Finalist: The Wall Street Journal, by John Emshwiller and Jeremy Singer-Vine

By John R. Emshwiller and Jeremy Singer-Vine

 

It was a discovery that helped launch the nuclear age.

 

On the eve of America’s entry into World War II, scientists isolated plutonium in a small room in UC Berkeley’s Gilman Hall. To make sure the moment wasn’t forgotten, Room 307 was designated a National Historic Landmark.

 

As it turned out, there would be plenty of other reminders. The work left radioactive residue that forced the university to rip out an entire adjacent room in 1957, according to its own documents. A quarter-century later, while professors and students were still using the building, the school found that a dozen other rooms and some hallways were contaminated. The school cleaned those up too—only to discover this year small amounts of residue in a study room.

 

Carolyn Mac Kenzie, the university’s radiation safety officer, says any current exposure is “well under” federal safety limits. Still, she says that before the 1980s cleanup, administrators or students there could have breathed in harmful levels. “We will never know,” she says.

 

The contamination at Berkeley is part of the legacy of one of the most important scientific and industrial undertakings in U.S. history. During the buildup to the Cold War, the federal government turned to the private sector to help develop and produce nuclear weapons and other forms of atomic energy. Hundreds of companies and thousands of workers were pressed into service. But while it helped defend a country, this enormous endeavor has left an equally enormous—but rarely publicized—cleanup job of contamination that spans the country.

 

Residue, left by the routine processing as well as the occasional mishandling of nuclear material, exists in sites in almost three dozen states. Some remains in public parks, some near schools, and some in the walls, floors and ceilings of commercial buildings. Contamination has been detected on hiking trails in residential neighborhoods, in vacant city lots and in groundwater.

 

Federal officials say they have taken adequate measures to protect the public health and that the sites don’t pose a threat to anyone living or working nearby. While some research has raised concerns, there is no conclusive evidence linking the sites to any public-health problems. In general, studies haven’t pinpointed the exact relationship between exposure to low-level radiation and medical issues such as cancer.

 

But a Wall Street Journal investigation raises other questions about the massive government program established to handle one of the country’s longest running and most expensive cleanups. Among the findings:

 

Record-keeping has been so spotty that the Energy Department says it doesn’t have enough documentation on several dozen sites to decide whether a cleanup is needed or not.

 

Despite years of trying to track these sites, the government doesn’t have the exact address for dozens of them. It acknowledges it doesn’t even know what state one uraniumhandling facility was located in.

 

More than 20 sites initially declared safe by the government have required additional cleanups, sometimes more than once.

 

“What we have learned from the nuclear program is that it is a surprise when there are no surprises,” says Robert Alvarez, a former senior Energy Department official during the Clinton administration.

 

In its investigation, the Journal sifted through tens of thousands of pages of government documents and company records; consulted property records, photographs and historical maps; and conducted interviews with hundreds of individuals, including former tenants and owners. Information from the Energy Department as well as a dozen other federal and state agencies was gathered in the search. The results of that research—covering over 500 sites—are in an online database.

 

Government records show that a large majority of those sites, which included factories, research centers and other facilities, handled radioactive material. Over the decades, an array of federal agencies have reviewed records to determine which sites were potentially dangerous. So far, the government has deemed about 130 sites worrisome enough to warrant a cleanup, and says it has finished work on 90 of them. Total projected cost: $350 billion.

 

The Energy Department declined requests for interviews but issued a statement to the Journal saying it was “confident” it had identified all of the sites and nearly all of the contaminated areas at those locations. “We continue to evaluate these sites through environmental sampling and records searches to determine whether additional contaminated areas exist,” the statement said.

 

The smaller sites stand in contrast to a handful of giant nuclear facilities that have grabbed national headlines—such as the 586-square-mile complex in Hanford, Wash., which officials estimate will account for $150 billion of the total cleanup tab. But while they are far less contaminated than the Hanfords of the world, the smaller sites are closer to population centers and are harder to track through a series of private operators.

 

Indeed, according to the Journal’s database, more than four million Americans live within a mile of one of the roughly 300 sites the Journal could pinpoint. About one million live within a half mile. Some 260 public schools are also within a half mile of a site, as are 600 public parks. Still, most current owners or occupants contacted by the Journal didn’t know about the locations’ past.

 

“Now you’ve got me scared,” said Sal Mazzio with a nervous laugh, upon learning that his Staten Island towing company sits on a former World War II storage site for uranium ore. Federal officials are looking at doing a cleanup there, though they say there is no imminent health risk.

 

“I should be thrilled that I’m in such excellent health,” said JoAnn LaFon upon hearing that her Alexandria, Va., townhouse is on the site of a former factory that worked with uranium and thorium. Ms. LaFon said that to build her complex’s 29 townhomes nearly 20 years ago, the developer tore down the factory and cleaned up the site. Still, she wondered if there was any remaining residue. Available records don’t show the government felt the site needed a cleanup.

