Florida bill allowing radioactive roads made of potentially cancer-causing mining waste signed by De

[icymist]

Source: CBS News

Florida governor and presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis signed a bill Thursday that would allow for roads across Florida to be made with "radioactive" mining waste that has been linked to cancer.

The measure, brought forward by the state House, adds phosphogypsum to a list of "recyclable materials" that state officials say can be used in road construction.

The list already included ground rubber from car tires, ash residue from coal combustion byproducts, recycled mixed-plastic, glass and construction steel, which officials had previously determined are "part of the solid waste stream and that contribute to problems of declining space in landfills."

But unlike most of those products, phosphogypsum is not a material that is aggregated in landfills. It's the remains left behind from mining phosphate, which is described by the EPA as being a "radioactive material" because it contains "small amounts" of uranium and radium.

Read more: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/florida-radioactive-roads-phosphogypsum-potentially-cancer-causing-mining-waste-bill-signed-ron-desantis/

[bringthePaine]

1. its already a toxic shithole by most civilized measures, sooooooooo...fuck 'em

[JPK]

2. Who in Florida...

Owns phosphogypsum waste storage sites in Florida. Maybe they need to dispose of said material.

[mpcamb]

36. Or do they import carcinogens from other states?

[sheshe2]

3. The man is one sick dude.

He needs an asylum not the governor's mansion.

[Rhiannon12866]

18. +1000!

It's like he's endlessly looking for new ways to harm and kill off other humans...

[brush]

49. Take notes, Dem oppo researcher, in case this nut gets the gop nomination.

[2naSalit]

4. Well I was already planning...

To never go there again for any reason. I've successfully boycotted that place for decades.

[Snarkoleptic]

5. Sounds like his donors have massive mounds of this junk lying around, so

they turned to their boy Ronald to assist in disposing of it.

[ananda]

6. There is something ddeply wrong with that man.

He is missing a human heart.

[barbtries]

8. plus it appears

that he has a legislature that is comprised of nothing but yes men. can't record his travel? question how he pays for it? he's got a law for that, and they pass it. wants to pave the roads with radioactive waste? he's got a law for that, and they pass it. Don't want to allow people to say gay? he's got a law for that, and they pass it. his boondoggle with Disney? did it all with the help of lawmakers who as far as i can tell might just be paper dolls the way they kowtow to his every impulse.

i have a hard time getting over the incredulity of what this man is accomplishing in FL. it's all bad, it's fascist, it should not be legal. Who is pushing back on this overreach and abuse of power??

[Mawspam2]

7. Meatball Ron staring as The Tin Man in...

...The Wizard of Blahs.

[PSPS]

9. Geiger counter option on new cars. Google's directions will offer "less radiation" option.

Instead of a route being tagged as "faster due to heavy traffic," it can now include "faster but higher radiation."

[VMA131Marine]

12. The radium and uranium decay chains consist of

alpha and beta emitters which would be easily stopped by a car body. Obviously you’d be much more exposed walking, on a bicycle, or on a motorcycle.

[denbot]

15. Gypsum dissolves in water.

It will be on the road surface, and what doesn’t become airborne will accumulate in the water system for a very long time.

[DBoon]

20. road dust can be inhaled

and the decay chain includes a gas, radon

[dembotoz]

38. bet they will outlaw masks for that too.

[cachukis]

10. I think some of this is an overreaction. I don't think it is as bad

as media wants to it to be.

[pazzyanne]

32. This is worth a little research time.

The EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler under the Trump asministration, approved this use in the following statement: “The approval of this request means that phosphogypsum, which already requires significant engineering and regulatory controls to be disposed of in stacks, can now be put to productive use rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure. This demonstrates President Trump’s commitment to “win-win” environmental solutions.”

I can't help but think about another statement: "Everything Trump touches, dies."

[diva77]

11. OP article didn't reveal much about the phosphogypsum hazardous materials - here's from 2016

Like a horror story:


Fertilizer plant leak leads to massive sinkhole in Florida

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fertilizer-plant-leak-leads-to-massive-sinkhole-in-florida/

September 16, 2016 / 6:27 PM / CBS/AP

TAMPA, Fla. More than 200 million gallons of contaminated waste water from a fertilizer plant in central Florida leaked into one of the state’s main underground sources of drinking water after a massive sinkhole opened up beneath a storage pond, a phosphate company said Friday.

Mosaic, the world’s largest supplier of phosphate, said the hole opened up beneath a pile of waste material called a “gypsum stack.” The 215-million gallon storage pond sat atop the waste mineral pile. The company said the sinkhole is about 45 feet in diameter.

