Florida moves forward on radioactive road paving plan as Gov. DeSantis signs new law

This seems bad. Can someone with expertise on this comment? At a minimum, I’d worry about worker safety as they pave roads with radioactive materials.

I don’t know if we have any forum members with this knowledge. If you know someone, please tag them.

Im not seriously interested in your partisan opinion based on your 10 minute google degree.

https://www.npr.org/2023/06/30/1185280180/florida-roads-radioactive-desantis-signs-law

Florida is another step closer to paving its roads with phosphogypsum — a radioactive waste material from the fertilizer industry — after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a controversial bill into law Thursday.


​

 

Starting a thread on a political debate site, and expecting to limit respondents to only those with a highly specialized, and uncommon expertise, is a ridiculous thing to do. Nevertheless, as you make clear, you do not want my opinion on your topic, without my having that rare understanding and experience, I will not offer it.

Instead, I will just pre-emptively comment-- in case others, like myself, take your restriction to heart-- that if you get very few responses, don't try blaming it on a lack of any interest in the topic, among our membership (unless you are prepared to be mocked for it).

 

Partisans on the right will tell me that drinking radioactive waste is healthy, and partisans on the left will tell me the sky is falling.

That’s fine. It just doesn’t add any value.

 

Phosphogypsum contains uranium and all of its decay products, including radon, which is a radioactive gas. The activity is 0.4 Bq/g, or 400 Bq/kg (1 Bq is one disintegration per second, thus, one kg will emit 400 particles per second). This is about 1000-fold the radioactivity of drinking water, so it is quite significant.

With that said, I think the risk to motorists with phosphogypsum in roads is quite low, since the alpha and beta particles will be absorbed by the car before getting to the passengers. However, I'd be worried about the safety of road workers. Of course, I am not an expert, I am not sure what the concentration of phosphgypsum in the road material will be.

Of course, this is a giveaway to the fertilizer industry, which wants to get rid of phoshogypsum as a side product of phosphate fertilizer production. Right now, it has to be stored as potentially toxic waste, so it costs them money. If it goes into roads, they get rid of their waste. Very convenient. It's also not a surprise that the GOP prioritizes profit of a certain private sector over worker safety. I wonder if campaign donations from the fertilizer industry were involved.

 

Ty. Yes, I’d like to know the quid pro quo DeSantis gets in return. Worker safety would be my primary concern. Since much of Florida is near sea level, and a huge part is over a swamp, roads tend to sink, which could potentially impact water supplies.

It would be awful if the workers had to wear radioactive suits to build these roads. It’s hot when wearing just a swimsuit.


Thanks for taking the time.

 

I'm more worried about the deep water injection they have recently started doing. That's pumping wastewater directly into the ground.

For anyone that doesn't know if you drive around certain areas of Florida you will see what appears to be old landfills but in reality are gyp stacks. You can't see it from the ground but they contain millions of gallons of the toxic wastewater which Mosaic claims is only slightly radioactive and acidic. And of course every time there's a major storm event at least one of them is going to breach and release millions of gallons into the watershed. They are nothing but ticking time bombs which is why ever so often fertilizer companies would go out of business and reincorporate under a new name so they would not be responsible for them any longer.

Then of course you have sinkholes that open up underneath of them releasing that same toxic wastewater into the local aquifer.

Mosaic calls themselves good stewards of the land. The reality is they make a million dollars or better per acre and only spend about $6,000 on reclamation efforts for that same acre.

They have plans to mine 19,000 acres in this county but we have been holding out for years but of course they will eventually get their way because there's just too much money in it.

The phosphate industry has had big control of Florida since at least the early 1900s and it doesn't matter who the governor is. They get their way one way or the other.

 

This is a typical example of a market failure. The cost of the product does not include the REAL cost of the environmental remediation. In fact, the cost of dealing with the environmental pollution is shifted to the public, in other words, profits are privatized but losses are socialized. This is nothing new, a well known phenomenon. Typically, free market proponents tend to pretend that these types of market failures don't exist.

 

Hmmmm - here are your research papers courtesy of google scholar

https://scholar.google.com.au/schol...sum+road+construction&oq=phosphogypsum++road+

 

I would be more worried about living near them

 

It’s more a failure in our constitution. The FF didn’t imagine a world where the top 1% could keep congress creatures as obedient slaves.

The taxpayers pay towards labor costs, too. A big percentage of full time Walmart (and other companies) employees are on welfare, to supplement low wages.

My last employer had a department dedicated to getting government gravy for training employees. It’s a ridiculous amount of paperwork to complete. How many government employees are we paying to process all this paperwork to ensure we, the taxpayers, send money to billionaires so they don’t have to pay their own way?