 

At a group of buildings in the 500 block of W. 20th Street in Manhattan, federal records shows that in the 1940s the Manhattan Project—the research-and-development effort that led to the first atomic bomb—stored some 300,000 pounds of uranium products in what served as warehouses at the time.

 

In that case, the federal inspectors in 1989 found radioactive contamination up to 38 times federally allowed levels in parts of the structures, according to a 1995 Energy Department report. After hauling off 50 drums of contaminated material recovered from vacuuming, scraping and other work, the government declared the buildings fit for “unrestricted use.” The buildings are currently occupied by dozens of offices and art galleries. A woman who described herself as one of the owners but didn’t give her name said she didn’t know about any past contamination and declined to comment.

 

Determining actual risks from radiation is far from a precise science; much of it is based on long-term health studies of World War II atomic-bomb survivors in Japan. Current scientific thinking holds that even the smallest amount of additional radiation raises a person’s cancer risk slightly, with the danger rising with the dose.

 

Generally, the relatively low levels of radiation at most old nuclear sites aren’t viewed as a short-term danger. Any exposure would occur in the soil, air and groundwater. Richard Muller, professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, said government exposure limits are “often set so far into the safety zone nobody should worry” about them.

 

Cleanup responsibilities have been divided among an array of federal agencies—including the Energy Department, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health also weighs in on scores of sites under a program to compensate nuclear-weapons plant workers for radiation-linked cancers.

 

Still, sometimes it has taken citizens to find contamination problems. In 1978, a college geology student in Attleboro, Mass., carrying his own detection equipment discovered radioactive junk at a local landfill. That sparked a federal cleanup that was completed in 2012, three decades after the student’s find. A 2011 state health study found elevated levels of a few types of cancers within a mile of the site, but said “the elevations were not statistically significant.”

 

In the 1970s, federal officials decided that a factory in Fort Wayne, Ind., which had machined uranium for the weapons program, didn’t need a cleanup. However, in 2004 a buyer of the facility found radiation there during an environmental review. That site is now slated for a government cleanup, though it isn’t expected to begin for several years, officials say.

 

Even after being cleaned, many sites still contain residual radioactive contamination. “Cleanup does not imply that all hazards will be removed from a given site,” the Energy Department said in its statement to the Journal. Often, the taint is so slight that it poses no public-health risk, government officials say. But in about 50 completed cleanups, enough contamination remains that the federal government has imposed “institutional controls,” restricting how the area or facility can be used. Such restrictions could last “for centuries or, in some cases, millennia,” one Energy Department report said.

 

The former Mound nuclear complex in Miamisburg, Ohio, can’t be used for day-care centers, elementary schools or other activities where children would spend too much time. While the government says the contamination levels don’t threaten adults in offices or doing other work at what is now a technology-business park, research has shown children to be more at risk from radiation exposure.

 

Eric Cluxton, president of the nonprofit Mound Development Corp., says he checked with the Energy Department to make sure it was all right to let kids come to this year’s annual Thanksgiving “Turkey Trot” 5-mile run being hosted by Mound. The government gave the green light.

 

The U.S. entered the atomic age in the 1940s, with the Franklin Roosevelt administration moving ahead with developing a nuclear bomb just before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Adding urgency, U.S. officials feared Nazi Germany was already well into its own bomb project.

 

The Staten Island site now being considered for cleanup was the repository for 1,200 tons of extremely high-grade uranium ore from the Belgian Congo that a European business executive had shipped to the U.S. in 1940 to keep it from the Nazis. Forty years later, federal records show, the Energy Department found residual contamination at the site. Even though the uranium had eventually been purchased for the Manhattan Project, the department decided the site didn’t qualify for a federal cleanup because the ore had been owned by private companies while it sat on Staten Island.

 

The department said it decided to reconsider the site’s eligibility at the request of other government agencies. A 2012 federal report calculated that potential radiation exposure in a relatively remote and unused corner of the property, part of which now hosts Mr. Mazzio’s towing company, could be up to about 10 times current standards.

 

Such were the challenges of building the first bomb that Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize-winning Danish physicist, reportedly once remarked that an entire country would have to turn itself into a factory to build the weapon. After viewing the labors and results of the Manhattan Project, Mr. Bohr concluded America had done just that.

 

NEW YORK—On the block in Queens where Irving Avenue dead ends into a vacant lot and old railroad track, with a cemetery just beyond, the mechanics at Los Primos Auto spend their days working on cars while pedestrians from nearby apartments stop by a corner market for a little shopping. Across the street, an ice-making plant churns away.

