Patty Ameno has spent the last 25 years fighting to clean up nuclear waste in and around Apollo, her hometown in western Pennsylvania. WSJ's John Emshwiller reports. Photo: Ross Mantle for The Wall Street Journal.

APOLLO, Pa.—For Patty Ameno, it is a Kodak moment from childhood that stirs many memories. She is 8 years old, dressed up for Easter in her family home's yard, clutching a doll. Her mom, as she recalls, made the doll; her dad took the photo.

But the most important memory for Ms. Ameno, now 62 and still living near this blue-collar town, is the massive factory in the photo's background. For years, it produced nuclear fuel for U.S. submarines and other customers. With a red pen she has circled drums of unknown material stacked outside the plant.

Consider it the focal point for a one-woman nuclear crusade spanning a quarter century. Ms. Ameno has fought over the atomic legacy here, as well as a sister facility in nearby Parks Township next to a 44-acre field that still holds atomic waste.

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One Woman's Fight to Clean Up Nuclear Waste

In her quest, she has helped organize litigation that resulted in more than $80 million in payments to her and scores of neighbors claiming health damage from radioactive contamination. When federal regulators said the waste could safely stay buried in the field—which for years had been used as an informal recreation area by residents—Ms. Ameno hounded government officials until Congress passed a law requiring a cleanup.

She now relentlessly bird-dogs that cleanup effort, which is behind schedule, over budget and recently wrapped in a cloak of secrecy after authorities unearthed what they said were unexpected amounts of "complex material." The government increased security at the site and now estimates the cleanup could cost up to $500 million.

A Navy veteran and former Defense Department investigator, Ms. Ameno has pored through thousands of pages of documents, interviewed hundreds of people, picketed and been arrested for disrupting a public meeting—and sued those who arrested her. At one point, she hired a helicopter for an aerial view of the dump site.

She has been praised as a community protector and criticized as a troublemaker unnecessarily stoking local fears and potentially hurting the local economy. "She continues to stir things up," says David Heffernan Sr., president of the Apollo borough council, adding it could deter companies from investing in the area. Ms. Ameno argues she had no choice: "You have to have a mad, junkyard-dog mentality in order to deal with this."

This corner of western Pennsylvania's coal country is part of a national nuclear junkyard. Radioactive residue from the government's massive buildup of nuclear weapons and other atomic-energy programs during World War II and the Cold War is scattered across scores of locations in some three dozen states. The estimated cleanup bill is now $350 billion.

A recent investigation by The Wall Street Journal cataloged hundreds of sites that did government nuclear work and uncovered problems with the remediation effort that range from sites that haven't been found to ones needing repeated cleanups.

Federal agencies responsible for radioactive cleanups say they are taking adequate measures to protect the public and continue to be on the alert for needed additional work. Among them is the Army Corps of Engineers, which has responsibility for the dump site near here, known as the Shallow Land Disposal Area. The two local atomic factories were torn down and carted away beginning more than two decades ago.

Ms. Ameno has long argued that contamination—from emissions when the plant operated and from decades of leftover residue—has created high cancer rates in the area. Babcock & Wilcox, which owned the two nuclear plants and still owns the dump site, has denied harming the public. A 1996 state health department survey found some higher cancer rates near the nuclear operations but concluded the difference wasn't statistically significant.

Health debates aside, this isn't the only time the government's handling of the sites has created unease in local communities. A company sparked a continuing federal cleanup after discovering radioactivity at an Indiana factory that had been declared safe, while a college student's find of contamination led to a similar cleanup in Massachusetts. Protests by St. Louis area residents have caused federal officials to reconsider plans to leave a radioactive dumpsite in place.

"It shouldn't default to local citizens to do the work that the government should have done in the first place," says Daniel Hirsch, a faculty lecturer on nuclear issues at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and critic of some federal nuclear cleanup activities. Federal officials say they have been vigilant and are confident they identified the sites and "nearly all the contaminated areas at those locations."

