A plan to make sure an underground St. Louis-area landfill fire doesn’t reach a cache of Cold War-era nuclear waste buried nearby will come before the end of 2015, an Environmental Protection Agency administrator said Monday.
Mark Hague, acting chief of the EPA region that includes Missouri, said the agency is working with the state of Missouri on the plan for keeping the smoldering embers beneath the Bridgeton Landfill from moving at least 1,000 feet to the nuclear waste at the West Lake Landfill, a federally funded Superfund site since 1990.
Hague said the permanent fix would be decided by “solid science, good engineering data” and not outside pressure. He declined to estimate when a solution would be in place, but he noted that options could include installing an in-ground fire break or suppression barrier, or injecting inert gases that snuff the smoldering.