 

All is normal, except for the radiation rising up from the ground. The contamination dates back to the 1940s and 1950s when a now-defunct company, called Wolff-Alport Chemical Corp., handled radioactive materials as part of its commercial operations as well as for sale to the country’s nuclear-weapons program. In the process, the company dumped some of its waste into the sewers and ground, according to government records. Federal and state officials, who are now trying to deal with the problem, say there is no imminent public-health threat.

 

However, a 2012 study by a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services arm said workers at the auto shop could after one year of exposure face an elevated lifetime cancer risk up to 31 times as great as allowed by federal standards. And “pedestrians who frequently use the sidewalks of Irving Avenue may have an elevated cancer risk from the exposure to ionizing radiation.” The report added that the risks of adverse health effects would still be low.

 

For decades, government officials and science experts have wrestled with the question: How much radiation from nuclear activities should the public be exposed to and how quickly should officials move to clean up sites that are contaminated? It is widely agreed that high doses of radiation, measured in tens or hundreds of rems, which is an amount of energy that is absorbed by the body, can quickly produce health problems or even death. But there is a continuing debate over what health risks are posed by millirem doses absorbed by someone over years or decades. A millirem is onethousandth of a rem.

 

A typical chest X-ray gives about 2 to 10 millirem, roughly the same range as a round-trip plane ride across the country. A mammogram gives about 30 or more millirem. An American, on average, gets about 300 millirem a year from natural background radiation, such as the sun.

 

Scientists and government officials say it is impossible to know whether an individual’s cancer was caused by low doses of nuclear radiation, or to precisely say how much risk is posed by certain doses. But even “the smallest dose has the potential to cause a small increase in risk to humans,” says a 2006 report from the National Research Council arm of the National Academy of Sciences. This report, known as BEIR VII, is the latest in a long series of radiation health reviews done at the behest of the federal government. Under this theory, risk rises as exposure accumulates over time.

 

The BEIR VII report estimated that a rem of radiation could produce roughly one additional cancer per 1,000 people receiving that dose. Using that assumption, 300 millirem a year—the equivalent of the average background dose—could, over 70 years of exposure, cause one extra cancer among about every 50 people exposed.

 

Current federal radiation-protection standards for allowable public exposures from nuclear sites range from about 15 millirem to 100 millirem a year. These standards have gotten tighter as scientists learned more about the potential risks of radiation—raising questions among some inside and outside government about whether standards used on some past nuclear-cleanup projects were strict enough.

 

In the late 1980s, the Energy Department looked at the Irving Avenue site under a program, known as Fusrap, to clean locations contaminated by nuclear-weapons work. After deciding that most of the contamination came from other activities, it referred the case to other agencies, which deemed the exposure levels below the then-prevailing standard of 500 millirem a year. But calculations contained in the 2012 Health and Human Services report show that radiation doses for a worker at the auto-repair shop could range from 41 millirem to 5,400 millirem a year, depending on length of workday and the location of the work. For a pedestrian, annual doses could range from 7 millirem to 656 millirem.

 

The site drew attention in 2007 during radiation surveys being done by New York City and state officials, documents show. At that point, the radiation levels were deemed high enough to spark action. So far, at a contaminated empty lot, Environmental Protection Agency officials have cleared weeds, removed two abandoned boats, erected a new fence, laid fresh gravel and dirt, and put down a cement strip as a radiation shield on a particularly hot spot. On a recent day, a barbecue used by the auto-shop workers sat on that strip. On part of the sidewalk, the EPA is laying down a thin metal “sandwich,” says Eric Daly, the EPA’s on-scene coordinator. The agency is also installing new cement flooring, with some lead, in the auto shop.

 

By John R. Emshwiller

 

APOLLO, PA.—For Patty Ameno, it is a Kodak moment from childhood that stirs many memories. She is 8 years old, dressed up for Easter in her family home’s yard, clutching a doll. Her mom, as she recalls, made the doll; her dad took the photo.

 

But the most important memory for Ms. Ameno, now 62 and still living near this blue-collar town, is the massive factory in the photo’s background. For years, it produced nuclear fuel for U.S. submarines and other customers. With a red pen she has circled drums of unknown material stacked outside the plant.

 

Consider it the focal point for a one-woman nuclear crusade spanning a quarter century. Ms. Ameno has fought over the atomic legacy here, as well as a sister facility in nearby Parks Township next to a 44-acre field that still holds atomic waste.

 

In her quest, she has helped organize litigation that resulted in more than $80 million in payments to her and scores of neighbors claiming health damage from radioactive contamination. When federal regulators said the waste could safely stay buried in the field—which for years had been used as an informal recreation area by residents—Ms. Ameno hounded government officials until Congress passed a law requiring a cleanup.

