Just outside of St. Louis, a battle has been waged. The battle isn’t the normal political argument with Democrats and Republicans at each other’s throats. No, this is a battle between common sense, science, and unions that want to justify a need for themselves.
I have weighed in on this fight numerous times, but the argument has taken an even more absurd turn that deserves another look.
The unions, now incredibly with the support of the Environmental Protection Agency, want to put a community at risk. Presumably the EPA is acting at the request of local politicians, who can’t be blamed for wanting to appear like they are doing as much as possible for their constituents. But, that doesn’t mean that the requests of these politicians and advocacy groups are what is best for the community. It just means that politicians and advocacy groups want to appear as if they are doing something.
In fact, with the new plan to “clean” up the waste site at West Lake, they create a new risk of exposing the local community, they put multiple other communities at risk along the way, and, if everything goes perfectly, a secondary community is exposed to the risk of having radioactive material buried in their backyard.
The whole issue started in the 1970s when radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project was illegally dumped in what is now called West Lake Landfill. This illegal act was caught, and the site was deemed a Superfund site in 1990. Since then, the EPA has been working on a solution, and a few years ago now they were nearing a final plan. They were going to install a “cap” to make sure that in the event of a tornado or other natural event, the radioactive material would stay put instead of being scattered with the wind contaminating the local community.
Instead of cheering this solution and asking for it to be implemented as soon as possible, the unions threw a fit. They wanted the solution to involve them. In fact, they even had a town hall where union members and a few others called for the U.N. to intervene.
However, the scientific tests that were done at the time and overseen by the EPA showed that the local community had not been contaminated by the illegal dumping, and some of their samples showed less radiation than what the testers would have expected anywhere else in Missouri.
The facts haven’t stopped the unions from continuing their mission to enrich themselves. Now they are pushing for a plan to dig up the radioactive material, load it onto trains, send it across the country, and bury it in another community’s backyard.
It would be laughable if the EPA wasn’t seriously considering it.
It is like they want to test themselves. But, if they fail — and if government is good at one thing, it’s failing — there are real problems that are created. First, digging up the contaminated soil is likely to pollute the air. Then putting it onto a train is another point of weakness. Just in the last year we have seen train wreck after train wreck (including one carrying a group of Republican members of Congress). They will put the material in casks designed for this, but putting more communities at risk based on the strength of a few metal welds is still risky. And of course workers will be exposed to these materials at every stage.
Will they take precautions? Yes. But, even the best risk management protocols come down to the people using them.
The cap that was originally proposed by the EPA didn’t make a lot of people happy. But, given the tragedy of the illegal dumping in the first place, it was unlikely that anything short of magically making the radioactive material disappear would make people happy. However, that doesn’t mean that it was a bad solution. Capping was the result of years of research and planning, and it is designed to keep the community safe. It could be done quickly without unnecessary additional risk to the community or workers and, best of all, it would have been paid for by the current owners of the dump.
I don’t usually second-guess scientists. However, when they come up with one solution and then seemingly change their solution based on political pressure, we need to question them.
Charles Sauer (@CharlesSauer) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. He is president of the Market Institute and previously worked on Capitol Hill, for a governor, and for an academic think tank.
