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But Drey has a way of simplifying things.

“It’s in the Missouri River flood plain,” she says of the nuclear waste. “I can’t think of a worse location. The Missouri River floods all the time. We cannot leave it there.”

That was the basic theme of the first of two reports she gave me. It’s 14 pages of testimony she submitted to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Missouri Department of Natural Resources 10 years ago. In painstaking detail, Drey outlines what is known of the waste, how it might affect groundwater and the potential for disaster if the Missouri River were to reclaim its floodplain now protected by the Earth City levee.

She quotes two old Nuclear Regulatory Commission reports, one from 1982 and the other from 1988, that outline how “hot” the waste is in West Lake and call for some sort of “remedial action.” She quotes one of the foremost flooding experts in the region, Bob Criss from Washington University, who said, “This is the wrong place to store hazardous material. It does not belong in a flood plain.”

Nobody who read Drey’s words from a decade ago would have been surprised by the release this week of a secret EPA report that reached similar conclusions.

The report, internal findings by EPA scientists that had been kept secret since 2013, concluded that it was feasible to remove the nuclear waste from West Lake. The scientists also found that doing so would reduce long-term risks.

Money.

The EPA has long wanted to simply put a cap over the waste and leave it there, at a cost of $40 million or so. It’s much less expensive than having the Army Corps of Engineers unearth the waste and dispose of it elsewhere, which might cost 10 times as much. Putting a cap in place is the preferred option of Republic Services, the company that currently owns the landfill.

Drey doesn’t care about the cost. She doesn’t care about how long cleaning up the waste would take. And she doesn’t want Republic to pay, either.

“The government put it there,” she said. “The government needs to clean it up. If we can keep making bombs, we can find the money to clean up the waste from the 1940s.”

The U.S. Senate passed a bill this year to carry out Drey’s preferred solution — have the Corps of Engineers take over the project and clean it up. But the measure appears to be dead in the House. Here’s what lawmakers need to know about Drey:

She’s not giving up…… “We need to get both houses of Congress to say they’re going to clean it up,” Drey says. “It just can’t stay there.” http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/columns/tony-messenger/messenger-activist-won-t-back-down-in-quest-to-rid/article_3da42a06-a587-53cc-bd86-e3844af3d6e1.html