But single mom of two who can’t find a job is a drain on society.

 

Yes, what’s the leakage when the road cracks and the winds come? I’ve no clue.

 

It’s nice to have a chemistry prof on the board.

 

It emits radon gas and isn't terribly dangerous in the open air. Not so good in enclosed spaces though. It's a fairly strong cancer risk with repeated exposure.

 

What It ultimately is, is simple greed. There's so much money that one Palm greases the other and they get to do whatever the hell they want.

I have heard stories of cattle's teeth falling out that are grazed on reclaimed mine land.

The area they plan to mine is a couple of miles outside of town and it is pretty rural but quite a few people do live there many of them probably several generations.

And the land out there is still selling at very high rates. I don't know how anyone would pay any amount of money out there for a house. I'm pretty sure Mosaic already holds the mineral rights to all of that land.

All they're waiting for is the zoning.

You couldn't sell me an acre of land out there at a $1,000 an acre

 

As far as the radioactivity... There is a small amount of radiation naturally present in the Earth.

But when they process their great big mountains of it, they are concentrating it.

I have heard that most of their phosphate is sold to other countries. I'm surprised it isn't considered some sort of strategic mineral reserve because it's basically necessary for modern agricultural crop production.

And when it's gone, it's gone.

 

It’s only recently that I learned we only own about a foot of land. That’s another benefit of owning congress critters.

 

Are you on proposed mine land? I'm confused how can you only own about a foot?

 

How long is this stuff dangerously radioactive for? The dangerous element is radon, but that has such a short half life that it's used up far faster than the uranium decay chain can replace it.

 

Because some else owns the mineral rights. I’m sitting on gold? Not mine.

 

Every road is paved with radioactive material. Most matter is slightly radioactive. Even water you drink

The question is real how much radiation does it emit. It's it like being X-rayed or less this would come down to millirads and hour.

I've been trained in industrial radiography this includes gamma sources (The one you can't use on people because it will kill them.)

So it would be important to learn how radioactive it is. If it's only slightly more than background you'll likely not have a problem unless you are licking the road. I'll have to look into it and see how radioactive it is.

 

I don't know exactly how it works but I know that when they get approval for the mine everyone out there in that area is going to have to go.

 

Read a little bit more about phospogypsom and it's widely used as a substrate in roads and parking lots. What I have read seems to indicate once the road is built it doesn't produce any more than background radiation as Portland cement is a standardizing agent. The danger is when it is being put from and I remember working construction and seeing them apply that stuff and everybody was wearing respirators.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1850391/

Chances are it's under your roads and parking lots.

 

See post #4 in this thread. Of course, phosphogypsum will be diluted in the road material, I don't know by how much.

A more important point: Phosphorous resources will run out in 80 years.

http://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2016/finalwebsite/solutions/phosphorus.html#:~:text=Earth's phosphorus is being depleted,of it in crop fertilizers.

It's just another resource, just like oil and fresh water in the west, which the current economy depletes without a plan on what comes after. How do we feed the future world population without oil and fertilizer? Of course, you are not supposed to ask those questions, unless you want to be attacked as a whacko environmentalist. Much better to just keep consuming and stick you head in the sand, in order to not upset economic growth.

The real culprit here is the simple physical fact that exponential growth in a finite system (earth) is not sustainable. Our children/grandchildren will have an interesting ride....

Phosphogypsum was not allowed in roads through EPA rule until 2020, when Trump sunsetted that said rule. Biden brought it back in 2021. So, no, it is not likely that it currently is found in roads/parking lots.

 

From my 10 minute google degree, I gather this isn't a good idea. Even more concerning is why are we using fertilizers with radioactive byproducts? I'd rather just pay more for safer produce. It almost makes meat more healthy than fruits and veggies. yet its 2023 and we are still putting high fructose corn syrup in almost everything. Yes, its true, most 3rd world countries have "healthier" soda than we do.

 

The radioactive byproduct is a consequence of phosphoric acid production from phosphate rock. It cannot be helped, unless you find a new source of phosphorus.

Here is another interesting article into the matter:

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2013/04/01/phosphorus-essential-to-life-are-we-running-out/

Just as with oil, the cheap and easy phosphorous is gone, i.e. the low hanging fruit is picked. To get new phosphorous continues to be more and more energy intensive, and, thus expensive. In the backdrop of a 3% increase of phosphorous consumption per year (exponential growth), this will spell doom for the future.

Of course, this is expected, because the concepts of extracting a non-renewable resource is the same as with fossil fuels,