09/12/2025
When we told Eric Steppe, former Eureka worker turned whistleblower, about the latest numbers change, he said: https://scoop.publicherald.org/p/twenty-six-days-later-dep-logs-cleanup?r=b7r7s
“They are bold-faced liars. That’s how they’ve stayed afloat for so long. Burning every bridge laid for them. On occasion I was sent to try and repair something and 4 out of 5 times was told the hardware store or auto parts store was freezing Eureka’s accounts until their debts are paid in full. That’s one of the reasons everything in that hell hole was duct-taped and zip-tied together.”
DEP cautioned that these numbers are “preliminary” and not reviewed. Allowing the company to define the scope of its own disaster raises the risk that penalties will be quietly reduced.
A further danger lies in the way radium-226 can become more radioactive over time inside storage tanks — a process called radioactive ingrowth.
Here’s what Dr. Daniel Bain, a research professor at University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Geology and Environmental Science who studies radioactivity, had to say about it:
“The problem with all radiation is that it continues to decay and the decay products can be worse than the parent products. Over time it has the potential to turn into something that’s able to admit even more intense ionizing radiation, so you want to avoid that and keep it separate from humans, animals and the entire system.”
“There’s a lot of radium associated with all this and if it doesn’t get put somewhere safe people are going to get hurt. It’s an astonishing amount. Right now they're dumping it on roads in the summer and DEP knows about it and isn’t doing a damn thing. They’re dumping it in landfills and it’s slowly making its way out. And by the time this all gets out it will be too late. In the long run, if it’s delayed by 20 years, you’ve got 20 years of mess to clean up.”
"There’s a lot of radium associated with all this and if it doesn’t get put somewhere safe people are going to get hurt."
