One Woman’s Fight to Clean Up Nuclear Waste

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One Wom­an’s Fight to Clean Up Nuclear Waste

Nuclear Waste Clean Up in Penn­syl­va­nia
Morn­ing fog from the Kiskimine­tas Riv­er cov­ered a por­tion of Leech­burg, Pa., in Jan­u­ary. This cor­ner of west­ern Penn­syl­va­ni­a’s coal coun­try is part of a nation­al nuclear junk­yard. Ross Mantle

Pat­ty Ameno One Woman Nuclear Crusade

Pat­ty Ameno has spent the last 25 years fight­ing to clean up nuclear waste in and around Apol­lo, her home­town in west­ern Penn­syl­va­nia. WSJ’s John Emsh­willer reports. Pho­to: Ross Man­tle for The Wall Street Journal.]

A Navy vet­er­an and for­mer Defense Depart­ment inves­ti­ga­tor, Ms. Ameno has pored through thou­sands of pages of doc­u­ments, inter­viewed hun­dreds of peo­ple, pick­et­ed and been arrest­ed for dis­rupt­ing a pub­lic meeting—and sued those who arrest­ed her. At one point, she hired a heli­copter for an aer­i­al view of the dump site.

She has been praised as a com­mu­ni­ty pro­tec­tor and crit­i­cized as a trou­ble­mak­er unnec­es­sar­i­ly stok­ing local fears and poten­tial­ly hurt­ing the local econ­o­my. “She con­tin­ues to stir things up,” says David Hef­fer­nan Sr. , pres­i­dent of the Apol­lo bor­ough coun­cil, adding it could deter com­pa­nies from invest­ing in the area. Ms. Ameno argues she had no choice: “You have to have a mad, junk­yard-dog men­tal­i­ty in order to deal with this.”

This cor­ner of west­ern Penn­syl­va­ni­a’s coal coun­try is part of a nation­al nuclear junk­yard. Radioac­tive residue from the gov­ern­men­t’s mas­sive buildup of nuclear weapons and oth­er atom­ic-ener­gy pro­grams dur­ing World War II and the Cold War is scat­tered across scores of loca­tions in some three dozen states. The esti­mat­ed cleanup bill is now $350 billion.

A recent inves­ti­ga­tion by The Wall Street Jour­nal cat­a­loged hun­dreds of sites that did gov­ern­ment nuclear work and uncov­ered prob­lems with the reme­di­a­tion effort that range from sites that haven’t been found to ones need­ing repeat­ed cleanups.

Fed­er­al agen­cies respon­si­ble for radioac­tive cleanups say they are tak­ing ade­quate mea­sures to pro­tect the pub­lic and con­tin­ue to be on the alert for need­ed addi­tion­al work. Among them is the Army Corps of Engi­neers, which has respon­si­bil­i­ty for the dump site near here, known as the Shal­low Land Dis­pos­al Area. The two local atom­ic fac­to­ries were torn down and cart­ed away begin­ning more than two decades ago.

Ms. Ameno has long argued that contamination—from emis­sions when the plant oper­at­ed and from decades of left­over residue—has cre­at­ed high can­cer rates in the area. Bab­cock & Wilcox, BWC +1.36% which owned the two nuclear plants and still owns the dump site, has denied harm­ing the pub­lic. A 1996 state health depart­ment sur­vey found some high­er can­cer rates near the nuclear oper­a­tions but con­clud­ed the dif­fer­ence was­n’t sta­tis­ti­cal­ly significant.

Health debates aside, this isn’t the only time the gov­ern­men­t’s han­dling of the sites has cre­at­ed unease in local com­mu­ni­ties. A com­pa­ny sparked a con­tin­u­ing fed­er­al cleanup after dis­cov­er­ing radioac­tiv­i­ty at an Indi­ana fac­to­ry that had been declared safe, while a col­lege stu­den­t’s find of con­t­a­m­i­na­tion led to a sim­i­lar cleanup in Mass­a­chu­setts. Protests by St. Louis area res­i­dents have caused fed­er­al offi­cials to recon­sid­er plans to leave a radioac­tive dump­site in place.

