over the years to contain the burn and control the foul odors.

“There’s been a lot of concern and public comment on earlier decisions this agency made and it’s time for us to give them a proposal,” Mark Hague, an acting regional administrator for the EPA, told CBS.

The EPA is considering installing a barrier between the two landfills by the end of the year, but the residents insists that will not accept a barrier as an alternative to the removal of all the radioactive residue and extinguishing the burn.

There are other problems, though. Over the past weekend, a grass fire reached to within seventy-five yards of the radioactive waste, and the region sits near an earthquake fault line.