Photograph by Dilip Vishwanat
Other couples show up for PTA meetings and maybe run the neighborhood yard sale. Kay & Leo Drey save the environment. Leo by buying and managing a forest (once the largest private landowner in Missouri, he has donated much of his Pioneer Forest to the Dreys’ nonprofit foundation), and Kay by barraging decision-makers with facts nobody knows about the issue nobody wants to talk about.
Kay Drey was testifying in Jefferson City about radioactive nuclear waste, and the state reps’ eyes were glazing over. “The alligators have smaller penises than they should,” she tossed out, and her all-male audience sat up a little straighter.
Kay has an innocence about her, an idealism so strong it would seem to border on naïveté. But when she’s fighting for the environment, she can strategize with the wiles of her grandfather, St. Louis chess champion Max Bruckstein.
She started her activism in the civil rights movement. When her family moved into Clayton, first Jews on the block, the grandson of a wealthy St. Louis stockbroker tied her to a tree and pelted her with icy snowballs because she’d killed Christ. Years later, she “taught lying at Concordia Seminary,” she says matter-of-factly. “We worked with black families looking for housing, and we had elaborate ways of finding out if an apartment was available and then calling for directions from right around the corner, so when we appeared they couldn’t say, ‘We just rented that.’
“I cannot lie in my personal life, I just can’t,” she adds. “But if it’s the only way you can fight …” Drey exaggerates her ploys for fun; her main weapon is dull, dry facts. She found thousands of them when she shifted her focus to the environment and landed on the least sexy, most bureaucratic and impenetrable of all: nuclear waste.
Civil rights will be irrelevant, she points out, if everybody’s dead.
She made her first speech to a Missouri Senate subcommittee on November 13, 1974—the day Karen Silkwood was run off the road for talking about flaws in the welding of plutonium fuel rods.
“I had to read stuff that was Greek to me—I majored in cultural anthropology!” Kay recalls. “Once I wrote a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission asking questions, and I apologized, explaining that all I’d had was “plain geometry.” Leo read it and said, ‘That was cute, the way you spelled plane geometry.’”
Now on the board of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, she’s one of the industry’s most dreaded gadflies. She uses colored pencils to parse complicated articles sentence by sentence: “red, green, purple, blue, and the brightest is the most important.” Her basement’s lined with file cabinets, her index-card files are all meticulously cross-indexed, and she keeps a filing box of volunteers. “People offer me money to get out of it!”
“I have been fired from virtually every job I ever had,” Kay adds, “including teaching water ballet and being Girl Scout cookie chairman. But I really do think I’m the world’s best filing clerk.” The library at the University of Missouri–St. Louis begged for her and Leo’s papers, and they have already donated boxfuls—but Kay keeps borrowing them back.
“My number-one reason for disliking nuclear power is, you can’t have it without exposing workers to the radiation,” she says. “I don’t think they level with the workers about that. My second reason is routine releases: Every nuclear power plant, even without accidental releases, sends nuclear waste into the air and water—in our case, from Callaway [Power Plant] into the river. And I don’t think people know that.”
Then there’s “the possibility of huge accidents. Terrorism—it’s a dream for a terrorist. In one reactor vessel the size of Callaway, there are 16 billion curies—a long-lived radioactivity equivalent to 1,000 Hiroshima bombs—and there’s even more in the spent fuel pool. And there is simply no place for the waste.
“As of July 1, 2008, there will be no place for Callaway to send its most radioactive ‘low-level’ waste,” she continues, leaning forward. “Only fuel rods are called ‘high-level,’ and irradiated fuel rods are sitting at Callaway in what’s called a swimming pool, because there’s no place for them to go. Everything else has to be called ‘low-level’—even when it has to be handled by remote-control equipment or a worker could get a lethal dose in a matter of minutes.” She pauses for breath. “Anyway, South Carolina will no longer let us send our waste there. And some of the radioactive waste we sent to the Fernald plant in Ohio in 1953 came back through St. Louis last year—about 10 truckloads a day—on its way to a parking lot in Texas. This is very, very hot stuff; it was from the Belgian Congo, which had the richest ore, and it will remain radioactive for literally billions of years. And they don’t know where it’s going next.”