“It should­n’t default to local cit­i­zens to do the work that the gov­ern­ment should have done in the first place,” says Daniel Hirsch, a fac­ul­ty lec­tur­er on nuclear issues at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, San­ta Cruz, and crit­ic of some fed­er­al nuclear cleanup activ­i­ties. Fed­er­al offi­cials say they have been vig­i­lant and are con­fi­dent they iden­ti­fied the sites and “near­ly all the con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed areas at those locations.”

Ms. Ameno’s slice of this nation­al nuclear saga came to town in the late 1950s. A new­ly formed com­pa­ny, Nuclear Mate­ri­als and Equip­ment Corp., set up in an old steel mill across the street from her home. Numec processed thou­sands of pounds of bomb-grade ura­ni­um and plu­to­ni­um and oth­er radioac­tive mate­ri­als, accord­ing to gov­ern­ment and com­pa­ny documents.

Grow­ing up, Ms. Ameno says she rarely paid much atten­tion to the fac­to­ry, fes­tooned with dozens of rooftop vent­ing stacks. It was­n’t until after she returned home from her stints in the Navy, where she was injured in a heli­copter crash, and at the Defense Depart­ment that her late father, wor­ried about health risks from the plant, asked her to look into it. (He even­tu­al­ly died from a stroke.)

That was in 1988. Ms. Ameno began col­lect­ing Numec-relat­ed infor­ma­tion, comb­ing through libraries and fil­ing pub­lic-records requests. She began inter­view­ing ex-employ­ees and residents.

While Numec’s ear­ly man­age­ment denied harm­ing the pub­lic, the com­pa­ny did have issues. These includ­ed alleged improp­er han­dling of nuclear mate­r­i­al and ques­tions over radi­a­tion releas­es from the rooftop stacks, accord­ing to gov­ern­ment and com­pa­ny records.

Read­ing through those records, she came across ref­er­ences to a 1963 fire in a vault con­tain­ing high­ly enriched ura­ni­um that also caused radioac­tive mate­ri­als to be released. An esti­mat­ed three kilo­grams of bomb-grade ura­ni­um was lost in the blaze, accord­ing to a 1966 report by the now-defunct Atom­ic Ener­gy Commission.

Ms. Ameno found work­ers who had been through that blaze, includ­ing George Pugh. In an inter­view with the Jour­nal, Mr. Pugh said that after fight­ing the fire, he was scrubbed down in a show­er for six hours to remove radioac­tive con­t­a­m­i­na­tion. His clothes were buried in the nuclear dump. Mr. Pugh died last year at the age of 76 after bat­tling kid­ney and prostate can­cer. Med­ical experts say it is impos­si­ble to know if a par­tic­u­lar per­son­’s can­cer is linked to radi­a­tion expo­sure. Mr. Pugh’s wid­ow did receive cash com­pen­sa­tion under a fed­er­al pro­gram for nuclear-weapons indus­try work­ers suf­fer­ing from can­cer and oth­er maladies.

Ms. Ameno began gath­er­ing infor­ma­tion on local can­cer cas­es and would ulti­mate­ly become con­vinced that a large num­ber of the cas­es were linked to the Numec radi­a­tion. Dur­ing her vis­its to hos­pi­tals, Ms. Ameno met a health-care work­er named Nedra McPher­son, who became her live-in part­ner and with whom she raised Ms. McPher­son­’s bio­log­i­cal son. “She would read doc­u­ments in the bath­tub,” says Ms. McPher­son. “She had no time for anyone.”

By the 1990s, Ms. Ameno was push­ing for med­ical mon­i­tor­ing of local res­i­dents and a com­plete cleanup of all remain­ing con­t­a­m­i­na­tion at the fac­to­ry sites and the dump. She pick­et­ed at both sites, car­ry­ing a sign say­ing “Honk, If You Want to be Safe.” She attend­ed pub­lic meet­ings and called some of her own. Arrest­ed at one gath­er­ing for alleged­ly being dis­rup­tive, Ms. Ameno sued local author­i­ties after she was acquit­ted, set­tling on undis­closed terms.