Ms. Ameno's slice of this national nuclear saga came to town in the late 1950s. A newly formed company, Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp., set up in an old steel mill across the street from her home. Numec processed thousands of pounds of bomb-grade uranium and plutonium and other radioactive materials, according to government and company documents.

Growing up, Ms. Ameno says she rarely paid much attention to the factory, festooned with dozens of rooftop venting stacks. It wasn't until after she returned home from her stints in the Navy, where she was injured in a helicopter crash, and at the Defense Department that her late father, worried about health risks from the plant, asked her to look into it. (He eventually died from a stroke.)

That was in 1988. Ms. Ameno began collecting Numec-related information, combing through libraries and filing public-records requests. She began interviewing ex-employees and residents.

While Numec's early management denied harming the public, the company did have issues. These included alleged improper handling of nuclear material and questions over radiation releases from the rooftop stacks, according to government and company records.

Reading through those records, she came across references to a 1963 fire in a vault containing highly enriched uranium that also caused radioactive materials to be released. An estimated three kilograms of bomb-grade uranium was lost in the blaze, according to a 1966 report by the now-defunct Atomic Energy Commission.

Ms. Ameno found workers who had been through that blaze, including George Pugh. In an interview with the Journal, Mr. Pugh said that after fighting the fire, he was scrubbed down in a shower for six hours to remove radioactive contamination. His clothes were buried in the nuclear dump. Mr. Pugh died last year at the age of 76 after battling kidney and prostate cancer. Medical experts say it is impossible to know if a particular person's cancer is linked to radiation exposure. Mr. Pugh's widow did receive cash compensation under a federal program for nuclear-weapons industry workers suffering from cancer and other maladies.

Ms. Ameno began gathering information on local cancer cases and would ultimately become convinced that a large number of the cases were linked to the Numec radiation. During her visits to hospitals, Ms. Ameno met a health-care worker named Nedra McPherson, who became her live-in partner and with whom she raised Ms. McPherson's biological son. "She would read documents in the bathtub," says Ms. McPherson. "She had no time for anyone."

By the 1990s, Ms. Ameno was pushing for medical monitoring of local residents and a complete cleanup of all remaining contamination at the factory sites and the dump. She picketed at both sites, carrying a sign saying "Honk, If You Want to be Safe." She attended public meetings and called some of her own. Arrested at one gathering for allegedly being disruptive, Ms. Ameno sued local authorities after she was acquitted, settling on undisclosed terms.

Working out of a cluttered office in her second-floor apartment, she says she spent nearly $1,000 for a helicopter flyover of the dump in 2001. Tacked on her office wall is also an old $3,784 phone bill, one month's worth of long-distance calls.

She spearheaded a 1994 lawsuit on behalf of herself and over 300 other local residents against Babcock & Wilcox and another previous Numec owner, alleging health and property damage from nuclear emissions when the plants were in operation. Ms. Ameno blamed radiation for two benign brain tumors she had. (Years later she was diagnosed with uterine cancer but says she is in remission.)

"She got all the people organized and together," recalls attorney Steve Wodka, who did early work on the case after being contacted by Ms. Ameno. He eventually turned the case over to a Texas law firm headed by the late Fred Baron, a well-known products-liability lawyer.

In 1996, the Pennsylvania Department of Health, citing "residents' ongoing concerns" about the Numec operations, issued a study of the area's cancer rates. The study said there had been off-site contamination and that for those living within one mile of the two Numec plants, the overall cancer incidence was "11% greater than the state as a whole" pushed by higher-than-expected rates for various specific malignancies.

However, the study said that generally the cancer rates weren't far enough outside the norm to be meaningful and couldn't be connected to environmental factors, such as radiation. Showing "a causal link between cancer incidence in an area and radiation exposure can be extremely difficult," the study added.