Kay and Leo met at a wedding: Kay’s neighbor, who knew Leo had bought more than 100,000 acres in the Ozarks, asked how his trees were handling the drought, and a blithe young Kay Kranzberg misheard and blurted, “Oh, you have a tree! I’m a tree worshipper.” He walked away.
“I was very impressed that he had a tree,” she says now.
“Two or three, actually,” Leo adds dryly.
It took two more chance meetings before he called her neighbor and asked, “How do I get a hold of the girl whose name is Cranberry?”
Now their dining room table is covered in box lids—her way of organizing current projects—and she keeps to-do lists pinned to her blouse—and Leo has the patience of a saint.
“Nah, she’s not hard to live with,” he says. “Just very intense.” His career was one long, methodical, brilliantly successful demonstration that selective tree-farming works; sustainability is possible; clear-cutting is unnecessary. National awards wallpaper his foundation’s office.
Kay’s had successes, too: She led the campaign that stopped Callaway from building a second reactor. She got the U.S. Department of Energy to acknowledge the radioactive waste at Lambert International Airport and won a 20-year battle to get it removed. She identified contaminated quarry water at Weldon Spring and made sure a water treatment plant was built so hot waste wouldn’t be dumped into the Missouri River. “We have the oldest radioactive waste of the Atomic Age,” she observes, “because we purified the uranium that went into the world’s first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.
“I don’t give up,” she adds. “Except on Mondays. I feel very disheartened on Mondays, always. I would like to outlaw them.”
She turns serious. “I’m a manic-depressive, and I’ve cracked up more than once. My way of surviving is to distract myself by keeping busy. I’ve been fine—as fine as I know how to be—since 1992. But I once hung myself with a tie I’d knitted for a resident at the hospital.” She pauses, then grins. “The tie broke. I’m not very good at housewifely things.”
Instead, she has a list of favorite isotopes. At the top is tritium-3, radioactive hydrogen. She says one official told her, “Tritium is no big deal. All it can do is destroy a DNA molecule.” Her latest favorite, though, is carbon-14, “a radioactive carbon that’s created and released at nuclear plants. If they were to take fuel rods and cut them up, which is what [President] Bush wants to do, unknown amounts of carbon-14 could be released.”
Kay also has a list of disappointments. “The stupid EPA,” she blurts. “I was so excited I almost felt I could retire when I heard they were going to do a study of the ground water at West Lake, next to Earth City. There was highly radioactive waste dumped illegally at West Lake, in the Missouri River floodplain, in 1973. It turns out that they are going to do the study, but first they are going to put the cap on the waste” (rather than remove it).
She hates the warehouses that were built in Earth City, which has some of the world’s best farmland, with topsoil 90 feet deep.
She’s disappointed that the U.S. Army Chemical School came to Fort Leonard Wood, teaching people about nerve gas and other chemical weapons, biological weapons and radioactive materials.
She’s disappointed that it took Americans so long to acknowledge global warming—and that now people are actually saying, straight-faced, that nuclear power is a solution.
She saves articles about plants and animals that are becoming extinct—“but I absolutely can’t look at them. I can’t stand it. I saw a picture the other day of a polar bear on just a thin strip of ice.”
Years ago, to stay informed, Kay called and asked to join the American Nuclear Society. The woman who answered the phone said you had to be working in the industry for 10 years first. “I said, ‘Well, I’ve been fighting against nuclear power for more than 20 years!’”
She pulls a blue and white membership card out of her wallet with a triumphant flourish. Then she tucks it away and adds, with all the play gone out of her soft voice, “First, you try to find the facts—and that’s not easy, because nowadays they withhold more than they used to.
“But if people don’t have the facts, there is no hope.”