Work­ing out of a clut­tered office in her sec­ond-floor apart­ment, she says she spent near­ly $1,000 for a heli­copter fly­over of the dump in 2001. Tacked on her office wall is also an old $3,784 phone bill, one mon­th’s worth of long-dis­tance calls.

She spear­head­ed a 1994 law­suit on behalf of her­self and over 300 oth­er local res­i­dents against Bab­cock & Wilcox and anoth­er pre­vi­ous Numec own­er, alleg­ing health and prop­er­ty dam­age from nuclear emis­sions when the plants were in oper­a­tion. Ms. Ameno blamed radi­a­tion for two benign brain tumors she had. (Years lat­er she was diag­nosed with uter­ine can­cer but says she is in remission.)

“She got all the peo­ple orga­nized and togeth­er,” recalls attor­ney Steve Wod­ka, who did ear­ly work on the case after being con­tact­ed by Ms. Ameno. He even­tu­al­ly turned the case over to a Texas law firm head­ed by the late Fred Baron, a well-known prod­ucts-lia­bil­i­ty lawyer.

In 1996, the Penn­syl­va­nia Depart­ment of Health, cit­ing “res­i­dents’ ongo­ing con­cerns” about the Numec oper­a­tions, issued a study of the area’s can­cer rates. The study said there had been off-site con­t­a­m­i­na­tion and that for those liv­ing with­in one mile of the two Numec plants, the over­all can­cer inci­dence was “11% greater than the state as a whole” pushed by high­er-than-expect­ed rates for var­i­ous spe­cif­ic malignancies.

How­ev­er, the study said that gen­er­al­ly the can­cer rates weren’t far enough out­side the norm to be mean­ing­ful and could­n’t be con­nect­ed to envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors, such as radi­a­tion. Show­ing “a causal link between can­cer inci­dence in an area and radi­a­tion expo­sure can be extreme­ly dif­fi­cult,” the study added.

The sci­ence behind the harm of radi­a­tion expo­sure is far from pre­cise. Most experts believe even small amounts of addi­tion­al radi­a­tion raise a per­son­’s can­cer risk slight­ly, with the risk ris­ing with the dose. Some stud­ies have shown a radi­a­tion link to cer­tain types of can­cers. The fed­er­al gov­ern­ment has a list of 22 cancers—including leukemia, thy­roid can­cer and lung cancer—that can qual­i­fy a per­son for com­pen­sa­tion under a pro­gram to help nuclear-weapons indus­try employ­ees who suf­fered health dam­age from their work.

In 1998, an ini­tial eight plain­tiffs, all of whom had can­cer, went to tri­al in Pitts­burgh fed­er­al court in a test of the case, focus­ing on emis­sions from the plant here. For over a month, the two sides bat­tled over how much radi­a­tion was released, how much got into the com­mu­ni­ty and how much harm any such con­t­a­m­i­na­tion caused. The jury award­ed $36.5 mil­lion to the plaintiffs.

How­ev­er, the judge sub­se­quent­ly ordered a new tri­al, say­ing she made mis­takes in admit­ting evi­dence. Even­tu­al­ly, the defen­dants set­tled, with­out admit­ting fault, pay­ing more than $80 mil­lion to the over­all group of plain­tiffs, includ­ing over $350,000 to Ms. Ameno. She says her share helped finance her con­tin­ued nuclear fight.

Detrac­tors say her efforts have made her a scare mon­ger, unnec­es­sar­i­ly upset­ting peo­ple and help­ing spark a new round of still-pend­ing lit­i­ga­tion in Pitts­burgh fed­er­al court by more local res­i­dents claim­ing health dam­ages. In a court fil­ing last year, Bab­cock & Wilcox assert­ed that “Ms. Ameno enlist­ed dozens of plain­tiffs, even though they had no sci­en­tif­ic or med­ical basis for suing.” She also destroyed sub­poe­naed doc­u­ments and refused to answer some depo­si­tion ques­tions, the fil­ing said.

