“People are aware that there’s something strange or different in West Chicago.”
However . . .
Until the mound was coated with soil and asphalt in the mid-80s, radioactive dust blew in the wind or was washed by the rain into nearby Kress Creek. Everyone agreed that the new cover would not stand up to eternity and that something had to be done. The mound’s owner, the Kerr-McGee Corporation, wanted to bulldoze it into a tighter, higher heap and enclose it in a four-story, 27-acre clay tomb. The estimated cost of the project: $25 million. The state, the city, and its residents wanted to tear it down and ship it out. Estimated cost: more than $120 million.
“We didn’t believe it,” said Rich Kassanits, cofounder of the Thorium Action Group (TAG), the citizens group created last year to fight Kerr-McGee. “But once we understood it was money-motivated, we believed it. Because that’s Kerr-McGee’s motivation–money. Unless we could understand how this was good for them, we were skeptical.”
Thorium is number 90 on the periodic table of elements; its atomic weight is 232. It was discovered in the late 1820s by a Swedish chemist named Jons Jakob Berzelius, who named it after the Norse god of thunder.
“They had so much of it,” said Dan Balocca, the other founder of TAG. “I’m convinced that they just piled it up on the factory site thinking that they’d find a way to reprocess it some day and get more out of it. Lindsay was trying to be an alchemist with this sand.”
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“There are three cardinal rules that exist in both common sense and NRC regulations,” said Joe Karaganis of Karaganis & White, the Chicago environmental law firm hired by the city of West Chicago to fight Kerr-McGee. “These rules operate under the premise that, ultimately, something will go wrong. So, when and if failure occurs, it will happen where it will cause the least damage. These rules have been ignored by Kerr-McGee and the staff of the [NRC] Licensing Board.”
