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I'm in Weldon Spring,
near St Louis, Missouri, USA,

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and in the 1950s and 60s,

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this strange, grey, wind-blasted hill
wasn't here:

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instead, there was a uranium processing factory.

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And conditions for the workers back then were
shocking by today's standards.

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It wasn't quite the 1940s,

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you can find testimony from back then of workers
hand-scooping uranium ore,

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but there are tales of
spilled radioactive powder,

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of overflowing disposal pits,

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and of strange-looking frogs.

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And I am not making that up.

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When the factory here was running, it was
known as "The Clean One".

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And, well, it wasn't.

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The plant here closed in 1966,

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as the most contaminated site in the area:

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PCBs, mercury, asbestos, and radioactive waste.

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In the 1980s, the Environmental Protection
Agency declared Weldon Spring

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a Superfund Site,

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meaning it would finally be cleaned up.

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And the result is this: a seven-storey high
nuclear waste dump,

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the permanent disposal cell,

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containing more than a million cubic metres
of toxic waste,

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and hopefully keeping the local residents
safe for the next 1,000 years or so.

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And that was going to be pretty much all of
the video.

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If you search this place online,
that's as far as a lot of articles go.

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Except.

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Then I did a bit more research.

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And I found out about Coldwater Creek,
a few miles away,

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where radioactive waste from
the Manhattan Project,

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the project that built the first nuclear bombs,

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the waste was just dumped there
in the 1940s,

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with the government's approval.

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That waste eventually flowed, decades later,
into people's backyards after flooding.

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That was in 2015.

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Then there's the West Lake Landfill,
on the other side of St Louis,

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where an underground trash fire has been burning

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very close to another radioactive waste site
for seven years.

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Now, the risk is apparently minor.

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No-one is about to find a glowing barrel in
their backyard.

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But radiation hazards are invisible and terrifying:

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local residents are concerned about
clusters of cancer diagnoses,

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about infant mortality
caused by contaminated groundwater.

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There are wells for drinking water
only a mile away.

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The state department of health investigated

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and their results set no-one's mind at ease.

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There are so many confounding factors

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that the facts are, well, somewhere between
confusing and unknown,

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and people are scared.

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This site is a legacy of a time when
the people in charge

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didn't know, or didn't care, about the risks
of radioactive contamination.

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But this isn't a monument to how we've fixed
their mistakes:

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it's a reminder that we're still fixing them,

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and that we'll still need to for centuries
or millennia to come.