
The Fallout (2017) - pje
https://www.guernicamag.com/the-fallout/
======
PcMojo
There is a recent HBO Documentary about this landfill called Atomic Homefront
[https://www.atomichomefront.film/about/](https://www.atomichomefront.film/about/)

The government also sprayed (possibly radioactive) chemicals on low income
areas of St Louis during Cold War [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/secret-cold-
war-tests-in-st-lou...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/secret-cold-war-tests-in-
st-louis-cause-worry/)

[https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/suit-
fi...](https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/suit-filed-over-
government-test-spraying-in-st-louis-
during/article_9bc1fc7d-7093-58a3-b557-0cbac5dc38ab.html)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-GK_OOjYEw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-GK_OOjYEw)

Lookup Operation LAC (this is one reason we have chem-trail conspiracies)

On the other end of St Louis they had to remove an entire city in one of the
worst ecological disasters in the USA Dioxin Times Beach, MO
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach,_Missouri](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach,_Missouri)

[https://www.stlmag.com/Remember-Times-Beach-The-Dioxin-
Disas...](https://www.stlmag.com/Remember-Times-Beach-The-Dioxin-
Disaster-30-Years-Later/)

One of my teachers from St Louis worked for a major chemical company there
that made some really dangerous products. He claimed for extra money they paid
employees $20 a barrel to put barrels in their cars & dump them in the river
or elsewhere, during your commute back home. He died rather young of cancer.

While governments & the war machine played a major role in many ecological
disasters & toxic & radioactive disasters, perhaps as the reason for the
initial production, for-profit companies have their hands in the R&D, the
production, the distribution & allegedly safe removal & storage. After these
companies split up the profits between executives & investors, they usually go
through a series of paper sales or just shut down to protect the beneficiaries
from legal liability. The problems are then outsourced to the government and
the taxpayers pay millions or billions for the cleanup and litigation.
Sometimes the "efficiencies of the free market" have an enormous hidden price
tag.

------
dragonsky
I find it interesting that the people in the story seem amazed that the
government would actually do something that was dangerous to the general
population.

I’m not suggesting tin foil hats, but it seems that experience shows that
governments regularly do things that end up harming others either through
ignorance or incompetence.

~~~
erikb
Why limit it to governments. Always when certain people have power over other
people, they value a small advantage to themselves higher than a big
disadvantage to the others or the general well being. It's not that all people
are acting like this, but such people tend to compete hardest for positions of
power which often leads to one such person gaining that position at some
point.

Doesn't matter if government, company, NGO, newspaper, soccer club, church.
Whatever offers power over other people has this disadvantage.

------
karlkloss
Wait till all the chemicals used for fracking finally make the drinking water
of big cities unusable.

And no, Europe won't take refugees from the US.

------
lkdjjdjjjdskjd
If it is so bad, why isn't anybody making a short, accessible story out of it?

I read as far as the cancer map. I wonder if the population density is perhaps
simply higher around the creek. I can't tell from the map.

------
rhacker
> Even if every gram of radioactive waste were removed from the landfill,
> where would it go? There are facilities in Idaho and Utah willing to accept
> it. But those facilities are located in communities, or near them, and those
> people don’t want this waste in their backyards or their gardens or their
> rivers or their drinking water either. Even if we box it up and send it in
> train cars to remote places, it will be there, ready and waiting to kill any
> of us long after we’ve forgotten where we put it, or what “it” even is.

I know there are a lot of HN readers that keep pushing for nuclear power. This
article seems to suggest we're not ready for it. It's as simple as asking for
one more failure, which can, apparently permanently destroy large areas of
land.

The US government should buy every property and relocate all of those people
and give them all 2 acres of land.

~~~
dmm
This waste wasn't created from power generation and bringing up power
generation is misleading.

