Nuked in the Midwest feat. Devin O’Shea (Premium E280) Sample
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If you're hearing this, well done. You found a way to connect to the internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast premium episode 280, Nuked in the Midwest. As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Devin O'Shea, Liv Aker, and Travis View.

I was watching this documentary called The Simpsons where the main guy, Homer, barehands a plutonium rod and his son, Bart, fishes a three-eyed fish out of the pond downstream from Mr. Burns' nuclear reactor. And it's sort of like a commentary on America in the 1990s because then you have the Springfield tire dump, which happens to be on fire, and it's funny because black smoke pours into the air and no one on the show ever dies, so it's fine.

In St. Louis, we said, "Oh yeah? You think that's funny? How about a radioactive landfill that's on fire for 14 years?" Oh dear. A few weeks ago, back in January, I fired up my favorite local news source, St. Louis Public Radio, and saw one of the worst-case scenario headlines. There are these two big landfills up in North St. Louis. One is called the Westlake Landfill, and it is packed full of radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project.

Excellent. As you do. It sounds like not where I would expect them to place the waste from the Manhattan Project. Yeah. I would have expected a really big hole, and then it has one of those weird universal signs where it's like, none shall enter here. Nothing good. Pictures of sharp rocks. They made that as the St. Louis welcome sign instead? Yeah. I called it a day. I guess I'm a little confused why they decided to do the Manhattan Project in

the middle of the desert of like New Mexico and then move the waste to a highly populated area. That's a little confusing to me. I think they should have put it in Manhattan since that's the name of the project. But yeah, I guess I'm voted out. I think they were trying to create like six eyed fish. Yeah. How many eyes can we get? Yeah. That's almost like it's almost like a Kendrick lyric. How many eyes can you get? One, two, three, four. All right. All right. I'll stop.

There's hosing and tarps covering these huge sections of fields, and it looks like a weird golf course from overhead or a kind of sore in the land, which is deserved because this nuclear disposal site is the end product of a dozen botched techniques for disposing of nuclear material. Jake, would you read some of the other techniques for me? With pleasure. Number one.

Secretly burying the stuff near a creek by the airport. Number two: Forgetting about it and hoping no one notices. Number three: Finally admitting there's a problem, digging up millions of cubic meters of soil, then reburying it all in a slightly better spot. Now number three really sounds like the American way. Wait till the absolute last second to tell everybody you did a big boo-boo and then you fix it.

Minorly. Minorly. This really makes me happy that Chernobyl didn't happen in America. Yeah. Like, that was definitely a Soviet, you know, late Soviet bureaucrat, you know, corruption problem that was particular. But it's really good it happened there and not in America. Yeah.

Because I guess they would have just played it off. Like, whoops. Don't worry about that. It's like what they did with cigarettes for like 100 years. They're like, it's actually good for you. All the radiation, it's going to make you stronger. You'll have more children with more limbs. They're releasing more dogs and animals into the area because they're like, we want to see the three-eyed dogs in The Simpsons. Well.

Well, the big problem was with the better spot that they chose, which was directly next to the Bridgeton landfill, or as some say, both the Westlake and the Bridgeton landfill are just the same big hole in the ground. Long after some construction companies started burying leftover thorium in the Westlake landfill, the Bridgeton landfill caught fire underground. For the last 14 years, something called the Subsurface Smoldering Event has haunted a large part of St. Louis.

It's a very DeLillo name. I like a lot. The subsurface smoldering event. Yeah. They try to make it sound like a good thing. It's like a festival or something. You could buy a three-day pass. Overpriced, but you get to see everybody. It's a 14-year-long party that ends in, well, we'll see.

Moms in the houses around the Westlake landfill have go bags and a plan for what to do in the worst case scenario. There are a whole bunch of emergency services around the greater St. Louis area that have been prepped for this. And if the bad thing happens, people are supposed to either flee or shelter in place and close the air ducts and ventilation of their houses and hope for the best. Well, what's the bad thing that happens if like the whole thing goes up like a volcano, like a man-made volcano kind of? Oh, we're getting there. Oh boy.

