A Nuclear Neighborhood

Moms In St. Louis Used Their Voices & Now A Nuclear Waste Cleanup Is Underway.

Photo by Kilian Karger on Unsplash

The political will to confront nuclear danger abroad seems inexhaustible. Washington has been consumed by Iran’s nuclear program for decades.

The will to confront it at home? That’s another matter entirely.

While the U.S. negotiates a fragile ceasefire on the specter of nuclear weapons in Tehran, the radioactive legacy of our own nuclear weapons program sits beneath apartment complexes in suburban St. Louis.

Children played in it. Families lived on top of it. And for decades, the government that built the bomb looked the other way.

While we spend billions policing Iran’s enriched uranium, we have spent 80 years ignoring our own.

The contamination near Coldwater Creek, a Missouri River tributary north of St. Louis that was polluted by nuclear waste from the development of the first atomic bomb, is one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history, impacting three generations and thousands of people across the region. So why have so few of us heard about it?

Moms Cleaning Up Nuclear Waste?

For more than a decade, Dawn Chapman and Karen Nickel have been doing what moms do: protecting their children. The threat wasn’t a person or a policy they could march against. It was radiation, and the silence around it.

The U.S. government spent decades trying to hide the radioactive waste buried beneath the streets, schools, and backyards of north St. Louis County.

Now, the Army Corps of Engineers has announced it will demolish a former apartment clubhouse in Hazelwood, Missouri, because the ground underneath it tested positive for nuclear contamination.

It’s a validation the women of have fought years to receive. And it is also a warning that the worst may not be over.

A Secret Buried Under Suburbia

The story begins with the Manhattan Project. During World War II, Mallinckrodt Chemical Works processed uranium ore for the first atomic bombs at its downtown St. Louis facility. The radioactive byproducts were stored at a site near the St. Louis airport, at the headwaters of Coldwater Creek, and the waste spread into the waterway and beyond.

After the war, the waste from Mallinckrodt was trucked to the north side of the airport property, adjacent to Coldwater Creek, where it sat in the open for years, dispersed by wind and rainwater. As early as 1949, Mallinckrodt itself discovered that the radioactive waste in deteriorating steel drums risked leaking into the creek, but nothing was done.

The waste ended up at West Lake Landfill, where it remains today. The entire time, local residents had no idea. Read more about it here.

Subdivisions went up. Children played in the creek. Families planted gardens, built lives, and had babies. No one told them what was underneath.

Decades of Fighting

The women of JustMomsSTL did not start this fight. They inherited it.

The earliest effort to document the contamination was led by environmental activist Kay Drey in the 1970s, followed by a landmark seven-part investigative series in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1989 that raised serious public concern and prompted initial federal action. The Missouri Coalition for the Environment sent a letter to the Army Corps of Engineers as far back as 1985 demanding acknowledgment and cleanup, a demand that went largely unanswered for decades.

The fight never stopped. It just kept finding new people willing to carry it.

Karen Nickel’s parents moved to the banks of Coldwater Creek in Hazelwood without knowing the area was contaminated. Karen later raised her own family in nearby Maryland Heights, just 1.5 miles from West Lake Landfill, again unknowingly living near radioactive waste.

In November 2012, after learning the truth, she started a Facebook group about the West Lake Landfill, where she connected with Dawn Chapman.

In March 2014, the two founded JustMomsSTL, a grassroots organization dedicated to raising awareness about radioactive material in the St. Louis metro area as a legacy of the Manhattan Project.

They were not scientists. They were not politicians. They were mothers with binders full of government documents and a refusal to be quiet.

They were also not alone. A parallel grassroots group, Coldwater Creek – Just the Facts Please, worked to educate the community and healthcare professionals, and to fight for community inclusion in federal compensation programs. The STL Toxic Waste Alliance brought together community groups, concerned citizens, advocacy nonprofits, and decision-makers focused on the West Lake Landfill, Coldwater Creek, and Maline Creek, all contaminated by the same legacy waste.

State legislators including Rep. Cori Bush and state Rep. Chantelle Nickson-Clark became vocal allies, pushing for full creek testing and legislation to formally notify residents of their exposure.

