Incremental Buyout

“...methods for demolishing, imploding, or otherwise subtracting building material are not among the essential skills imparted to architects-in-training. With the belief that building is the primary constructive activity, the discipline has not institutionalized special studies of subtraction.”
(Easterling, 7)

Unbuilding is a strategy of survival, beginning with the voluntary buyout within the first mile radius of the landfill, the atomic destruction zone, expanding out to a 3 mile radius.

Primary Zone: Voluntary buyouts of surrounding 1 mile perimeter

Secondary Zone: Eventual buyouts within 2 mile diameter of West Lake Landfill

Secondary Zone: Eventual buyouts within 2 mile diameter of West Lake Landfill

Tertiary Zone: Evacuation of entire devastation zone

Site Exposure

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To understand the radioactivity occurring at these unbounded sites, I borrowed a Geiger Counter from Randy Korotev a lunar geochemist from Washington University in St. Louis, Department of Earth and Planetary Science. I am by no means a scientist, nor even a citizen scientist. Therefore, while my methods were deliberate, they were not scientific and limitations of data collected are inherent. At HISS (Hazelwood Interim Storage Site), radiation levels were highest. There, the site is insecure, and open to public entry, therefore, I chose to walk into the site 50 ft to take a reading. SLAPS and West Lake Landfill on the other hand are secured areas. In fact, at West Lake Landfill, after pulling up outside of the entry, an employee of Republic Services (the current owner of the facility) immediately pulled up next to me and started documenting my licence plate through images. Their intimidation tactic worked, and I left without taking a Geiger reading. How has secrecy and lack of trust inflicted harm on the situation? Are there policies in place to more tightly control contemporary hazardous waste disposal?

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The Encroaching Disaster: A smoldering fire at adjacent Bridgeton Landfill


Bridgeton Landfill, immediately adjacent to West Lake Landfill poses another risk. Underground, a growing fire smolders. This fire is 60’ to 150’ underground, where there is no oxygen. It looks more like a “trail of hot, partially combusted material and a low-lying haze of gas.” (“The Bridgeton Landfill ‘Fire’ Explained (Updated)”) This fire can not easily be put out due to its depth underground, and unknown exact whereabouts. The degree of severity in relationship between the fire and the radioactive material at West Lake Landfill remains controversial. While the fire appears to be several hundred yards away from the nuclear waste, preventative measures are being taken by imposing 28 cooling points between the fire and West Lake Landfill.
If the fire were to reach West Lake Landfill, radon and radium would likely be released into the air and dissipate northward with the wind.

Bridgeton Landfill

Half-Life

Uranium is the heaviest element of the periodic table with 92 protons. In nature uranium consists of two primordial isotopes, uranium-238 (92%), and uranium-235 (0.7%), with very small amounts of uranium-234. Like all other elements with atomic weights greater than iron (26), uranium is only naturally born in supernovae. Uranium decays by emitting an alpha particle. Uranium-235 is the only naturally occurring fissile isotope, and therefore exploited for its nuclear capabilities. As uranium undergoes decay by emitting alpha particles, it creates entirely different elements known as daughters. Uranium decays to become protactinium (91). Protoactinium too is radioactive and decays to become thorium (90). Thorium becomes radium (88). Radium becomes radon (86) and so on. Each of these elements has its own properties including its own half life. Uranium’s final daughter, is lead. Lead is no longer radioactive, but is still toxic to humans.

13020 Old Saint Charles Road

To describe a site, we as architects and landscape architects tend to use annotated drawings, diagrams, and images to simplify adjacency, patterns of material flow, and space. Through video, instead of attempting to synthesize this place, I offer fragments of imagery and sound to acknowledge that this site cannot be understood in totality as a linear system (a task which I have tried to do through the use of this blog), but is instead an assemblage of both competing and symbiotic systems, agents, and biases. This collection of imagery communicates an impending distress. One that is both bucolic, and veiled. 

 

Source Material: Mallinckrodt Chemical Works Plant Downtown, St. Louis MO

Mallinckrodt Chemical Works was the first large scale producer of uranium oxide and uranium metal, both materials requested by the Manhattan Engineering District in the endeavor to create nuclear weaponry.

The Mallinckrodt Chemical Company produced one ton of uranium oxide per day (1996 St. Louis Sites Remediation Task Force Report 2).

This endeavour was one of particular danger, and secrecy. Workers were not aware of what they were making, and scientists who may have had some understanding were sworn to secrecy by the FBI. Possibility of material explosion and inhalation of radioactive dust particles were severe, but not a primary concern by workers or management.


“If we had known as much about the adverse health effects of human exposure from processing uranium and being exposed to the resulting radioactive waste, would we have chosen a site in the center of Missouri’s largest urban population center to do the processing?” (1996 St. Louis Sites Remediation Task Force Report 2, 14).

