The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is drilling through basement floors in the Cades Cove subdivision of Florissant to determine whether there is radioactive contamination under residents’ homes.

The United States should not expand nuclear energy use, at least until the federal government can make up for the harms caused by previous nuclear projects, U.S. Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri said at a congressional hearing in Washington, D.C., on Thursday.

Nuclear waste stored outside St. Louis was found to pose a risk to nearby Coldwater Creek as early as 1949. The contaminated creek will finally have warning signs almost 75 years later.

Provisions that would have compensated those exposed to radioactive waste left over from the Manhattan Project was removed on Wednesday

In April 1950, the US federal government raided the offices of Scientific American Magazine to destroy every printed issue, burning three thousand copies. The reason? The banned magazine contained an article, titled “The Hydrogen Bomb: II” written by Professor Hans Bethe, one of the country’s most prominent nuclear scientists, which had been deemed a threat to national security.