 

She now relentlessly bird-dogs that cleanup effort, which is behind schedule, over budget and recently wrapped in a cloak of secrecy after authorities unearthed what they said were unexpected amounts of “complex material.” The government increased security at the site and now estimates the cleanup could cost up to $500 million.

 

A Navy veteran and former Defense Department investigator, Ms. Ameno has pored through thousands of pages of documents, interviewed hundreds of people, picketed and been arrested for disrupting a public meeting—and sued those who arrested her. At one point, she hired a helicopter for an aerial view of the dump site.

 

She has been praised as a community protector and criticized as a troublemaker unnecessarily stoking local fears and potentially hurting the local economy. “She continues to stir things up,” says David Heffernan Sr., president of the Apollo borough council, adding it could deter companies from investing in the area. Ms. Ameno argues she had no choice: “You have to have a mad, junkyard-dog mentality in order to deal with this.”

 

This corner of western Pennsylvania’s coal country is part of a national nuclear junkyard. Radioactive residue from the government’s massive buildup of nuclear weapons and other atomic-energy programs during World War II and the Cold War is scattered across scores of locations in some three dozen states. The estimated cleanup bill is now $350 billion. A recent investigation by The Wall Street Journal cataloged hundreds of sites that did government nuclear work and uncovered problems with the remediation effort that range from sites that haven’t been found to ones needing repeated cleanups.

 

Federal agencies responsible for radioactive cleanups say they are taking adequate measures to protect the public and continue to be on the alert for needed additional work. Among them is the Army Corps of Engineers, which has responsibility for the dump site near here, known as the Shallow Land Disposal Area. The two local atomic factories were torn down and carted away beginning more than two decades ago.

 

Ms. Ameno has long argued that contamination—from emissions when the plant operated and from decades of leftover residue—has created high cancer rates in the area. Babcock & Wilcox, which owned the two nuclear plants and still owns the dump site, has denied harming the public. A 1996 state health department survey found some higher cancer rates near the nuclear operations but concluded the difference wasn’t statistically significant.

 

Health debates aside, this isn’t the only time the government’s handling of the sites has created unease in local communities. A company sparked a continuing federal cleanup after discovering radioactivity at an Indiana factory that had been declared safe, while a college student’s find of contamination led to a similar cleanup in Massachusetts. Protests by St. Louis area residents have caused federal officials to reconsider plans to leave a radioactive dumpsite in place.

 

“It shouldn’t default to local citizens to do the work that the government should have done in the first place,” says Daniel Hirsch, a faculty lecturer on nuclear issues at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and critic of some federal nuclear cleanup activities. Federal officials say they have been vigilant and are confident they identified the sites and “nearly all the contaminated areas at those locations.”

 

Ms. Ameno’s slice of this national nuclear saga came to town in the late 1950s. A newly formed company, Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp., set up in an old steel mill across the street from her home. Numec processed thousands of pounds of bomb-grade uranium and plutonium and other radioactive materials, according to government and company documents.

 

Growing up, Ms. Ameno says she rarely paid much attention to the factory, festooned with dozens of rooftop venting stacks. It wasn’t until after she returned home from her stints in the Navy, where she was injured in a helicopter crash, and at the Defense Department that her late father, worried about health risks from the plant, asked her to look into it. (He eventually died from a stroke.)

 

That was in 1988. Ms. Ameno began collecting Numec-related information, combing through libraries and filing public-records requests. She began interviewing ex-employees  and residents.

 

While Numec’s early management denied harming the public, the company did have issues. These included alleged improper handling of nuclear material and questions over radiation releases from the rooftop stacks, according to government and company records.

 

Reading through those records, she came across references to a 1963 fire in a vault containing highly enriched uranium that also caused radioactive materials to be released. An estimated three kilograms of bomb-grade uranium was lost in the blaze, according to a 1966 report by the now-defunct Atomic Energy Commission.

 

Ms. Ameno found workers who had been through that blaze, including George Pugh. In an interview with the Journal, Mr. Pugh said that after fighting the fire, he was scrubbed down in a shower for six hours to remove radioactive contamination.

 

His clothes were buried in the nuclear dump. Mr. Pugh died last year at the age of 76 after battling kidney and prostate cancer. Medical experts say it is impossible to know if a particular person’s cancer is linked to radiation exposure. Mr. Pugh’s widow did receive cash compensation under a federal program for nuclear-weapons industry workers suffering from cancer and other maladies.

 

Ms. Ameno began gathering information on local cancer cases and would ultimately become convinced that a large number of the cases were linked to the Numec radiation. During her visits to hospitals, Ms. Ameno met a health-care worker named Nedra McPherson, who became her live-in partner and with whom she raised Ms. McPherson’s biological son. “She would read documents in the bathtub,” says Ms. McPherson. “She had no time for anyone.”

