Guest opinion: Don’t use radioactive material from Idaho fertilizer production in roads

One of the final gifts of the Trump administration to industrial polluters was to give the green light for fertilizer manufacturers to sell their toxic waste for government road construction. This decision overturned a 31-year U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ban of such use of phosphogypsum, the cancerous and radioactive byproduct of fertilizer production.

That is why Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility has joined with several other environmental groups in a lawsuit to block the EPA’s approval of this radioactive material in road construction.

This is an important issue in Idaho and many other states. Phosphate rock is mined in southeast Idaho to make fertilizer. The resulting phosphogypsum waste is indefinitely store in huge piles. The concentrated radionuclides in phosphogypsum led the EPA to ban its use in roads under President George H.W. Bush. In 2004, lobbying led to a congressional hearing where Elizabeth Cotsworth, head of the EPA’s radiation and indoor air office, staved off industry by reaffirming that phosphogypsum exposure in road building “would lead to excess cancer rates.”

Undeterred, recently the fertilizer industry convinced the EPA to allow it to profitably offload its responsibility for its 60 mountains of radioactive waste piles in 13 states, including Idaho. EPA rubber stamped the partisan analysis of the Fertilizer Institute that phosphogypsum use in roads will be “at least as protective of human health” as stacking the waste in piles. EPA’s Administrator Andrew Wheeler struck down the prior ban and declared the new use a “win-win” environmental solution.

In fact, no effective technologies are known for processing phosphogypsum so that it can be used in roads without solving the problem of radioactivity. But the stacking of phosphogysum waste is also extremely dangerous to human health. Radium can be blown from gypsum stacks and leach into nearby water and aquifers. It can be absorbed by plants, consumed by livestock and wildlife and end up in humans.

That is one reason why, in Idaho, the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes this month filed a lawsuit in federal court to stop a land exchange between the Trump administration and the agribusiness giant J.R. Simplot. The tribes fear that the exchange gives Simplot an adjacent 700 acres to expand its phosphogypsum piles, increasing the possibility of wind carrying radioactive particles to the reservation. They said that the deal also privatizes land that was covered in an 1868 treaty guaranteeing access for traditional hunting and fishing.

The solution to the management of phosphogypsum is not to use the waste to build roads. Rather it is to enhance production efficiency, reduce waste and provide financial assurances that companies producing such waste will protect the environment and the health of nearby communities.

The Idaho Department of the Environmental Quality is currently is engaged in negotiated rulemaking to reconsider how to develop design requirements on these stacks, including run-on and runoff controls for the phosphogypsum stack systems, liner and leachate control systems and perimeter dikes. The draft is open for public comment at the DEQ until Feb. 5.

The management of phosphogypsum is a difficult task — we hope the state gets these design standards right and that we prevail in our lawsuit against EPA. The radium from this fertilizer waste should not end up in our communities or in our roads.