Florida looking at making roadways radioactive as waste disposal solution
Florida lawmakers are considering making radioactive solid waste a component in road construction materials in the state.
I have a suggestion on how this should be done. But first, here’s a little background.
The fertilizer industry in Florida has a daunting hazardous-waste storage problem. Every pound of fertilizer that’s produced creates five pounds of waste.
And it’s not a benign kind of waste. An acid solution is used to dissolve phosphate rock. The process takes naturally occurring uranium, thorium and radium and makes them more radioactive than their original state. Along the way, it also releases radon gas, which is classified as a hazardous air pollutant under the Clean Air Act.
Waste is a mountainous problem for Florida fertilizer industry
About 21,000 people who are exposed to radon gas die every year from the lung cancer it creates, the Environmental Protection Agency reports.
So, the EPA has been restrictive about how the fertilizer industry handles this hazardous waste product, which is called phosphogypsum. For the most part, it’s required to be stored on the industry properties.
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About 30 million new pounds of it are produced every year, to add to the more than 1 billion pounds that have already been created, and are piled in waste mountains called “stacks” that rise up as high as 200 feet and can each span hundreds of acres.
Florida has 25 of these stacks, each with a contaminated lake of radioactive water in their centers.
The fertilizer industry would like to relieve itself of being the responsible custodian of its own waste product, a responsibility that has left the industry saddled with enormous costs. But since 1989, the EPA has required the companies to essentially entomb the waste product on their property in lined containers, and to keep the public away.
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That changed when Donald Trump got into the White House. At least temporarily.
Trump selected Andrew Wheeler, a former coal company lobbyist who had represented one of the most heavily fined coal companies, to run the EPA.
And Wheeler used a study by The Fertilizer Institute to declare it was safe to use radioactive phosphogypsum waste as a road-building material.
Using The Fertilizer Institute, a trade group representing the polluters, as your authority is like hiring the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association to cater your vegan picnic.
Even so, there is some disagreement about the radiation health hazards posed by phosphogypsum. Other countries have experimented with projects that repurpose the waste in agriculture and construction. And the International Atomic Energy Agency has said that the radiation levels from phosphogypsum could be “sufficiently low” to justify recycling the waste rather than continuing to store it.
In the fall of 2020, during the closing weeks of the Trump administration, the EPA gave a green light for the fertilizer industry to remove some of its radioactive waste to be used as filler for road construction projects.
Because the industry said it’s unfeasible to truck the hazardous waste more than 200 miles, that meant that the radioactive waste stored in Florida would be spread on Florida’s roads.
This was sold to the public as a “win-win environmental solution.’”
“Allowing the reuse of phosphogypsum shows EPA’s commitment to working with industry in a way that both reduces environmental waste and protects public health,” Wheeler said in an EPA news release.
But the agency never explained the benefits to public health because of this move.
Presidential election changes government policy of fertilizer waste
Environmental groups howled in protest, saying that the EPA side-stepped sufficient public notice and a required comment period.
It became moot when Trump lost the election, and President Joe Biden appointed a new EPA administrator who promptly reversed the phosphogypsum decision made by his predecessor.
No phosphogypsum got moved from the Florida stacks. But that’s not the end of the story.
The Republican-led Florida Legislature is pushing a bill now that would seek EPA approval to create a “study” to test the use of phosphogypsum as a “construction aggregate” material in some road construction in the state.
For the purposes of the study, the phosphogypsum used would not be classified as hazardous waste, the bill says.
Environmental groups have called this move by Florida lawmakers a reckless endangerment to the health of construction workers and the public at large because of the inevitable leaching of toxins into the surface and groundwater.
“This would be an outrageous handout to the phosphate industry at the expense of the health and safety of Floridians and our environment,” said Ragan Whitlock, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “If this bill becomes law, Florida roads would become ticking time bombs, waiting for the next storm event to expose our communities and waterways to this radioactive waste.”
But maybe Whitlock’s wrong. Maybe this is as safe as The Fertilizer Institute says it is.
So, my proposal is simple. If this industry-friendly Florida study is approved, it should be limited to the roads in front of the homes of the Florida legislators who voted for it.
If the public is truly not at risk for spreading radioactive waste on the road, let’s find out by testing that on the roads where the enabling lawmakers and their families live.
Thoughts and prayers.
Frank Cerabino is a columnist at The Palm Beach Post, part of the Paste BN Florida Network. You can reach him at fcerabino@gannett.com.