 

By the 1990s, Ms. Ameno was pushing for medical monitoring of local residents and a complete cleanup of all remaining contamination at the factory sites and the dump. She picketed at both sites, carrying a sign saying “Honk, If You Want to be Safe.” She attended public meetings and called some of her own. Arrested at one gathering for allegedly being disruptive, Ms. Ameno sued local authorities after she was acquitted, settling on undisclosed terms.

 

Working out of a cluttered office in her second-floor apartment, she says she spent nearly $1,000 for a helicopter flyover of the dump in 2001. Tacked on her office wall is also an old $3,784 phone bill, one month’s worth of long-distance calls.

 

She spearheaded a 1994 lawsuit on behalf of herself and over 300 other local residents against Babcock & Wilcox and another previous Numec owner, alleging health and property damage from nuclear emissions when the plants were in operation. Ms. Ameno blamed radiation for two benign brain tumors she had. (Years later she was diagnosed with uterine cancer but says she is in remission.)

 

“She got all the people organized and together,” recalls attorney Steve Wodka, who did early work on the case after being contacted by Ms. Ameno. He eventually turned the case over to a Texas law firm headed by the late Fred Baron, a well-known products-liability lawyer.

 

In 1996, the Pennsylvania Department of Health, citing “residents’ ongoing concerns” about the Numec operations, issued a study of the area’s cancer rates. The study said there had been off-site contamination and that for those living within one mile of the two Numec plants, the overall cancer incidence was “11% greater than the state as a whole” pushed by higher-than-expected rates for various specific malignancies.

 

However, the study said that generally the cancer rates weren’t far enough outside the norm to be meaningful and couldn’t be connected to environmental factors, such as radiation. Showing “a causal link between cancer incidence in an area and radiation exposure can be extremely difficult,” the study added.

 

The science behind the harm of radiation exposure is far from precise. Most experts believe even small amounts of additional radiation raise a person’s cancer risk slightly, with the risk rising with the dose. Some studies have shown a radiation link to certain types of cancers. The federal government has a list of 22 cancers—including leukemia, thyroid cancer and lung cancer—that can qualify a person for compensation under a program to help nuclear-weapons industry employees who suffered health damage from their work.

 

In 1998, an initial eight plaintiffs, all of whom had cancer, went to trial in Pittsburgh federal court in a test of the case, focusing on emissions from the plant here. For over a month, the two sides battled over how much radiation was released, how much got into the community and how much harm any such contamination caused. The jury awarded $36.5 million to the plaintiffs.

 

However, the judge subsequently ordered a new trial, saying she made mistakes in admitting evidence. Eventually, the defendants settled, without admitting fault, paying more than $80 million to the overall group of plaintiffs, including over $350,000 to Ms. Ameno. She says her share helped finance her continued nuclear fight.

 

Detractors say her efforts have made her a scare monger, unnecessarily upsetting people and helping spark a new round of still-pending litigation in Pittsburgh federal court by more local residents claiming health damages. In a court filing last year, Babcock & Wilcox asserted that “Ms. Ameno enlisted dozens of plaintiffs, even though they had no scientific or medical basis for suing.” She also destroyed subpoenaed documents and refused to answer some deposition questions, the filing said.

 

In response, she says she did help connect residents with the South Carolina-based firm handling the suit, but only received out-of-pocket expenses and didn’t improperly destroy documents. A federal judge has ordered her to try to provide more information to the defendants.

 

Though all the litigation has focused mostly on the two now-demolished Numec plants, Ms. Ameno has increasingly put her efforts into getting the dump site excavated and the radioactive trash hauled away. The site—which for many years wasn’t fenced, according to local residents—is near homes and the Kiskiminetas River and sits atop an abandoned coal mine. “As long as the radioactive waste remains, it’s a threat to the community,” she argues.

 

For years, federal officials disagreed with that assessment. For instance, a 1997 Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff report said the waste could safely be left in place with some site upgrading and restrictions on public use. That answer didn’t satisfy Ms. Ameno. She bombarded her then-congressman, John Murtha, and his staff with information and demands for action, including a one-day “faxathon” that inundated every machine in the powerful Democrat’s offices. Her contacts became so routine, Ms. Ameno says, that a top Murtha aide would call if he didn’t hear from her in the morning.

 

In 2002 Congress passed Section 8143 of Public Law 107- 117, which required a cleanup at the Pennsylvania site and one in Massachusetts. Ms. Ameno “was certainly the catalyst” for the Parks Township cleanup requirement, says Brad Clemenson, a former senior staffer to Rep. Murtha, who died in 2010. “She got the whole community involved.”

 

The excavation project was turned over to the Army Corps of Engineers under a program, known as Fusrap, to clean up old nuclear-weapons-related sites. In a 2007 report, the Corps, taking a different stance from the NRC’s prior assessment of the site, said “concentrations of radionuclides in the buried wastes are high enough to present a potential future risk to human health” and need to be removed.

