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

[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.