Waste from former industrial plants can pollute some of the nation’s
most natural areas, including state and national park land. Brad
Linder reports that even a treasured historic site made famous by George
Washington is at risk:
Transcript
Waste from former industrial plants can pollute some of the nation’s
most natural areas, including state and national park land. Brad
Linder reports that even a treasured historic site made famous by George
Washington is at risk:
General George Washington and his troops braved cold weather and
starvation for six months in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. The site’s now
a national historic park. But for much of the 20th century, part of the
site was also home to an asbestos manufacturing plant.
Attorney Andy Hartzell is with the state of Pennsylvania, which recently
reached an agreement with the federal government to split the 11
million dollar cleanup cost. He says just because the site holds
historic significance doesn’t mean it was safe from industrial waste:
“Since the industrial revolution our country’s had an industrialized
society, and standards were different in the 1800s than they were in
the 1900s, than they are today. So, sometimes things like this happen.”
Much of the asbestos has already been buried on site, and removing it
would be more dangerous than leaving it in place. Only the asbestos on
the surface will be moved.
Billions of fish and other aquatic organisms
are killed every year by industrial plants located on
waterways. Brad Linder reports that environmental
regulators are hoping to bring those numbers down:
Transcript
Billions of fish and other aquatic organisms
are killed every year by industrial plants located on
waterways. Brad Linder reports that environmental
regulators are hoping to bring those numbers down:
Power plants, oil refineries, and other industrial plants often have
cooling systems that rely on river water. But when water is sucked
into the cooling tanks, so are fish and other tiny organisms.
John Hughes is the state of Delaware’s environmental secretary. He says companies could use systems that recycle water but few want to spend the money:
“Every refinery in America looks up into the air and
worries about their emissions. That’s where the bulk of their
investments go in pollution controls. And when you bring up water, you
get that blank look, like ‘what now?'”
Hughes says federal rules let companies sidestep water regulations if
upgrading is considered too costly. But Hughes says
he is asking local companies to step up… and if that doesn’t work,
his state might pass tougher regulations.
Grassland prairie flowers from Weldon Spring, part of the Department of Energy's restoration effort to control erosion and add aesthetic beauty to the area. (Photo courtesy of U.S. Department of Energy)
Birdseye view of Weldon Spring disposal cell, which contains 1.48 million cubic yards of radioactive waste. (Photo courtesy of U.S. Department of Energy)
Another view of the disposal cell. The cell covers a massive 45 acres in Weldon Spring. (Photo courtesy of U.S. Department of Energy)
Across the U.S., there are more than 100 sites contaminated by radioactive waste from the nation’s nuclear weapons programs.
The government is trying to return these Cold War relics to safe and useful purposes. Some of these once toxic zones are being treated much like public parks. The GLRC’s Kevin Lavery visited one that was recently opened to the public:
Transcript
Across the US, there are more than 100 sites contaminated by radioactive waste from the
nation’s nuclear weapons programs. The government is trying to return these Cold War
relics to safe and useful purposes. Some of these once toxic zones are being treated much
like public parks. The GLRC’s Kevin Lavery recently visited one that was recently
opened to the public…
A thick grove of trees opens up to a clearing that reveals a white mound of limestone
rock. It rises like a tomb from some long-forgotten civilization, were it not for the water
towers and golf courses on the horizon.
Mike Leahy and his 9-year-old son Cameron came to this rock dome to catch the view
atop its 75 foot summit. But the real attraction was what they did not see:
“We read the sign and saw what was buried and how they did it, and – it’s kind of
disturbing, what’s in there.”
Beneath their feet lay more than a million cubic yards of spent uranium, asbestos and
PCB’s. The 45 acre mound is a disposal cell, where the government buried thousands of
barrels and tons of debris. That history didn’t bother young Cameron:
“It’s really cool. They keep all that nuclear waste under all that and it can’t harm
anybody.”
The Weldon Spring site, 30 miles west of St. Louis, Missouri began during World War
Two as an Army TNT factory. In the 1950’s, the plant refined yellow cake uranium for
later use in nuclear weapons. All that stopped in 1966 and all the radioactive waste just
sat there. Weldon Spring became an EPA Superfund site in 1987. After a 900 million
dollar cleanup, the site was opened to tourists in 2002.
(Sound of frogs)
Today, frogs sing in a native prairie at the foot of the cell. In April, officials opened a
hiking trail adjacent to a once-radioactive landfill. The route connects to a state park.
Weldon Spring is not a park per se, but project manager Yvonne Deyo says urban sprawl
prompted them to think like one:
“There’s subdivisions and lots of infrastructure going in…and that just kind of hits home
how important green space is, and that’s kind of what we’re trying to do a little bit of
here at the site.”