The science behind the harm of radiation exposure is far from precise. Most experts believe even small amounts of additional radiation raise a person's cancer risk slightly, with the risk rising with the dose. Some studies have shown a radiation link to certain types of cancers. The federal government has a list of 22 cancers—including leukemia, thyroid cancer and lung cancer—that can qualify a person for compensation under a program to help nuclear-weapons industry employees who suffered health damage from their work.

In 1998, an initial eight plaintiffs, all of whom had cancer, went to trial in Pittsburgh federal court in a test of the case, focusing on emissions from the plant here. For over a month, the two sides battled over how much radiation was released, how much got into the community and how much harm any such contamination caused. The jury awarded $36.5 million to the plaintiffs.

However, the judge subsequently ordered a new trial, saying she made mistakes in admitting evidence. Eventually, the defendants settled, without admitting fault, paying more than $80 million to the overall group of plaintiffs, including over $350,000 to Ms. Ameno. She says her share helped finance her continued nuclear fight.

Detractors say her efforts have made her a scare monger, unnecessarily upsetting people and helping spark a new round of still-pending litigation in Pittsburgh federal court by more local residents claiming health damages. In a court filing last year, Babcock & Wilcox asserted that "Ms. Ameno enlisted dozens of plaintiffs, even though they had no scientific or medical basis for suing." She also destroyed subpoenaed documents and refused to answer some deposition questions, the filing said.

In response, she says she did help connect residents with the South Carolina-based firm handling the suit, but only received out-of-pocket expenses and didn't improperly destroy documents. A federal judge has ordered her to try to provide more information to the defendants.

Though all the litigation has focused mostly on the two now-demolished Numec plants, Ms. Ameno has increasingly put her efforts into getting the dump site excavated and the radioactive trash hauled away. The site—which for many years wasn't fenced, according to local residents—is near homes and the Kiskiminetas River and sits atop an abandoned coal mine. "As long as the radioactive waste remains, it's a threat to the community," she argues.

For years, federal officials disagreed with that assessment. For instance, a 1997 Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff report said the waste could safely be left in place with some site upgrading and restrictions on public use.

That answer didn't satisfy Ms. Ameno. She bombarded her then-congressman, John Murtha, and his staff with information and demands for action, including a one-day "faxathon" that inundated every machine in the powerful Democrat's offices. Her contacts became so routine, Ms. Ameno says, that a top Murtha aide would call if he didn't hear from her in the morning.

In 2002 Congress passed Section 8143 of Public Law 107-117, which required a cleanup at the Pennsylvania site and one in Massachusetts. Ms. Ameno "was certainly the catalyst" for the Parks Township cleanup requirement, says Brad Clemenson, a former senior staffer to Rep. Murtha, who died in 2010. "She got the whole community involved."

The excavation project was turned over to the Army Corps of Engineers under a program, known as Fusrap, to clean up old nuclear-weapons-related sites. In a 2007 report, the Corps, taking a different stance from the NRC's prior assessment of the site, said "concentrations of radionuclides in the buried wastes are high enough to present a potential future risk to human health" and need to be removed.

An NRC spokesman said "we have no issues" with the Corps' approach to the site and periodically confer with them about it. A Corps spokesman declined to comment on any past NRC actions.

Once actual digging began in 2011, an apparent new headache emerged. A Corps spokesman would only say that excavators found "larger amounts of complex material than expected." Digging was abruptly halted after just two months and the government classified documents on the project as secret, citing a security rule regarding "special nuclear material"—typically uranium and plutonium isotopes usable in nuclear weapons. Security, which included armed guards, was beefed up.

Col. William Graham, who at the time headed the Corps' cleanup effort at the site, defended the security and secrecy. "I don't want to make Parks Township a target for nefarious activity," he said in an interview last year. "With people flying airplanes into buildings, who knows what people could do with the material there."

Corps officials now say the cleanup could cost $500 million, more than 10 times the agency's original estimate. In light of the escalating cost estimates, the Corps is reviewing its plans and said any renewed digging won't start before 2015 and would take at least a decade to complete.

Write to John R. Emshwiller at