The Reckonings

by Lacy M. Johnson

  Kay repeats herself only a few times during the three hours we sit in her dining room, and it’s in these repetitions that I learn what is important to her: that she spent her life fighting for housing integration before she began the fight against nuclear proliferation, that any amount of radiation exposure is bad for one’s health, and that she gave her first speech against nuclear power on November 13, 1974, the day that, as is widely believed, Karen Silkwood was run off the road in Oklahoma. In that speech, Kay argued against the building of a nuclear power plant in Callaway County in the middle of the state, about one hundred miles from her home in St. Louis. Originally the plan was to build two reactors, but activists like Kay fought the plan and only one was built. “That was a victory,” she says. She’s had other victories too: she tells me that she’s the one who got the Department of Energy to acknowledge the radioactive waste at Lambert and won a twenty-year battle to get it removed. She also tells me she identified contaminated water near the second Mallinckrodt plant at Weldon Spring and made sure a water treatment plant was constructed so that radioactive waste wouldn’t be dumped into the Missouri River. “It is important to pause to celebrate those victories, no matter how small,” she says, “because that is what gives you courage to fight the really big battles, the ones you have to fight even though there’s no chance of winning.”

  She asks if I’d like to see her basement. “Most people do,” she adds. We climb down a set of steep stairs and she flips a switch, illuminating an overhead fluorescent light. “LED,” she corrects me, even as I think it. Four-drawer file cabinets line two walls, all meticulously indexed and cross-indexed in an ancient oak card catalog that sits in the center of the room. Thousands of documents are housed here, and she knows exactly where to find any given report. “In St. Louis we have the oldest nuclear waste in the country,” she observes, “because we purified all of the uranium that went into the world’s first self-sustaining chain reaction.”

  The moment I mention the EPA, she puts her hand directly on the drawer where the woman upstairs—“my librarian,” Kay tells me—has filed the EPA’s Record of Decision for the West Lake Landfill and then on the drawer where I might find studies that contradict the EPA’s assessment that the radioactive waste in the landfill doesn’t pose a threat to residents: the radiological surveys of the site conducted in the 1970s and 1980s by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy, as well as more current studies by independent researchers. She explains that the radioactive waste buried in West Lake Landfill covers about twenty acres in two locations in one or many layers, estimated at two to fifteen feet thick, some of it mixed in with municipal refuse and some of it sitting right at the surface. It is in the trees surrounding the landfill and the vacuum bags in nearby homes. This waste contains not only uranium but also thorium and radium, all long-lived, highly radiotoxic elements. And because Mallinckrodt removed most of the naturally occurring uranium from this ore, the Cotter Corporation, in effect, created an enriched thorium deposit when it dumped the residues at West Lake Landfill. “In fact,” Kay muses, “West Lake Landfill might now be the richest deposit of thorium in the world.”

  Thorium and uranium in particular are among the radioactive primordial nuclides, radioactive elements that have existed in their current form since before the Earth was formed, since before the formation of the solar system even, and will remain radioactive and toxic to life long after humans are gone. We’re sitting back in Kay’s dining room when she pulls out a tiny booklet titled “Nuclear Wallet Cards.” What its intended purpose is, I don’t know, but Kay flips to the back to show me the half-life of thorium 232: 14 billion years, a half-life so long that by the time this element is safe for human exposure, the Appalachian Mountains will have eroded away, every ocean on Earth’s surface will have evaporated, Antarctica will be free of ice, and all the rings of Saturn will have decayed. Earth’s rotation will have slowed so much that days will have become twenty-five hours long, photosynthesis will have ceased, and multicellular life will have become a physical impossibility.

  * * *

  “You know, tritium is my favorite,” Kay tells me before I leave. It’s produced as a side effect of operating nuclear reactors and released into the air, or leaks into the waterways; it contaminates the water supply and condenses in our food. One official who worked at the nuclear reactor Kay had tried to prevent once told her that tritium was no big deal: “It only destroys DNA molecules.” A few years ago they found tritium in the groundwater in Callaway County. “There is no way to remove it,” she says.