St. Louis MO - Date Unknown: Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, Building No. 707, Destrehan Street between Hall & Wharf Streets, attached to Building No. 706, Saint Louis, Independent City, MO.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

West Lake Landfill

‘’The dirt would fall off the trucks...there was waste all over Hazelwood and Latty (avenues). Sometimes if it rained, the stuff got so thick and sticky it looked like cow manure.”
Skip Cothran, a forklift operator, told the St. Louis Dispatch | 1989 (“Building a Mountain of Radioactive Waste”)


As a consequence of the mismanagement of nuclear waste, the whole city is potentially a site of contamination. Workers at the Mallinckrodt Chemical Plant were paid per barrel to take away potentially radioactive refuse. Where this material ended up is practically invisible. Additionally, as the waste moved from the downtown site to SLAPS, the dirt was carried in open trucks, allowing the random dropping of materials along roadways throughout the city. As a result, the defined boundary around nuclear waste is a fallacy. Radioactive material likely exists along stream beds, in ditches, along roadways, and in people’s backyards. It’s imperceptibility through touch, taste, smell and site makes it mostly impossible to detect. How then can we respond to the problem, when it is invisible?

The Hibaku Trees: Atomic Bomb Survivors

On August 6th 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima Japan. 170 trees survived the bomb. These are called the Hibaku Trees.


Since 2006, artist Hiroshi Sunairi has been distributing the seeds of these Hibaku trees throughout the United States and Singapore, inviting people to plant and nurture the growing artifact. This is an act of remembrance and a memorandum of hope established through the on-going life of these trees. This project is a nod towards the slow process of healing after significant disaster. Now, the daughters, and daughter’s daughters grow proudly throughout the world.

Atomic Gardens + Gamma Gardens

Atomic gardening is a fad from the 1960’s where civilians were encouraged to experiment with atomic energized produce seeds for radiation-induced mutagenesis. Plants were exposed to radiation in the hopes they could generate larger, brighter, and more resistant fruits and vegetables to various stress. This entrepreneurship came in response to a creed for peaceful use of atomic energy after World War II, with the hope that atomic breeding could be used to reduce global hunger. This initiative shows the possibility for citizen science on sites of radioactive material.


Gamma Gardens on the other hand, are offial test plots where plants have been exposed to radiation. As a result of exposure to radiation, they harboured a range of unpredictable genetic mutations. Typically, Gamma Gardens take the form of a circular field where plants growing closest to the center are most exposed to a radioactive source. Further away, plants are less exposed, and likely less mutated. At the edges, dikes were designed to contain the radioactive material, and limit exposure to organisms outside the dike. Caesium-137 is recommended for this type of testing due to its short half life of 33 years. (“Gamma Gardens & Caesium 137 – The Center for Genomic Gastronomy”).

Left Top: Johnson, Paige. Brookhaven National Labs, New York 1958.
Left Bottom: Institute of Radiation Breeding, Hitachiohmiya, Japan
Right Top: Atoms for Peace symbol
Right Bottom: Scherschel, Frank LIFE Magazine, 1961

After Hiroshima by Elin o’Hara Slavik

A monograph of cyanotypes of Atomic Bombed artifacts from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. The process of exposure is essential to understanding this photographic project. o’Hara’s work considers exposure to radiation, to the sun, to light, to history, and then also exposures made from radiation, the sun, light and historical artifacts from the Peace Memorial Museum’s collection. After Hiroshima engages ethical seeing by creating a visual of warfare, in order to confront the conflicting paradox of making visible the inhuman from the point of view of witness, artist, and viewer (elinoharaslavick.com).

Warfare to Wildlife: Weldon Spring Conservation Area, Weldon Spring Missouri

Nature; pure, separate, external
Spectacle; a strategic ontology that arranges biopolitical relations regarding the separation of Nature and Human.

Greenwashing of military land and the conversion into nature refuges, is an example of spectacle used as a biopolitical technique - ‘warfare to wildlife’ (Krupar, 2016). The “post military nature refuge has been used to...bury public criticism or annex environmental critique to military goals, and to foster ignorance of the biophysical socialization of risk and exposure” (Krupar 2016, 124). Nuclear landscapes such as Weldon Spring Ordinance Works “propagate the idea that such lands are now demilitarized and safe for public recreation and observation of nature” (Krupar 2016, 122). The result; consumption of nature, such that it becomes spectacle, and removes the political context of these landscapes. Concealment of site contaminants is further generated through offices of regulation and observation that create an economy of decontamination projects. In the frame of this investigation spectacle can be understood as the biopolitical separation between human and waste, as a method of rationalizing disposal through a denial of the grace condition. Warfare to Wildlife tactics generate landscapes displaced in place.

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Spectacle

Spectacle, an instrument “to the organization of regimes of perception, and to forms of collective
experience, population management and social-ecological order that, in this case allow for abandonment and exposure” (Kurpar, 146). There are two predominant methods of managing nuclear waste sites, the salvation method and a neo-liberal framework of surveillance (Krupar, 148). A salvation framework attempts to rescue the purity of the landscape through environmental cleanup. This includes the reintroduction of plants and wildlife in order to advantage environmental tourism. Alternately, a framework of surveillance works to manage the legacy of nuclear production into an infinite data dependent future. Through constant observation, testing, budgeting, supervision and regulation, these nuclear waste site sustain an economy of unlimited regulation. The induction of spectacle onto a site is a response tactic used to make sense of the sites violated by the prioritization of warfare over humanity and natural systems.


Further, through the practices of monumentalization and memorialization, the transformation of
nuclear landscapes to cultural landscapes create landscapes for consumption and concealment.
Instead, these landscapes should be considered landscapes of complex socio-political histories
that need to be further tested and explored by designers. These methods of spectacularization
reduce environmental memory by concealing their pasts.