Mosaic says it’s monitoring groundwater and has found no o
ffsite impacts.

“Groundwater moves very slowly,” said David Jellerson, Mosaic’s senior director for environmental and phosphate projects. “There’s absolutely nobody at risk.”

The water had been used to transport the gypsum, which is a byproduct of fertilizer production, the company said.

That’s not a huge relief to residents like Rob Bentley, who lives in the area, reports CBS affiliate WTSP.

“I’m a little more concerned now. What did they say? Radioactivity possibly? Slightly? Yeah - I’m concerned.” said Bentley.

SNIP

The sinkhole, discovered by a worker on Aug. 27, is believed to reach down to the Floridan aquifer, the company said in a news release. Aquifers are vast, underground systems of porous rocks that hold water and allow water to move through the holes within the rock.

The Floridan aquifer is a major source of drinking water in the state. One of the highest producing aquifers in the world, it underlies all of Florida and extends into southern Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.

SNIP

=============
bold type added to emphasize the typical corporate response.
And just like Rush of the Titan, the Mosaic guy has the same cavalier and negligent attitude towards safety.

=============
K&R for at least making some of the public aware of another dire offense from DeSenseless

[NJCher]

28. Thanks for that research

Just how clueless does one have to be to keep electing this jerk.

[Orrex]

13. I'm sure that this will be used in wealthy white retirement communities

[Warpy]

14. Ah, Florida! Where the roads are paved with GARBAGE

Works for me, I guess. They're trying to cover their butts for all those 1950s clocks and watches with radium dials.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

30. Garbage is not the problem. Garbage is not used. They use waste. Waste is not the problem

The problem is a specific waste.

You post Title is attention getting but deceptive.

[70sEraVet]

39. The OP title was meant as a word play on 'streets paved with gold'

I don't think it was meant to be deceptive.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

42. Thanks. . . nt

[Warpy]

40. Solid waste like old tires and construction wage is still GARBAGE

and I didn't actually say I disapproved, either. Beats having it clog the landfills.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

43. Okay. Sure does beat landfill. But I think of re-used and recycled waste as not-garbage

I think it's okay, but I haven't looked into the degree of radioactivity. The OP excerpt doesn't cover that point.

[diva77]

45. Unfortunately, a tire-related chemical has been found to cause death in adult coho salmon in urban

streams.

https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/12/03/tire-related-chemical-largely-responsible-for-adult-coho-salmon-deaths-in-urban-streams/

Tire-related chemical is largely responsible for adult coho salmon deaths in urban streams
December 3, 2020 Sarah McQuate UW News

Every fall more than half of the coho salmon that return to Puget Sound’s urban streams die before they can spawn. In some streams, all of them die. But scientists didn’t know why.

Now a team led by researchers at the University of Washington Tacoma, UW and Washington State University Puyallup have discovered the answer. When it rains, stormwater flushes bits of aging vehicle tires on roads into neighboring streams. The killer is in the mix of chemicals that leach from tire wear particles: a molecule related to a preservative that keeps tires from breaking down too quickly.

This research was published Dec. 3 in Science.

“Most people think that we know what chemicals are toxic and all we have to do is control the amount of those chemicals to make sure water quality is fine. But, in fact, animals are exposed to this giant chemical soup and we don’t know what many of the chemicals in it even are,” said co-senior author Edward Kolodziej, an associate professor in both the UW Tacoma Division of Sciences & Mathematics and the UW Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering.

“Here we started with a mix of 2,000 chemicals and were able to get all the way down to this one highly toxic chemical, something that kills large fish quickly and we think is probably found on every single busy road in the world.”

SNIP

[tonekat]

16. Can't DeInsanity just run his head into a wall

...again and again to own the libs?

Radioactive roads...brilliant!

[sakabatou]

17. *headdesk*

[ZonkerHarris]

19. GOP - Giving Out Poison

[SunSeeker]

21. Wow, not The Onion!

[PortTack]

22. All the more reason to not vacation there. All that heat on road surfaces billowing toxic chemicals

Into the air as you travel to your magical experience in FL…right

[Qutzupalotl]

23. Can we start with Rick Scott's driveway?

If anyone deserves it, it's him.

Actually, he looks like someone beat me to it.

[calimary]

24. And don't forget Mar-a-Lago! Any pavement there need resurfacing?

[Ligyron]

34. We should have a mansion built using all that waste.

Then invite deSatan and his lackey legislature in for a banquet and month long strategy session.

[ShazzieB]

25. It figures.

If anyone was gone to sign this garbage into law, it would be DeSantis.

I need a new nickname for him. I used to called him DeSatan, but I decided that wasn't fair to the Santanic Temple, who are doing a lot of good work these days.