 

An NRC spokesman said “we have no issues” with the Corps’ approach to the site and periodically confer with them about it. A Corps spokesman declined to comment on any past NRC actions.

 

Once actual digging began in 2011, an apparent new headache emerged. A Corps spokesman would only say that excavators found “larger amounts of complex material than expected.” Digging was abruptly halted after just two months and the government classified documents on the project as secret, citing a security rule regarding “special nuclear material”—typically uranium and plutonium isotopes usable in nuclear weapons. Security, which included armed guards, was beefed up.

 

Col. William Graham, who at the time headed the Corps’ cleanup effort at the site, defended the security and secrecy. “I don’t want to make Parks Township a target for nefarious activity,” he said in an interview last year. “With people flying airplanes into buildings, who knows what people could do with the material there.”

 

Corps officials now say the cleanup could cost $500 million, more than 10 times the agency’s original estimate. In light of the escalating cost estimates, the Corps is reviewing its plans and said any renewed digging won’t start before 2015 and would take at least a decade to complete.

BRIDGETON, MO.—A dispute is smoldering here, in one sense quite literally, over what to do with thousands of tons of radioactive waste in a landfill in this suburban St. Louis town.

 

Some residents argue the waste, created decades ago by the U.S. nuclear-weapons program and other federal work, poses a health and environmental threat and should be removed. The landfill’s owner disputes that and says the best course is to leave the waste in place with some beefed-up protections. The Environmental Protection Agency has favored the second option but is reconsidering in reaction to community opposition.

 

The dispute is complicated by other factors. What officials from the EPA and the landfill’s owner call a “subsurface smoldering event”—locals call it an underground fire—has sprung up in a nearby nonnuclear landfill area. It isn’t clear what would happen if the smoldering reaches the radioactive materials. Efforts are under way to prevent that.

 

Digging up the radioactive waste, meanwhile, could cause flight-safety headaches at the nearby Lambert-St. Louis International Airport. Officials of the airport say excavating the landfill could attract birds that might pose a risk to planes. A 2010 letter from the airport authority called the landfill, known as West Lake, “a hazardous wildlife attractant.”

 

West Lake exemplifies one of the enduring challenges created by the federal government’s drive to develop nuclear weapons and other forms of atomic energy: what to do with the radioactive mess left behind.

 

During the past year, The Wall Street Journal has examined the government’s efforts to identify and remove residual radioactivity at scores of sites involved in federal nuclear work. At dozens of locations around the country, federal and other records show, the government has yet to gather enough information to determine what to do. Cleanup jobs have had to be redone, sometimes more than once, because too much toxic material was left behind. Other cleanup efforts have taken decades to complete. Some aren’t yet done.

 

Government officials say they are working to complete remaining cleanups as quickly as possible.

 

Bridgeton’s waste traces back to atomic-weapons work during World War II and early in the Cold War era, when a local chemical company, Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, processed tens of thousands of tons of uranium for the government. By the late 1940s, the government was storing waste from that work outside at a 22-acre site in the area, according to federal records and officials. In the mid-1960s, the waste was moved a short distance to another outdoor location where it sat until 1973.

 

These activities by the government and private parties that eventually bought the waste to extract further materials from it resulted in “widespread radioactive contamination” involving dozens of properties in the vicinity of the dump sites, according to a 2005 report by the Army Corps of Engineers, which is cleaning up those locations under a federal program for old nuclear-weapons sites, the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program.

 

In 1973, about 8,700 tons of the waste were mixed with 39,000 tons of soil from one of the storage sites and hauled about 10 miles to the West Lake landfill by private parties. Such disposal was “clearly in violation of” federal rules for disposing of nuclear waste, said a 1974 report by the now-defunct U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Still, the waste was allowed to remain at West Lake.

 

In 2008, the EPA issued a decision saying the nuclear waste “can be safely managed in place.” It proposed placing a cap over the site and requiring long term surveillance and use restrictions.

 

Local residents, who have shown up by the hundreds at community meetings about West Lake, protested. The EPA decided to reconsider and look at alternatives, including removal of the waste to another location. Agency officials say they hope to conclude the review sometime in 2014.

 

“Talk about active community groups; this sets the record,” says Missouri State Rep. Bill Otto, a Democrat whose district includes the landfill.

 

Among the most active residents is Dawn Chapman, a 33-year-old stay-at-home mother of three. Up to about a year ago, she says, “I didn’t even know I lived near a landfill.” Now, she is so involved that “my husband tells me I repeat the names of radioisotopes in my sleep.”

