Image: Fukushima Watch. Cooling towers shown for illustration; none of the three sites discussed here is pictured.
In May 2016 a widely shared post claimed that Americans were so absorbed in the fight over transgender bathroom access that they were missing "three nuclear disasters" unfolding at home. The three cases were real, but none of them was a nuclear disaster in the usual sense. They were a smouldering landfill fire near buried Cold War radioactive waste in Missouri, salty and slightly tritiated water escaping from a Florida power plant's cooling canals, and a tritium spill into groundwater at a New York reactor. Each deserved attention. None involved a meltdown, an explosion or a release that forced anyone from their home.
The real stories are more useful than the headline. They show how old nuclear waste is still with us, how ageing plants leak in small but stubborn ways, and how slowly cleanup decisions move. Here is what was happening at each site, what came next, and how to read alarming claims like this one.
Where the claim came from
The argument appeared on several alternative news sites in spring 2016, including True Activist and The Free Thought Project. Its timing was no accident. On 23 March 2016 North Carolina passed House Bill 2, which, among other things, required people in government buildings and public schools to use the multi-stall bathroom matching the sex on their birth certificate. The law triggered boycotts by companies, sports leagues and musicians, and it dominated cable news for weeks.
The viral post suggested the bathroom fight was, at least in part, a deliberate distraction. That part is speculation: there is no evidence that HB2 was passed to bury environmental news. What is fair to say is that the three nuclear stories received far less national coverage than the bathroom debate, even though residents near each site were deeply worried. The post also called them "East Coast" problems, but only Indian Point sits near the Atlantic seaboard; Turkey Point is at the southern tip of Florida and West Lake is in suburban St. Louis.
HB2's bathroom provisions were repealed on 30 March 2017 through House Bill 142, and the remaining parts expired at the end of 2020.
West Lake Landfill: Manhattan Project waste beside a burning dump
The most serious of the three concerns sat in Bridgeton, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. The West Lake Landfill is an unlined former limestone quarry that took household and industrial rubbish from the 1950s onward. In 1973 a contractor dumped about 8,700 tons of leached barium sulfate, residue from Mallinckrodt's uranium processing for the Manhattan Project and later weapons work, mixed with roughly 39,000 tons of topsoil. The dumping was illegal, and the material has been there ever since.
Protest banner near the West Lake Landfill. Image: St. Louis Rad Waste Legacy
The Environmental Protection Agency added the site to the Superfund list in 1990. Next door, in the Bridgeton Sanitary Landfill, engineers noticed unusually hot gas wells in December 2010 and concluded that waste deep underground had begun to smoulder. By 2013 high temperatures had been measured more than 150 feet down across about 20 acres, roughly 1,000 feet from the radioactive area. Residents feared that heat could reach the old uranium residue and drive radon or contaminated smoke into the air.
So the 2016 worry was understandable. The response, however, was not as idle as the post implied. The landfill owner began an isolation barrier plan in 2013, and in December 2015 the EPA announced a physical barrier, cooling loops and other controls to keep the smouldering zone away. A 2015 review by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry concluded that the waste did not pose a health risk to surrounding communities at the time, finding radon well below levels linked to lung cancer and no soil contamination off site.
What happened next
Local pressure did change the outcome. The EPA's 2008 plan had simply been to cap the waste in place. On 27 September 2018 the agency signed an amended decision requiring excavation of radiologically contaminated material, generally to a depth of 12 feet and in places up to 20 feet, followed by an engineered cover. The EPA estimated the cost at about $205 million and construction at roughly three years once work began. Anyone living nearby should check the EPA Region 7 and Missouri Department of Natural Resources pages for the current stage of work.
Turkey Point: cooling canals leaking into the aquifer
Turkey Point, run by Florida Power & Light about 25 miles south of Miami, does not use cooling towers. Instead it circulates water through a network of canals covering nearly 6,000 acres beside Biscayne National Park. Those canals are unlined, and over the years they became much saltier and hotter than the surrounding water. Overheating forced two reactor shutdowns in 2014.
