FLORISSANT, Mo. – The Army Corps of Engineers held a public meeting Wednesday in Florissant to discuss nuclear waste cleanup. The Army Corps met with media members ahead of the meeting to discuss some of the topics they’ll address in the public meeting.
Colonel Andy Pannier, the Army Corps Commander for the St. Louis District, said in the last 10 years they’ve gone from $11 million to $40 million in 2024 for the St. Louis cleanup.
Pannier said the cleanup of nuclear waste in the area comes with several limiting factors. He said one of those factors is that all the contaminated material from across the area goes to one location near the St. Louis Airport before being shipped off on railcars.
“There are even restrictive limits to how high we can put the dirt because we’re near the airport. That is one limiting factor that money doesn’t really help us right now,” he said. “The other is the technicality of some of it. It goes in specialized railcars and there are so many of those available in the country.”
Pannier said currently there are 700 employees working on remediation across the St. Louis area at the different sites and the cleanup is extremely technical work.
“So, there is not a long pool of people waiting to get the job, but there is a long line to build that pool. There is a lot of training and work,” he said. “So, even if we got a lot more money today, we couldn’t necessarily go out and hire a lot more people.”