Weldon Spring is one of about 100 such sites the Department of Energy is converting to
what it calls “beneficial re-use.” Many are becoming recreational venues. Another
closed uranium plant near Cincinnati is adding horseback riding trails. In Wayne, New
Jersey, a former thorium processing facility is becoming a baseball field. And a national
wildlife preserve is in the works at Rocky Flats, the site outside Denver that made the
plutonium cores of nuclear warheads.
The Department of Energy says Weldon Spring is safe for visitors – though some residual
contamination remains.
(Sound of Burgermeister Spring)
Burgermeister Spring runs through a 7-thousand acre state reserve adjacent to the site.
This is where uranium-laced groundwater from Weldon Spring rises to the surface.
Though the spring exceeds the EPA’s drinking water quality standard, there’s no warning
sign here. Officials say the contamination is so low that it poses no immediate public
hazard. The spring feeds into one of the most popular fishing lakes on the property.
Most visitors are surprised to hear that:
“Huh.”
Jeff Boeving fishes for bass four or five times a month:
“(Does that concern you to hear that?) Yeah – absolutely…I mean, they’ve got a great
area out here and they’re kind of messing it up if they’re going to have contaminants, you know, going into it.”
The government’s vision of post-nuclear playgrounds is not without its critics. Arjun
Makhijani heads the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park,
Maryland. He says recreational sites near urban development zones risk losing their
original purpose:
“Institutional memory tends to be very short; after 30, 40, 50 years people forget, they
begin to develop the land, and pretty soon you could have houses, farms and schools in
the area. So it’s not necessary that it will stay recreational forever.”
Recreation is only one option the Department of Energy is considering for all of its sites.
In the last two years, the agency’s budget has doubled with the addition of nearly a dozen
radioactive properties. Officials say Congress has so far supported its fiscal requests.
And with the future of a proposed permanent nuclear waste site at Yucca Mountain still
in doubt, even more tax dollars will likely be spent converting the nuclear dumps in
America’s backyards to a place where families play.
The EPA is investigating more than two dozen insulation plants around the country that processed a dangerous form of ore called vermiculite. Five of the plants are in the Midwest. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tracy Samilton reports:
Transcript
The EPA is investigating over two dozen insulation plants around
the country that processed a dangerous form of ore called vermiculite.
Five of the plants are in the Midwest. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Tracy Samilton reports:
The processing plants converted an ore called vermiculite into insulation,
which was then shipped to millions of homes in cold areas of the country.
The vermiculite was laced with mineral fibers that can cause asbestosis and
lung cancer. The government is investigating if plant workers and people
who lived near the plants are at risk of becoming ill from exposure.
Early results from a plant in Illinois found that workers were at higher
risk, but not nearby residents.
Dr. Michael Harbut is an expert in occupational medicine. He says the investigation is long
overdue.
“This is a serious enough danger that the EPA is actually in the process of removing vermiculite
from some attics in some areas the country.”
Some of the processing plants have been shut down, but others have been
converted to other uses. The government plans to make sure those plants
are safe, and locate former workers to assess their health.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Tracy Samilton.
The EPA is embarking on a new public education campaign about the dangers of vermiculite insulation. Much of the attic insulation was made with ore that is contaminated with asbestos. Critics say the EPA waited longer than it should have to notify the public. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tracy Samilton reports:
Transcript
The EPA is embarking on a new public education campaign about the dangers of vermiculite
insulation. Much of the attic insulation was made with ore that is contaminated with asbestos.
Critics say the EPA waited longer than it should have to notify the public. The Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Tracy Samilton reports:
The loose silvery brown insulation is
found in the attics of many homes built in the
60’s, 70’s, and
80’s. The mine where the tainted
vermiculite came from was shut down
13 years ago, after miners began
falling ill and dying. But it wasn’t until this month that
the EPA warned
homeowners that vermiculite insulation is dangerous and should be avoided.
Andrew Schneider is a reporter at the St. Louis Post Dispatch. He broke a story last year that the
White House had directed the EPA not to issue a public warning. But Schneider says the EPA
came under even more pressure from other places.
“A lot of it came not just from the press hammering away at them, but really good people within
the EPA who were raising hell with their own administrators.”
The EPA will distribute notices to hardware stores and state agencies, telling people how to
identify the insulation and to stay away from it. Removal should only be done by professionals.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Tracy Samilton.
