Officials claim if the fire actually reaches the nuclear waste, it could cause Chernobyl-like radioactive plumes to billow out of the ground at the site, potentially resulting in a catastrophe that would destroy St. Louis and poison a large portion of the country east of St. Louis all the way to the East coast.

LA Times Story

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An underground landfill fire is smoldering in a densely populated suburb of St. Louis — and it has been there for five years.

Underground landfill fires, or "smoldering events" as some officials call them, aren't rare. What makes the fire at the landfill in Bridgeton, Mo., so unusual is that it's less than a quarter of a mile from a large deposit of nuclear waste — with no barrier in its way.

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The radioactive legacy of St. Louis' role in the World War II atomic weapons program has unleashed Cold War-style nuclear paranoia in the area, as some residents debate what kind of gas masks to buy or whether to move away.

The story begins with the race to develop the world's first nuclear weapon. In 1942, Mallinckrodt Chemical Works secretly agreed to purify uranium in St. Louis for the federal government's Manhattan Project.

In the decades after World War II, responsibility for Mallinckrodt's uranium-processing waste changed hands several times. Cotter Corp. quietly buried 8,700 tons of what government investigators later identified as leached barium sulfate residue at the West Lake Landfill in 1973.

In 1990, the West Lake Landfill was deemed a Superfund site to be managed by the EPA. In 2008, waste conglomerate Republic Services acquired the companies responsible for the West Lake site and for a neighboring lot, the Bridgeton Landfill, where the fire is smoldering.

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Corporate, federal and state officials don't agree on what kind of threat West Lake Landfill poses to residents, or even if it poses a threat at all. Various scientists and officials have presented clashing stories to the public about whether the underground fire is moving and what might happen if it reaches the nuclear waste.

There might be a dangerous radioactive plume that forces residents to take shelter indoors or evacuate, St. Louis County emergency officials say.

Environmental Protection Agency officials counter that there might be a bit of radon gas, which may not even escape the landfill's perimeter.

The Missouri attorney general's office, which is suing the landfill's owner, contends the fire is creeping closer to the radioactive materials.

The EPA, however, says the fire is staying put.

"We just do not agree with the finding that the subsurface smoldering event is approaching the radiologically impacted material," said Mary Peterson, director of the Superfund division for EPA Region 7.

Residents have been baffled to learn that radioactive waste exists at the dump, and even more puzzled that regulators have yet to finalize a plan to contain or remove the nuclear material — four decades after a company illegally dumped it. The EPA is still evaluating whether to place a cap on the site, or excavate the radioactive material, or both.

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"There is a potential for radioactive fallout to be released in the smoke plume and spread throughout the region," St. Louis County officials warned in an emergency response plan, which was drawn up in October 2014 to "save lives in the event of a catastrophic event at the West Lake Landfill."

The EPA is probing the landfill to figure out exactly where all the radioactive material is and considering how to place a barrier between the fire and the nuclear waste. It downplays concerns about a Chernobyl-like disaster.

Peterson said the EPA doesn't know "for certain" what might happen if the underground fire hits the radioactive material. "But a somewhat plausible scenario would be there would be some very localized radon gas emissions to come off, but we don't expect particulate matter or anything like that," she said.

A report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, released Friday, warned that disturbing the surface of the landfill could release radium-226, radon-222 and radium-228 into the air and put landfill workers, in particular, at risk.

Radon is a leading cause of lung cancer, and radium can increase the risk of bone, liver and breast cancer, according to the health agency.

In the past, releases of radon at the landfill have sometimes exceeded regulatory limits for safety "by as much as 10 to 25 times at individual surface test locations," the agency said in its report.

This post was edited on 10/20/15 at 4:12 pm