That is it. They published a book which the article mentions. It was reported in USA Today in 2000. OP made it sound like it was still some nefarious conspiracy.
>OP made it sound like it was still some nefarious conspiracy.
"Defense industrial complex pollutes town then pretends they didn't despite everyone dropping dead from cancer" is a tempting and juicy narrative and will generally be welcomed with open arms around here even if it turns out reality is a lot more mundane (reality is almost always more mundane than the story).
Excise the part you made up and simply say Defense industrial complex pollutes town then pretends they didn't and you have an accurate assessment of what happened.
There does not appear to be any evidence they knew they were or were likely to be contaminating the site and ignored it at the time (i.e they did not act with negligence). The typical accusations, denial, lawsuit, wash, rinse, repeat cycle that tends to characterize instances when corporations act in bad faith (malice). By the time the site was identified activities that were contaminating it had ceased. It was cleaned up as promptly as a big lumbering bureaucracy (DOE in this case) can be expected to. They even expedited the cleanup at the request of the stakeholders.
This does not appear to be an example of corporate bad behavior because it is lacking in both negligence and malice.
If you want to be outraged over evil corporations go read about DuPont poisoning the water in various places. There's been a few longer articles posted here about it fairly recently and they seem to actually be acting in bad faith.
Where did I assert or imply it was or bring up anyone's competence at all?
It's really easy to sit in an air conditioned office in 2019 and look at decisions made decades ago and say "they should have known" when in in all liklihood the people doing this probably didn't know they were leaving behind an unsafe level of radioactivity.
Speaking generally about pollution, not this specific case, everybody wants to see everything as the result of some bad actor(s) so they can have someone to blame. Reality is often much more mundane. Usually either it was not widely known that the thing was dangerous at that level of exposure, the people who could know didn't want to go looking for the knowledge or society considered the pollution worth it and if it bothered you the onus was on you to limit your own exposure (social media comparison anyone?). If you didn't want to smell paint all day you didn't live downwind of the paint factory. Times have changed a lot and to try and look at decisions in the past through the lens of modern values is a fools errand, to put it charitably.
people read through their own lenses. some people read conspiracy, others see that it is generally due to circumstances and human error. perhaps, it might be somewhere in between, or perhaps both overlap in ways. i'd say people generally overestimate how 'on purpose' these things occur, but then again, with lack of clear information, both sides of the coin hold equal value...
Sounds like it got cleaned up in the 1990s.