A Florida company is giving new meaning to the popular “reduce, reuse, and recycle.” Specifically, it wants to reuse the byproduct produced during phosphate mining to build roads. There’s only one problem: It’s radioactive.
Using radioactive material to build roads in Florida . Earlier this week, the Environmental Protection Agency approved the request of Mosaic, the largest phosphate producer in the US, to carry out a small-scale pilot project using various mixtures of phosphogypsum as a road base. The company plans to create four sections of test roads with the phosphogypsum road base at its New Wales facility in Polk County.
Federal regulations require phosphogypsum to be stored in engineered piles, known as stacks , to limit the public’s exposure to its radioactive components. Standing hundreds of feet high and covering hundreds of acres, phosphogypsum stacks can resemble small mountains.
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