  As I’m standing to gather my things, Kay goes to retrieve an extra copy of the “Nuclear Wallet Cards” booklet that she wants me to have. The woman who answered the door, Kay’s librarian, comes back to keep me company while Kay is out of the room. “I was her husband’s caretaker,” she tells me. “When he left, I stayed to take care of her.” Kay returns with a warning of a nasty thunderstorm blowing in. I mention my disappointment that the storm might prevent my visit to the Weldon Spring site. After it was decommissioned, the plant, a second one run by Mallinckrodt, was found to be so contaminated that the Department of Energy eventually entombed the whole site in layers upon layers of clay and soil, gravel, engineered filters, and limestone rocks, creating a mountain covering forty-five acres, containing approximately 1.5 million cubic yards of hazardous waste. With its own educational center located near the base, the containment dome, the top of which is the highest point in the entire county, has become a kind of memorial for a tragedy that hasn’t finished happening yet.

  “Oh, you don’t want to go there anyway,” Kay says, waving the idea away with her slender hand. “It’s leaking.”

  * * *

  The rain comes down in sheets so thick I have to pull my car over to the side of the road. It’s early afternoon, but the sky has turned dark as dusk. It’s not the first time I’ve been stuck in a storm like this, the kind that comes up out of nowhere and falls all at once. Wipers and headlights become useless; nothing to do but stop and wait it out. It’s a thin little sliver of a storm, I see on the radar on my phone, so I know it will pass as quickly as it arrived, but even still, this time I’m wasting makes that tired, burning feeling I’ve been carrying around in my back more acute.

  It’s caused, perhaps, by a contradiction I can’t resolve: that the massive crime here began with a belief in a kind of care, a belief that protection comes only in the form of wars and bombs, and that its ultimate expression is a technology that can destroy in a single instant any threat to our safety with perfect precision and efficiency. But hundreds of thousands lost their lives to those bombs in Japan, and the fallout from building them has claimed at least as many lives right here at home.

  There is no one to arrest for this, to send to jail, to fine or execute or drag to his humiliation in the city square. Even if Karen and Dawn win their fight and convince the government to remove every gram of radioactive waste in the landfill and the creek and the airport and the backyards and gardens here, people will still be sick. Thousands of them. Chronic exposure to radiation has changed their DNA, and they’ll likely pass those changes on to their children, and to their children’s children, and on and on through every generation. In this regard, no one is immune.

  * * *

  My mom puts dinner on the table, but my grandmother refuses to eat. “Not again,” my mom groans, slamming her silverware down and rolling her eyes.

  “It happens,” my mom’s husband explains to me behind the cover of his raised hand, “when something throws off her routine.”

  My grandfather died a month ago, and now that Grandma is living in the spare bedroom, my mom has learned there was a lot my grandfather did not tell her. My mom is stretched thin with the sudden responsibility of it all: taking care of my grandmother, who has apparently been suffering from dementia for the last twenty years; cleaning out the house; selling all of their possessions at auction; her own inconsolable grief.

  “You
don’t have to eat if you don’t want to,” she says, her tone as calm and even as she can muster. “But I’m not making you anything else.”

  Grandma throws a weak tantrum at this: she pushes her chair out from the table, arranges her walker, shuffles out of the room. She is too old and feeble to storm out, but I think that is how she wants us to understand her actions. I laugh a little to myself when the television clicks on, Pat Sajak’s voice on Wheel of Fortune bellowing through the house full blast: “Do we have a U?”

  “It’s not funny,” my mom scolds, retrieving a bottle of wine from the fridge. “Let’s change the subject. What are you doing here anyway?”

