Sickened by U.S. Nuclear Program, Communities Turn to Congress for Aid

When Diane Scheig’s father, Bill, came home from work at the Mallinckrodt factory in St. Louis, he would strip down in their garage and hand his clothes to her mother to immediately wash, not daring to contaminate the house with the residue of his labors.

Mr. Scheig, an ironworker who helped build the city’s famous arch, never told their family exactly what he was doing at the plant, where scientists first began processing uranium for the Manhattan Project in 1942. But by the age of 49, he had developed kidney cancer, lost his ability to walk, and died.

Decades later, Diane’s older sister Sheryle, who years earlier had given birth to a baby boy born with a softball-sized tumor in his stomach, died of brain and lung cancer at 54. Her neighbor two doors down died of appendix cancer at 49. So many of her classmates have died of cancer that a large round table covered with their pictures is now a staple of her high school reunions.

“I know for myself, I was thankful when I passed the age of 49,” Ms. Scheig said. “And I was thankful when I passed the age of 54.”

The Mallinckrodt plant processed the uranium that allowed scientists at the University of Chicago to produce the first man-made controlled nuclear reaction, paving the way for the first atomic bomb.

But the factory — and the program it served — left another legacy: A plague of cancer, autoimmune diseases and other mysterious illnesses has ripped through generations of families like Ms. Scheig’s in St. Louis, and other communities across the country that were exposed to the materials used to power the nuclear arms race.

Now Congress is working on legislation that would allow people harmed by the program but so far shut out of a federal law enacted to aid its victims — including in New Mexico, Arizona, Tennessee and Washington state — to receive federal compensation.

A Toxic Legacy

In the 1940s, as workers churned out 50,000 tons of uranium to feed the nation’s nascent atomic arsenal, the factory was also spitting out heaps of nuclear waste.

Over the next several decades, hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive waste stored in open steel drums were hauled and dumped across the city. The waste seeped into large swaths of soil, including on land that later became ball fields.

And it drained into Coldwater Creek, a tributary that snakes through the metropolitan area for 19 miles through backyards and public parks where children play and catch crayfish. In heavy storms, the creek routinely floods.

There are similar stories across the country, among the Navajo workers in New Mexico and Arizona who were sent into mines with a bucket and a shovel to dig up uranium and were never told about the dangers; the children of workers at uranium processing plants in Tennessee and Washington state; and the downwinders across the Southwest who breathed in the fallout from the mushroom clouds of aboveground tests.

None of those communities qualify for aid under the only federal law to compensate civilians who sustained serious illnesses from the nation’s nuclear weapons program. Passed in 1990, that statute was narrowly constructed to help some uranium miners and a handful of…