NorthShore Mining Company now operates the former Reserve Mine and Taconite Plant. Waste rock is deposited on land a few miles from Lake Superior. Questions remain about whether taconite fibers pose a human health risk. (Photo courtesy Cleveland Cliffs)
This electron microscope photo shows a taconite fiber breaking up into smaller fibers in rat lung tissue. (Photo courtesy Dr. Philip Cook)
Researchers are trying to determine whether fibers found in taconite mined near Lake Superior might cause cancer. Taconite is a type of iron ore. The microscopic fibers found in some taconite rock are a lot like asbestos, and asbestos causes cancer and other serious lung diseases. Research is now underway that could determine whether the fibers in taconite can cause cancer too. The question is a classic example of the uneasy balance between protecting health and creating jobs. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill reports:
Transcript
Researchers are trying to determine whether fibers found in taconite mined near Lake Superior
might cause cancer. Taconite is a type of iron ore. The microscopic fibers found in some
taconite rock are a lot like asbestos, and asbestos causes cancer and other serious lung diseases.
Research is now underway that could determine whether the fibers in taconite can cause cancer
too. The question is a classic example of the uneasy balance between protecting health and
creating jobs. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill reports:
The fibers in taconite first made big news thirty years ago. Reserve Mining Company was
dumping its waste rock in Lake Superior, and the fibers turned up in Duluth’s drinking water.
People worried, and started drinking bottled water, until a special filtration plant was built.
Reserve was forced to dump its waste rock on land.
But the jury is still out on whether the fibers are dangerous.
Phil Cook is one of the people who discovered the fibers in the water supply. He’s a chemist at
the National Water Quality Lab in Duluth. He studied the fibers for years.
They’re so small, you can’t see them even with a regular microscope. Cook and his team had to
use an electron microscope to get a handle on the fibers.
“Hundreds of hours of looking at many fields of view and counting particles of all sizes and
shapes and identifying them specifically as to what their mineral nature was.”
Some of the taconite fibers turned out to be more cancer-causing than others. The most
commonly occurring fibers were less dangerous.
But Cook found that some of the fibers caused even more cancer than asbestos. After two years
of experiments on lab rats, Cook found the most dangerous taconite fibers had splintered off,
multiplying the number of fibers in the rats lungs.
“So there was some kind of slow leaching going on while the fibers were in tissue, and blocky
particles would become thinner fibers. So the number of fibers were increasing and the dose was
increasing.”
But the question is, does the same thing happen to people, and are people exposed to enough of
the fibers to worry about cancer?
NorthShore Mining Company currently operates the former Reserve mine and processing plant.
NorthShore monitors its fiber emissions. Millions of fibers pour from the smokestacks. But at
monitoring stations about a mile away, the numbers drop to a background level comparable to
cities out of the area.
But some people worry even that level could make people sick.
There are no national or state standards for fibers in the air.
There are some rules for workplaces. Miners and taconite workers are exposed to a lot more
fibers than people who live nearby.
Northeastern Minnesota has a much higher rate of mesothelioma than the rest of the state.
Mesothelioma is a rare form of lung cancer caused by asbestos. Some miners are concerned
taconite could cause mesothelioma too.
The state Health Department recently completed a study of taconite workers who died of
mesothelioma. The study found most of them were exposed to commercial asbestos used as
insulation as well as taconite dust. The study concluded the commercial asbestos was the most
likely cause of the miners’ disease.
But the study looked only for mesothelioma. Some miners say it should have looked for other
diseases too. David Trach is president of a Steelworker retiree group. He says 450 former mine
workers got x-rays, and 30% of them had some kind of lung abnormality. Only a very few of
them had mesothelioma.
“We’ve got to search out for those young miners that are working now so they don’t end up like
some of my friends did at LTV Steel that are in their 60s and 70s, and can hardly breathe.”
The Minnesota Health Department has file cabinets full of information about the health of miners
and taconite workers. But there’s no money to study the data looking for other lung diseases.
That’s because last year the Minnesota state legislature eliminated the money for the project.
There’s a lot riding on whether taconite fibers are safe. Officials in the area where NorthShore’s
plant is located, would like to use the plant’s waste rock to build roads, which would spread the
taconite fibers throughout the county. Until now the company has been prohibited from selling
its waste rock by the court ruling in the Reserve case.
Also, several companies have been prospecting in the region. New mines for copper, nickel, and
other minerals could provide much-needed jobs in a region hit by mine closures and cutbacks in
the taconite industry. But they could also be digging into the same rock where the taconite fibers
are found.
After the scientific studies are published, the Minnesota Health Department will conduct a
formal assessment of the risks – if any – of taconite fibers.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Stephanie Hemphill in Duluth.