In response, she says she did help con­nect res­i­dents with the South Car­oli­na-based firm han­dling the suit, but only received out-of-pock­et expens­es and did­n’t improp­er­ly destroy doc­u­ments. A fed­er­al judge has ordered her to try to pro­vide more infor­ma­tion to the defendants.

Though all the lit­i­ga­tion has focused most­ly on the two now-demol­ished Numec plants, Ms. Ameno has increas­ing­ly put her efforts into get­ting the dump site exca­vat­ed and the radioac­tive trash hauled away. The site—which for many years was­n’t fenced, accord­ing to local residents—is near homes and the Kiskimine­tas Riv­er and sits atop an aban­doned coal mine. “As long as the radioac­tive waste remains, it’s a threat to the com­mu­ni­ty,” she argues.

For years, fed­er­al offi­cials dis­agreed with that assess­ment. For instance, a 1997 Nuclear Reg­u­la­to­ry Com­mis­sion staff report said the waste could safe­ly be left in place with some site upgrad­ing and restric­tions on pub­lic use.

That answer did­n’t sat­is­fy Ms. Ameno. She bom­bard­ed her then-con­gress­man, John Murtha, and his staff with infor­ma­tion and demands for action, includ­ing a one-day “faxathon” that inun­dat­ed every machine in the pow­er­ful Democ­ra­t’s offices. Her con­tacts became so rou­tine, Ms. Ameno says, that a top Murtha aide would call if he did­n’t hear from her in the morning.

In 2002 Con­gress passed Sec­tion 8143 of Pub­lic Law 107–117, which required a cleanup at the Penn­syl­va­nia site and one in Mass­a­chu­setts. Ms. Ameno “was cer­tain­ly the cat­a­lyst” for the Parks Town­ship cleanup require­ment, says Brad Clemen­son, a for­mer senior staffer to Rep. Murtha, who died in 2010. “She got the whole com­mu­ni­ty involved.”

The exca­va­tion project was turned over to the Army Corps of Engi­neers under a pro­gram, known as Fus­rap, to clean up old nuclear-weapons-relat­ed sites. In a 2007 report, the Corps, tak­ing a dif­fer­ent stance from the NRC’s 503780.BY +5.00% pri­or assess­ment of the site, said “con­cen­tra­tions of radionu­clides in the buried wastes are high enough to present a poten­tial future risk to human health” and need to be removed.

An NRC spokesman said “we have no issues” with the Corps’ approach to the site and peri­od­i­cal­ly con­fer with them about it. A Corps spokesman declined to com­ment on any past NRC actions.

Once actu­al dig­ging began in 2011, an appar­ent new headache emerged. A Corps spokesman would only say that exca­va­tors found “larg­er amounts of com­plex mate­r­i­al than expect­ed.” Dig­ging was abrupt­ly halt­ed after just two months and the gov­ern­ment clas­si­fied doc­u­ments on the project as secret, cit­ing a secu­ri­ty rule regard­ing “spe­cial nuclear material”—typically ura­ni­um and plu­to­ni­um iso­topes usable in nuclear weapons. Secu­ri­ty, which includ­ed armed guards, was beefed up.

Col. William Gra­ham, who at the time head­ed the Corps’ cleanup effort at the site, defend­ed the secu­ri­ty and secre­cy. “I don’t want to make Parks Town­ship a tar­get for nefar­i­ous activ­i­ty,” he said in an inter­view last year. “With peo­ple fly­ing air­planes into build­ings, who knows what peo­ple could do with the mate­r­i­al there.”

Corps offi­cials now say the cleanup could cost $500 mil­lion, more than 10 times the agen­cy’s orig­i­nal esti­mate. In light of the esca­lat­ing cost esti­mates, the Corps is review­ing its plans and said any renewed dig­ging won’t start before 2015 and would take at least a decade to complete.

Write to John R. Emsh­willer at john.emshwiller@wsj.com