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.
