As noted in a recent Student Life article (“EPA signs decision to clean West Lake Landfill,” Oct. 1, 2018), the Environmental Protection Agency has finalized a plan to remove 70 percent of the radioactive materials in the landfill complex. This complex, approximately one mile south of the Missouri River, contains not only the natural radioactive residue of the chemical processing of uranium-rich ore, but also a municipal dump with an underground smoldering event. There are undeniable direct health effects from the emanations from the municipal dump. In contrast, the health effects, both present and future, from the radiation are well understood and minimal. However, it is the radiation that attracts most of the attention, has been used to advocate for removal and more importantly, generates great anxiety that has its own undeniable and significant health consequences.

Removal of the very low-risk radioactive waste at the West Lake Landfill hopefully will lessen a deep fear in our community, thus lowering the serious public health risks of stress and anxiety associated with that fear, allowing citizens to feel more comfortable on the land and in the neighborhoods that they clearly love and have defended. To advocate for removal has been their right as democratic citizens. However, the removal of the low-risk waste will not address the problem that got us here to begin with, which is a lack of forbearance in those who spread unnecessary fear.

Forbearance is defined as: patient self-control; restraint and tolerance. It is one mandatory quality of a democratic society identified in the 2018 book “How Democracies Die”, written by Harvard University political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Such a lack of forbearance has been demonstrated by those on and off our campus who casually dismiss scientific and medical consensus surrounding the effects of radiation on human health.

For example, according to the Health Physics Society, arguably the group most qualified to determine radiation standards, the risk of illness (namely cancer) is very, very small for radiation dose below 10,000 millirems per year. Washington University employs a conservative upper limit of no more than 500 millirems for its radiation workers, most of whom are at the medical school. As compared to other citizens in the St. Louis area, those in the vicinity of West Lake receive, at most, about three to four millirems additional radiation dose, annually. This additional radiation is less than the dose received from a single chest x-ray. The total annual exposure for a person living near West Lake is still far less than that person would receive if living at a higher elevation (say in Denver).

Radiation is the most highly studied carcinogen there is. We have studied it and studied it and studied it and will continue to do so. It’s a relatively weak carcinogen. Illness diagnoses—and sometimes treatment—depends on our knowledge of radiation. This is not to say that radiation does not cause cancer; it does. But the risk is much smaller than most people believe.

That West Lake activists have refused to acknowledge this is, on the one hand, in keeping with the popular assumption that any radiation is dangerous. Central to public fear of waste sites that contain any amount of radioactive materials is the belief by citizens, not just here in St. Louis but globally, that any level of radiation puts them in serious danger, and that small amounts over a long period of time will do great harm to their bodies. An analogy of this “cumulative dose effect concept” is this: If 1,000 aspirins taken at once would kill the average person (as it would), then the same person would be killed by taking 1,000 aspirins at the rate of one a day for 1,000 days. Also, if on one particular day, 1,000 people each took one aspirin, then one of those thousand people would die. We know this is wrong. The effects of aspirin do not work this way. Neither do the effects of radiation.

That activists have refused to acknowledge the very small risk of West Lake radiation, on the other hand, demonstrates a choice and lack of forbearance. In misrepresenting the small human health risk at West Lake as a very high one, their choice has done more harm to our community than the radiation itself. And if those who take part truly care about the health of the St. Louis community, the sustained dissemination of unnecessary fear is puzzling, for it fuels stress and anxiety, which does slow violence to public health. The question becomes, why are West Lake activists so insistent on representing what is a very low risk as a high risk to human health? Who gains from that? Is it simply an environmental ideological goal carried out at the expense of public health? Or is it, as so well expressed by theologian Thomas Merton, what we think more likely, that sometimes the frenzy of activism “neutralizes our work for peace…because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful”? Such frenzied activism surrounding West Lake, without the guidance of wisdom, has harmed our public health.

To fear radiation, as to fear fire, is normal. (Fire can burn down our house, entire cities, even large portions of our state, but we also use it every night to cook dinner. We rightfully do not imagine an inferno as we do so.) But to be made afraid of radiation, or to spread fear about radiation in a way that makes other citizens unnecessarily doubt the stability, health or safety of one’s body, home and neighborhood, when the risk is very small, should not be normal. The citizens of West Lake, it has often been said, did not have “the choice” to live near this waste. They also did not have the choice to be exposed to years of unnecessary fear. It’s time to reconsider what we understand as “good environmentalism.”