[AwakeAtLast]

26. Another Times Beach in the future

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach,_Missouri

[mwb970]

27. Are the people of Florida just going to put up with this forever?

Ron seems to be a one-man natural disaster that strikes the state every single day. What a nightmare place to live! It gives me the creeps.

[Ligyron]

35. Problem is a lot of people are having too much fun, i.e., golf, tennis, boating etc 2 bother voting.

As one who lives here, nothing he does has any real impact on my day to day existence.

[melm00se]

46. This is his last term as governor

FL has term limits built into the constitution.

[RocRizzo55]

29. Just think...

They will no longer need street lights in Floriduh.
However, you might want it invest in lead clothing.

[Vinca]

31. Another reason not to go to Florida.

[Chainfire]

33. I would suspect that the biggest danger would be to the workers handling the materials and

breathing the dust.

[Emile]

37. What a shit hole of a state!

[WhiteTara]

41. how many miles does a tire have to

travel to remove all the road tar? That's as close as I ever want to be to Florida.

[twodogsbarking]

44. Injury lawyers are standing by.

Have you ever been to Florida? You may have a claim.

[melm00se]

47. Ton answer some questions in this thread

- Phosphate mining has been going on in FL since the late 1800s
- FL and NC produce 75% (~15 million tons) of US phosphate.
- The main use of phosphate is in fertilizer
- FL has 9 active phosphate mines in (Polk, Hillsborough, Manatee, and Hamilton counties) which stretch from the Tampa area south to Sarasota.
- Phosphogypsum stacks are located near mines.
- Phosphogypsum is considered NORM residue (naturally occurring radioactive material) by the EPA and has since the 1990s.
- Piney Point (near St Petersburg), closed in 2002, had a waste water leak in 2021 dumping phosphogypsum (as well as other wastes) into the Tampa bay.

[csziggy]

48. In the 1960s my father was hired by the Atomic Energy Commission to see if those radioactives

Could be recovered. He was a phosphate mining engineer, as was his father. (In fact, my grandfather's name is on the patent for the process for removing phosphate from the matrix removed from the ground.) At the time, it was not economically feasible to remove the radioactive compounds. As a result, the sand that contains those materials were used to make concrete blocks from which many of the houses of the time were built in Central Florida.

Sometime in the 1980s, there was a big scandal about radioactive houses. It was determined that the level of radiation inside those houses was not very much higher than the background radiation - maybe equivalent to that in Denver, Colorado.

A bit of history - the process developed by my grandfather in the 1920s or 30s (and chemists and other professionals working for Swift & Co. for whom they worked) produced a huge amount of "clean sand." My grandfather and one of his co-workers decided that the easiest thing to do would be to pile it up into a giant pile of sand. It became known as Sand Mountain. In the 1950s it became a playground for kids. The owner of Cypress Gardens tried increasing the attraction by having skiing competitions with their water skiers going down the mountain.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/1r3yu1/sand_mountain_in_fort_meade_florida_date_unknown/

Then the kids that played on Sand Mountain started getting ringworm so the mountain was closed to the public.

In the 1960s the price of phosphate was high and my father was approached by a company who had purchased the rights to the mountain about reprocessing the sand. My father improved on the old process so it was economically profitable to do this. It was then he was approached by the Atomic Energy Commission. Since they could not cheaply remove the radioactives, they left them in - they were only traces and were not thought to be a danger to the public.

By the time that company was finished, Sand Mountain was gone. So my grandfather built it, and my father tore it down.

[quaker bill]

50. It is a bad idea

However much of the hand wringing I have read gets it wrong. I say this as a chemist who worked in a research lab on this material and its proper disposal.

Phosphogypsum is mildly radioactive. It contains radium, uranium, strontium and other radioisotopes in small quantities. While the concentration is very low, the quantity of the overall waste stream is huge.

Now as far as uranium is concerned, most phosphate miners are subsidiaries of petrochemical companies, that interestingly have a nuclear fuels operation. While the phosphate ore has so little uranium that it would not be mined for this profitably. However, when you are already grinding and dissolving the ore in sulphuric acid for the phosphate, the extra step to extract the uranium as is passes through the plant is profitable. The uranuim is largely stripped from the process water before it is neutralized forming the gypsum.

The largest threat is that the stuff will produce radon gas as the radium decays constantly, over a very long time. Using it in or near residential areas will increase the long term cancer risk as it will increase ambient radon levels in the local environment. There is nothing to be done to remediate it, which is why it is stored in stacks, gnenrally a long distance from residences.

[BlueWavePsych]

51. DeSatan strikes (out) again ...