 

One isotope mentioned often lately among activists is thorium-230, which can increase cancer risk if it gets inside the body. In late November, Robert Alvarez, a former Energy Department senior official in the Clinton administration and a nuclear critic, warned of dangers from the thorium levels in the West Lake waste. A populated area such as metropolitan St. Louis “would be the last place you would put a landfill with this stuff in it,” he said in a recent interview.

 

Republic Services Inc., which acquired the landfill as part of buying another company in 2008, dismisses the Alvarez report as evidence of “activist organizations that are advancing their own agenda without regard to actual scientific evidence or public safety.” The company favors the EPA’s original plan to leave the waste in place.

 

The company said research to date “strongly indicates” the adjacent smoldering event wouldn’t create a hazard even if it reached the radioactive material. Nonetheless, Republic has proposed digging an “isolation barrier” at the site to prevent that from happening.

 

EPA officials said they haven’t analyzed what might happen if the smoldering reaches the atomic waste, but they back the idea of the barrier.

ST. LOUIS—Federal officials have been cleaning up dozens of properties here tainted by radioactive waste from nuclear weapons-related work done decades ago. Jenell Wright and her friends think the problem goes further than the government has acknowledged.

 

The 43-year-old Ms. Wright grew up in a suburban neighborhood here near the federal cleanup area, where piles of radioactive material were stored in the open. She and others who lived there believe their neighborhood was contaminated by radioactive waste and that it caused an unusually large number of cancer cases and other maladies.

 

A Facebook page they started has attracted 8,000 members and gathered more than 3,000 reports of illness. “Cancers in my age group have gone crazy in the past three years or so,” said Ms. Wright, a professional musician and former financial executive who now lives just across the Mississippi River in Illinois. Ms. Wright points to what she has learned from people in the old neighborhood, as well as the reports on the Facebook page. She and her allies want a comprehensive health study done, along with a thorough search for any radioactive contamination in the neighborhood.

 

Earlier this year, the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services released a study of local residents saying it was unlikely any increased cancer risk came from local radiation. Ms. Wright says many of the people who have reported health problems no longer lived in the area during the period covered by the state study and thus weren’t counted. While defending the study, state officials acknowledge it was limited by available cancer and population data.

 

Ms. Wright’s group has been in touch with federal health officials at an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services. An agency spokeswoman said officials “remain interested in reviewing the data” being put together by the citizens’ group from the health complaints sent in to the Facebook page.

 

The Army Corps of Engineers, which is handling the nuclear cleanup work in the area, is checking for contamination in parts of Ms. Wright’s old neighborhood near Coldwater Creek, which runs through the area and sometimes floods. Sharon Cotner, the Corps’ manager for nuclear cleanup work here, said it was “amazing” that piles of radioactive material were allowed to sit outside for years. “It’s not something anyone would do today,” she said.

More than four decades after the U.S. halted a controversial ocean dumping program, the country is facing a mostly forgotten Cold War legacy in its waters: tens of thousands of steel drums of atomic waste.

 

From 1946 to 1970, federal records show, 55-gallon drums and other containers of nuclear waste were pitched into the Atlantic and Pacific at dozens of sites off California, Massachusetts and a handful of other states. Much of the trash came from government-related work, ranging from mildly contaminated lab coats to waste from the country's effort to build nuclear weapons.

 

Federal officials have long maintained that, despite some leakage from containers, there isn't evidence of damage to the wider ocean environment or threats to public health through contamination of seafood. But a Wall Street Journal review of decades of federal and other records found unanswered questions about a dumping program once labeled "seriously substandard" by a senior Environmental Protection Agency official:

 

• How many dump sites are there? Over the years, federal estimates have ranged from 29 to more than 60.

 

• How much of various types of radioisotopes are in the waste containers? While some isotopes are short-lived, others remain radioactive for hundreds or thousands of years.

 

• Has evidence of radioactive contamination in fish been adequately pursued? A 1983 California law calling for fish testing and annual reports on a major dump site off San Francisco produced just one state report, in 1991, even though that study found fish contamination and recommended follow-up research.

 

• Where are all the containers—whose numbers top 110,000, by one federal count—on the sea floor, even at known dump sites? For instance, an estimated 47,000 containers lie at the site near San Francisco. Though there were three designated dump areas for the containers, "many were not dropped on target," according to a 2010 report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which called the waste site a "potentially significant resource threat."

 

Much of the site—about 50 miles west of San Francisco, near the Farallon Islands—is within a national marine sanctuary that the federal government describes as "a globally significant" ecosystem "that supports abundant wildlife and valuable fisheries." Only about 15% of an estimated 540 square miles of sea floor containing the barrels, at depths from 300 to over 6,000 feet, has been evaluated, the NOAA report said.

 

In a recent response to questions, NOAA said it wants to further study the dump site but lacks the funds. Representatives of federal agencies recently contacted reiterated that the evidence collected over the years shows that the dump sites aren't posing any threat to the environment or the public.