Alright. The good news is that a lot more people know about the Westlake landfill than they did a decade ago, thanks to the Herculean work of a bunch of moms. A battalion of women activists have been catastrophically pissed off about this for a long time, and the whole story has helped me understand how much harassment public officials need, and the ends to which officials will go to avoid talking to you, or looking at you, or glancing at a well-documented map of a cancer cluster.

Still, this is bad. The Missouri Independent report from January says that there is a high likelihood that radioactive contamination has made it to the smoldering landfill fire, which is not the type of shit I'm trying to hear.

If the fire creeps into the Westlake landfill, the smoke will carry thorium and radium particulate up out of the subterranean, and cancer pollen will waft up and out, landing in an urban community where a lot of people live, up to five or six miles of populated area, depending on the wind. A whole lot of it could end up snowing on North St. Louis, St. Charles, and Southern Illinois. It might be secretly doing that right now, but the officials say chill out.

And they've never lied. Yeah, one of those, it could be already this bad. Who's to say? At the Noonday Club. The Noonday Club in downtown St. Louis is a famous room in American history that people like you and me were never invited to dine in. The club was at the top floor of the security bank building with 10 stories that towered over the city in 1892 when it was built.

The thing is a powerful-looking block structure, brick set on limestone base, and on the top floor was a members-only noonday lunch club where two veiled profit guys, Albert Lambert and William Bixby, dined one day and agreed to put money into American Nazi hands. Hmm.

Of course, in 1927, they didn't know that Charles Lindbergh would become a huge fan of the Reich. Lindbergh would go on to receive a big fancy Nazi sword from Hermann Goering. But that day, Bixby and Lambert were just putting money into Lindbergh's hands for his famous transcontinental flight.

It is said that whoever holds the sword, their plane can never crash. Indy and his father have been looking for it for decades. And Guring lost the sword right in the middle of the Battle for Britain. Damn. He just like misplaced it. Yeah.

Where's that sword? Where's that one sword? Plain sword? Bejeweled. It's bejeweled. It's got almost kind of a square, but some of the lines are bent in a funny way. For a long time, I thought it was actually a baton because Goring loved batons. He loved to be like the Reich Marshal.

Like a twirler? Like he's tossing them up into the air, he's doing a couple spins and he's catching them when it comes back down? Yeah, that kind. Curring really was like a Trump-style Nazi. Like he just liked owning big things. Yeah. Like that was his ideology. Like, yeah, I'll back whoever lets me do that. And whoever lets me like make the most suffering possible as well. Right. And everything's got to be gold-plated and shiny.

Yeah. Got a little quote. Before taking off for New York and Paris, Lindbergh thanked the backers by circling his plane over the Noonday Club. He pointed the nose down and flew close to the flagpoles so everyone there would hear his engine. This is like what the Ospreys, what Biden's Ospreys did when they flew over my house a couple of months ago. Yeah. Thanking you. Thanking me. For your patronage. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

About 15 years later, on April 17, 1942, two different men of the Veiled Prophets Court lunched at the noonday. One was Manhattan Project scientist Arthur Holly Compton, and the other was Edward Mallinckrodt.

These don't sound like villain names at all. You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QAA podcast. For access to the full episode, as well as all past premium episodes and all of our podcast miniseries, go to patreon.com slash QAA. Travis, what?

Why is that such a good deal? Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA podcast for just $5 per month. For that very low price, you get access to over 200 premium episodes, plus all of our miniseries. That includes 10 episodes of Man Clan with Julian and Annie, 10 episodes of Perverts with Julian and Liv, 10 episodes of The Spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of Trickle Down with me, Travis View.

It's a bounty of content and the best deal in podcasting. Travis, for once, I agree with you. And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com slash QAA. Well, that's not an opinion. It's a fact. You're so right, Jake. We love and appreciate all of our listeners. Yes, we do. And Travis is actually crying right now, I think, out of gratitude, maybe? That's not true. The part about me crying, not me being grateful. Oh.