Is this another disaster in the making, or at least a poor precedent... 7

[JohnRBaker]

Just read about this:

Florida lawmakers want to use radioactive material to pave road

https://wusfnews.wusf.usf.edu/trans...ant-to-use-radioactive-material-to-pave-roads

And excerpt from the above item:

Roads in Florida could soon include phosphogypsum — a radioactive waste material from the fertilizer industry — under a bill lawmakers have sent to Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Conservation groups are urging DeSantis to veto the bill, saying phosphogypsum would hurt water quality and put road construction crews at a higher risk of cancer.

The Environmental Protection Agency also has a say in the matter: The agency regulates phosphogypsum, and any plan to use it in roads would require a review, the EPA told NPR.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[CWB1]

Isnt everything radioactive?

At this point I believe the rubber tires on the road surface are producing more particulate emissions than the diesel engines.

Dust thrown into the air by tires is by far the most prevalent PM generated by vehicles, but to turn that metric into revenue would require taxing vehicle usage rather than production.

 

[FacEngrPE]

I am not going to panic over this issue. The risks from improper storage and unmanaged release appear to be greater than the risks from use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphogypsum[/URL]]The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has banned most applications of phosphogypsum having a 226Ra concentration of greater than 10 picocurie/gram (0.4 Bq/g)[7] in 1990.[3] As a result, phosphogypsum which exceeds this limit is stored in large stacks since extracting such low concentrations of radium is either not possible or not economical with current technology for either the use of the gypsum or the radium[citation needed]. Given the traditional definition of the Curie via the specific activity of 226 Ra, this limit is equivalent to 0.01 milligrams (0.00015 gr) of radium per metric ton or a concentration of 10 parts per trillion.

 

[davidbeach]

Isn't everything radioactive?

In the early '80s when I was working on my Bachelor degree, the Physics department was in a cast in place concrete building built in the late 1950s. They did a certain amount of radioisotope experimentation and the most difficult part of any of it was getting the experiment shielded from the building sufficiently to know that anything they saw was from the experiment and not the building. So it was always amusing when the anti-nuc protestors would set up their info table in the corridor, sitting there with their back against that benign looking concrete wall...

I’ll see your silver lining and raise you two black clouds. - Protection Operations

 

[CWB1]

Shortly before leaving active duty military service I attended a mandatory briefing with a VA benefits advisor who stated that the depleted uranium coatings used on armored vehicles was a health hazard and that we should claim disability for exposure to it. I instantly thought of Homer Simpson pronouncing nuclear as "nuc-u-lar."