For the first time since 1989, fertilizer manufacturers can sell their radioactive waste to governments for road projects. In mid-October, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency posted that they were agreeing with a study by The Fertilizer Institute, an industry-backed group. That study said the phosphogypsum waste, which includes uranium and radium, wasn’t as dangerous to human health as the EPA thought.
Environmentalist organizations were taken by surprise, but reacted quickly. “This approval seems incredibly short-sighted and irresponsible given past EPA findings that radon and gamma radiation from phosphogypsum in roads would pose an unreasonable risk to human health and safety,” said Jacki Lopez of the Florida office of the Center for Biological Diversity. Local environmentalists have a conflict. Using the phosphogypsum on roads would mean less on the stacks. Those stacks are known to spring leaks to the point of losing millions of gallons of toxic water into the aquifer, as happened in New Wales in 2016. In the 1990s, a different stack spilled large amounts of water into riverways, killing wildlife including manatees. Even without leaks, many believe the runoff from rainfall is enough to pollute waterways, although Mosaic said it is meeting all federal guidelines.
To the EPA, the question has been which is more hazardous to human health: storing the waste in the unstable stacks or spreading the waste across the nation’s highways? In 1992, using data from victims of atomic bombs in Japan, the EPA came up with threshold figures to help them decide whether an application is too dangerous. That figure is the lifetime odds of a person being stricken with a fatal cancer if exposed long term to the phosphogypsum. They assumed the material would emit radiation less than 35 picocuries per gram.
Source: The Arcadian
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