 

Concerned about the Farallon site, the California legislature passed the 1983 law calling for fish sampling in the area, where commercial fishing occurs. A spokeswoman for the California Department of Public Health said the law only required reports as funds were available, and they haven't been since 1991. Plus, she said, researchers "didn't find anything in the first survey."

 

"I would beg to differ," Thomas Suchanek, the principal investigator and lead author of the 1991 study, said recently. The study found americium, a radioactive decay product of plutonium, in some fish samples from the site as well as a comparison area about 60 miles away. The report calculated that plutonium in underwater sediment at the dump site was up to about 1,000 times normal background levels.

 

Regularly eating such contaminated fish, about a pound a week, could expose a person to up to 18.5 millirems of additional radiation a year, the report said. A chest X-ray typically gives about 2 to 10 millirems, while the average American gets about 300 millirems a year from natural background radiation.

 

While an occasional meal of such fish wouldn't be a worry, "I wouldn't want to eat it as a steady diet," said Dr. Suchanek. Current scientific thinking holds that even small doses of additional radiation can over time raise cancer risk by a small amount.

 

The California health department, in a written response to questions from the Journal, said continued monitoring of the dump should be a federal responsibility. The agency also provided a 1990 document from a now-defunct state advisory board saying the fish tested "do not appear to have a significant level of radioactivity."

 

A 2001 federal study of part of the Farallon dump site found indications of leakage from barrels, but only "very low levels" of radioactive contamination in sediment samples. The Food and Drug Administration said that in 1990 it found traces of plutonium in fish samples from the site but at levels well within safety standards.

 

Questions about the sites stem partly from the government's approach to discarding the waste. Early on, waste drums were simply "taken out to a convenient location and put overboard," said a 1956 report from the now-defunct Atomic Energy Commission. "Little administrative or technical control of those operations was required or exercised." Estimates of the radioactivity amounts in the containers "could be off as much as a factor of 10," the document said, adding "little is known of the fate of radioisotopes added to the sea."

 

Commercial fishermen have at times hauled up waste containers from various parts of Massachusetts Bay, home to a dump site. Frank Mirarchi, a 70-year-old retired commercial fisherman, said his catches occasionally included nuclear junk containers. After one such discovery, Mr. Mirarchi said government officials checked him and his crew for radiation but didn't find problems.

 

Early government survey efforts had difficulty finding the dumps. One 1980 report by an EPA official noted that in 11,000 underwater photos taken in the early 1960s during dump surveys in the Atlantic and Pacific, no photo captured a single waste drum.

 

Years after it started, the federal government began having second thoughts about the ocean dumping, as did other countries over their own programs. A 1970 report from the federal Council on Environmental Quality recommended no further ocean dumping except as a last resort. That same year, ocean dumping off the U.S. coasts effectively ended. (In the 1990s, the U.S. signed on to an international compact banning the practice.)

 

Government and public interest in the fate of that offshore waste has waxed and waned over the decades. Perhaps the biggest flare-up came in the late 1970s and early 1980s amid talk dumping might resume in the U.S.

 

Environmentalists and some elected officials jumped into action. A leading voice of alarm was W. Jackson Davis, a now-retired professor of biological and environmental sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who argued in papers and hearings that evidence showed environmental damage and health threats were already arising at the dump sites. In a recent interview, Mr. Davis recalled that the more he learned about the subject, "the more appalled I became."

 

At a 1980 congressional hearing, the EPA, which had primary oversight of the dump sites, reiterated its belief there wasn't a public health or environmental problem. However, it agreed information about the dump sites was "certainly inadequate."

 

A subsequent monitoring plan was scaled back due to "changing program priorities," a 1982 EPA letter to California state legislators said. The EPA and FDA would continue radiation sampling of commercial seafood purchased in cities, such as San Francisco and Boston, near dump sites. Sampling, to date, had shown "no unusual results," the letter said.

 

Testing through the early 1990s "showed no hazard present in the fish and shellfish collected" from near the dump sites, the FDA said in response to questions. The FDA said it routinely does a broader marketplace sampling of foods, including fish, for a range of contaminants, including radionuclides.

 

Officials have declared a no-fishing zone for two bottom-dwelling species at the radioactive waste site in Massachusetts Bay and issued an advisory against fishing for bottom-dwelling creatures. The worry, said the EPA in a recent response to Journal questions, wasn't that the fish might be contaminated but rather that any nuclear debris hauled up might "expose individual fishermen to elevated doses of radioactivity as well as further spreading any contamination."

 

It isn't clear how well the warnings are working. On various occasions, federal reports say, government researchers have encountered lobster fishermen or lobster traps inside the no-fishing advisory zone.