  I tell her a short version of the story: there’s a landfill, there’s a fire, there’s nuclear waste left over from the Manhattan Project. People are dying of rare cancers. But the short version of the story always leads into the long version, and soon the bottle of wine is empty. My mom’s husband is doing the dishes, half listening. His health has been deteriorating in the years since he retired—he gets lightheaded and can’t always feel his feet or his hands. “Peripheral neuropathy” is the term for it, I think. It’s becoming harder and harder for him to help around the house. The dishes are one thing he can do to feel helpful, balancing his weight against the sink.

  “So then all this waste is just sitting in giant piles at the airport,” I say.

  “Right there by the ballfields,” he interrupts, putting a plate into the dishwasher, but I don’t fully hear him. He is a man who likes to know things and to explain them even if they do not need explaining. I’ve learned to tune it out.

  “Then the government holds an auction and sells the waste to a private company. Who knew there was a market for nuclear waste?” I say while my mom opens another bottle and refills my glass. “And then the company that bought it went broke and another company took it over. They shipped most of it to themselves out in Utah—”

  “Colorado,” my mom’s husband interrupts again. I look up this time. “We were shipping it to Colorado.” He comes over, places his hand on the back of a chair to steady himself. “It was months out there shoveling that dirt into the train cars. Yellow and red and white: odd colors for dirt, if you ask me. We’d fill up the gondolas and then ride them over into the dryer, then jump off and ride the dry ones out the other side.”

  Suddenly I am completely sober. “You have to tell your doctor this,” I say. “Mike! You were right there in it! You have to tell your doctor. You have to file a claim with the government.”

  He shrugs his shoulders, sitting down in the chair. “What good would that do? I’m seventy-five years old.”

  * * *

  Later, I watch him as he shuffles from the kitchen to the living room. He moves so slowly, each step so tentative. He sits down on the couch to catch his breath.

  Peripheral neuropathy can be one side effect of radiation exposure, but it might also be caused by having smoked for sixty years or by having worked on trains for fifty years; years after he shoveled those radioactive wastes, he was exposed to Agent Orange during a train wreck. It would be an impossible case to make with the government, to pinpoint radiation as the one thing. Besides, he’s the kind of man who thinks it is unpatriotic to accuse the federal government of making mistakes.

  His eyes droop, losing focus, and then his head sags to his chest. Grandma falls asleep too, both of them folding over on themselves. My mom shouts for them to go to bed. She isn’t angry, just loud because they are both nearly deaf. I hear the sounds of running water, of doors opening and shutting, of ancient bodies surrendering to gravity and age. My mom sighs, pats my hand, tells me she’d better get off to bed also. When the bedroom door closes behind her, I turn off all the lamps and sit in the blue light of the flickering TV.

  * * *

  It is afternoon when I park my car in the EPA Region 7 parking lot and rush toward the door. The Region 7 offices are located in a sprawling modern government building in a suburb of Kansas City. The small conference room just to the side of the main entrance is filled with a surprising number of people. Curtis Carey introduces himself as the director of public affairs. He’s the one who arranged this meeting after our phone call last week. He was vetting me then and told me he’d try to set something up with a few of the technicians. I wasn’t expecting much. He introduces me to Mark Hague, the federally appointed administrator for Region 7, and also to Mary Peterson, director of the Superfund Division. Also present: Brad Vann, the new project director at the West Lake Landfill, and Ben Washburn, who does public affairs work too. To break the ice, I tell a quick story about getting lost in the backwoods while my phone was dying on the way here. “I thought I was going to have to get married to a farmer and start my life over again!” I say. No one laughs.

  “Here are the ground rules,” Curtis Carey begins. “Everything is on the record. You have one hour.”

  An hour isn’t much time to get anywhere with anyone, much less the five humorless strangers in this room. During our too-short conversation I learn that the EPA has more than thirteen hundred sites in the Superfund program, and Region 7 alone has ninety-eight sites on the National Priorities List. Each of these communities is demanding that their toxic sites be scrubbed clean. “And the process is lengthy,” Brad Vann tells me. “The investigations are lengthy, and then there’s all the time to collect [and] evaluate the data—to get to this point where you can make a decision on a remedy takes time. And unfortunately, sometimes it takes a lot of time, depending on the complexity of the site.”