In 2021, Chapman and Nickel got passed a trove of more than 15,000 government documents. The two women spent the next year analyzing and organizing them before turning the records over to journalists, leading to what became the most definitive public accounting yet of what really happened around Coldwater Creek.

The Science Caught Up

For years, families were told the risks were minimal. Official government studies downplayed the connection between the creek and the cancer clusters neighbors had noticed for decades. The coalition never stopped pushing back.

They were right to push. A landmark study published in JAMA Network Open found that children who lived near Coldwater Creek from the 1940s through the 1960s were more likely to be diagnosed with cancer over their lifetimes than those who lived farther away. The study’s senior author, Harvard epidemiologist Marc Weisskopf, described the findings as “quite dramatic” with not only elevated cancer risk, but one that increased steadily the closer childhood residents had lived to the creek.

Compared to those who lived 20 kilometers or more from the creek, those who lived less than one kilometer away had a 44 percent higher risk of developing any type of cancer.

Appendix cancer, also called appendiceal cancer, affects about 1 in a million people. Close to 200 cases of this rare cancer have been documented in the ZIP codes surrounding Coldwater Creek and the West Lake Landfill.

The Bomb Was Built On Someone’s Back

The nuclear chain that contaminated St. Louis didn’t begin in Missouri. It began on Indigenous land.

Between 1942 and 1985, Navajo tribal land became contaminated through the mining of more than 30 million tons of uranium ore, first for the Manhattan Project, then for the Atomic Energy Program. The U.S. government failed to tell the Navajo people their water was contaminated. Many Navajo homes were even built from uranium mine debris.

The EPA has documented more than 15,000 sites associated with uranium mining across the United States, including more than 4,000 mines in the Navajo Nation, of which more than 500 are abandoned. The communities harmed at every step of this chain, from extraction to processing to waste storage, were, by design or by indifference, Indigenous, of color, poor, or rural.
Source: Union of Concerned Scientists

St. Louis is no exception. Research from Washington University’s Interdisciplinary Environmental Clinic has found that Black St. Louisans are exposed to considerably greater environmental risks than white residents. A 2016 study found a consistent pattern for 30 years of placing hazardous waste facilities in neighborhoods where poor people and people of color live. In the U.S., race is the single biggest factor that determines whether you live near a hazardous waste facility.

This is not an accident of geography. It’s the feature of a system. We see the same pattern playing out with data centers right now.

Dawn Chapman understood the impact of this systemic issue when she stood alongside Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren at the signing of the renewed RECA legislation. Together with activists from across the country, they celebrated the renewal and expansion of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, but the moment was shadowed by grief for those who had already died waiting.

“There are so many people that should be behind us, that have already passed on,” Chapman said at the news conference in 2025. “Our government made it harder. They did everything they could to hide the truth from us.”

The poison runs through different communities in different forms. The negligence and the cover-up is the same.

A Demolition & A Warning

This month’s announcement that the Army Corps will demolish the former clubhouse of the French Quarter apartment complex in Hazelwood is a milestone. The ground beneath the structure tested positive for radioactive contamination linked to Coldwater Creek’s nuclear waste. But for Chapman and the broader coalition that has fought alongside her, it is a bitter victory.

“There’s nowhere else in the United States where something like this is happening in a residential area,” she said. “This radioactive waste was already out and contaminating that whole area, and only now is it being looked for. This has had the chance to hurt this community for decades.”

The Army Corps is also planning to expand its cleanup area to 750 more acres and 600 more properties along Coldwater Creek, a scope that speaks to just how far the contamination spread, and how long it was ignored.

The cleanup is estimated to cost $400 million (and counting) and take up to 15 years, all for contamination that has sat there poisoning a community for 8 decades.

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What You Can Do

The North County Community Advisory Group holds monthly public meetings to keep the community informed. Their next meeting is June 4 at 6:30 p.m. at the Black Jack Fire House in north St. Louis County.

To learn more or get involved, visit justmomsstl.org and moenvironment.org/our-work/hazardous-waste.