In 2016 county-commissioned research reportedly found canal water moving into Biscayne Bay, traced by its tritium signature. Tritium is produced in reactors and is a convenient marker because it travels with water. The levels reported were small compared with federal drinking-water limits; the real alarm was what the tracer revealed, namely that canal water was escaping. Environmental consultant Laura Reynolds, who was working with groups preparing legal action, summed up the concern: "We now know exactly where the pollution is coming from, and we have a tracer that shows it's in the national park."
The bigger long-term problem is salt rather than radiation. A plume of hypersaline water has spread west from the canals into the Biscayne Aquifer, which supplies drinking water to South Florida, and estimates suggest it may reach about four miles inland. Florida cited the utility for violations in 2016, and a disputed cleanup began that September, injecting the saltiest water deep below the aquifer. In 2019 federal regulators approved licence extensions allowing the two reactors to run for up to 80 years in total, a decision environmental groups continue to contest.
Indian Point: a tritium spike in groundwater
A riverside nuclear plant in winter. Image: Awareness Act
The third case was at Indian Point, a nuclear plant on the Hudson River north of New York City. On 6 February 2016 Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that water contaminated with radioactive tritium had leaked into groundwater at the site. State officials reported that one monitoring well showed radioactivity about 65,000 per cent higher than normal, a figure that made headlines.
That percentage sounds terrifying, but it describes a jump from a very low baseline in a monitoring well on plant property, not the water anyone was drinking. Tritium emits only a weak beta particle that cannot pass through skin, and the body clears about half of any ingested tritium in roughly ten days. The concern is real if it is swallowed in quantity over time, which is why the EPA sets a drinking-water limit of 20,000 picocuries per litre. The leak was a sign of poor maintenance at an ageing plant, and it added to political pressure to close it.
That pressure worked. In January 2017 the state announced a phased shutdown. Unit 2 closed in April 2020 and Unit 3 on 30 April 2021, ending power generation at Indian Point. The site is now being decommissioned by Holtec, whose plan to release treated wastewater into the Hudson has become the new local controversy.
Disaster, leak or legacy problem?
Words matter in stories like this. A nuclear disaster usually means an event like Chernobyl in 1986 or Fukushima in 2011: reactor damage, large releases of radioactive material and evacuations. None of the three 2016 cases fits that description. Calling them disasters makes them easier to dismiss when the predicted catastrophe never arrives, and that can work against residents who need sustained attention.
A better frame is that they are long-running environmental problems with a radioactive element. Each is slow, technical and local, which is exactly why national media tend to ignore them. They rarely produce a single dramatic day of news, so they lose out to fast-moving culture-war stories, whether or not anyone planned it that way.
How to read alarming environmental claims
A few habits help separate a genuine warning from an exaggerated one:
- Look for the regulator's own record. The EPA, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and state environment agencies publish site pages, decisions and monitoring data. They are not infallible, but they tell you what is officially known.
- Ask "compared with what?" Percentages like 65,000 per cent need a baseline. A huge increase from almost nothing can still be well under a safety limit, while a small rise in a big number can matter a lot.
- Check the place. Here, two of the three sites were nowhere near the East Coast, a small error that hints at how quickly the original story was assembled.
- Follow up later. In all three cases the most informative news came years afterwards: the West Lake excavation decision, the Turkey Point licence fight and Indian Point's closure.
- Separate the facts from the motive. The leaks were real. The claim that a law was passed to hide them is a guess, and the article is stronger without it.
The underlying message of the 2016 post still holds in a calmer form: radioactive legacies and ageing plants need steady public attention, long after the headlines move on.
Sources: Wikipedia: West Lake Landfill; US EPA, final remedy decision for West Lake Landfill (27 September 2018); US EPA: West Lake Landfill site page; Wikipedia: Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station; Wikipedia: Indian Point Energy Center; US NRC: Backgrounder on tritium; Wikipedia: North Carolina HB2. Original 2016 article: True Activist, drawing on The Free Thought Project. Images: Fukushima Watch, St. Louis Rad Waste Legacy, Awareness Act.
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