  “Why not remove the waste?” I blurt out. “Just to be sure. Just to be safe.”

  “It’s not as clear-cut as it might seem,” Brad says. “There’s more to excavating a landfill than sticking a backhoe in it. There is a process we must follow by law.” The law he’s referring to is the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), known more commonly as Superfund, which mandates that the risk to human health must cross a certain threshold before the EPA can take any action at all. He sighs heavily.

  “Our decisions have to be based on science,” Mary Peterson interrupts. “They can’t be based on emotion. They can’t be based on fear. They have to be based on sound science and the law.”

  According to the EPA, the science shows that there is low-level nuclear waste buried in a landfill in suburban St. Louis. Mostly it’s covered; mostly it’s inaccessible. But these findings do not alleviate the community’s concern. The landfill sits in the floodplain of the Mississippi River. What if there is a flood? What if the fire spreads and comes in contact with the radiological material? Either of these would create a disaster, and neither requires a great feat of imagination to bring into the realm of the possible. But the law doesn’t offer a framework within which to consider anything that hasn’t already actually happened yet.

  “So the community is asking us to use our imagination,” Mary explains, “and generate hypothetical scenarios in order to evaluate the risk. We don’t have any real data to rely on because that’s not the reality. Those things have not happened. If it had become reality, then we could collect real data and say, okay, this is the impact.”

  * * *

  I know this isn’t how risk evaluation works, but I’ve heard Mary say this before, in footage of a community meeting several years ago when she gave a PowerPoint presentation about the health risk assessment for the site. That presentation is convoluted and technical, and the whole thing comes down to an equation. One woman in the audience can’t handle this. She stands and takes the mic. She wants to know about the process, why the EPA is withholding certain information. “Did a cost-benefit analysis determine whether we are worth saving?” she asks, dropping the mic, fighting back tears. Behind her, her husband holds up photographs of their two children, both dead of rare cancers.

  Dan Gravatt—the project manager for the West Lake site at that time, their point of contact, the man who should be their advocate and ally—stands up and strides to the fron
t of the room, laughing to his colleague as he takes the mic. He explains the process in simple language, speaking slowly, raising his voice oddly on certain syllables in a kind of singsong, clearly straining to keep his tone neutral and calm and flat. The effect is deeply patronizing, infuriating even. He goes on for some time about the bureaucratic machinery behind the scenes of the EPA, the process through which its decisions are reviewed and re-reviewed. “The National Remedy Review Board asked for more tests,” he says. “That work is still being done. When that work is done, and the supplemental feasibility study is amended to include that new information, we’ll go back to the National Remedy Review Board, and they’ll have another crack at it.” He’s interrupted here by someone in the audience shouting something I can’t make out.

  This is an important moment because it’s when a lot of things go wrong. The interruption unnerves Gravatt, and the strain to remain calm and neutral becomes too much. He shouts, “I’m not done!” and lowers the mic for a moment to collect himself. Many people begin shouting—the parents holding up the pictures of their dead children, Dawn and Karen, Robbin and Mike. The camera pans across the room. Mostly it’s impossible to make out what the crowd is saying, but I hear the words, “They’re not your dead children!” and then a shuffling of chairs. Gravatt tries to continue, raises the mic to his mouth, is interrupted again. He laughs—a nervous response maybe, but the optics are not good. At this instant, the meeting breaks down, and Karen and Dawn and most of the other community members storm out.

  After that meeting, Gravatt stopped working on West Lake—moved to another project, another division. The head of Region 7 was also suddenly working in a new position, and Mary Peterson, formerly the deputy director of public affairs, became director of the Region 7 Superfund program. That’s when Brad Vann came on board and immediately tried to get the project back on track, improve transparency, expedite certain studies, move forward on a final remedy for the site. But none of this has repaired the relationship with the community, which might have been irrevocably broken from the start.