"The U.S. houses hundreds of millions of tons of phosphogypsum in open-air stacks, but regulation is inconsistent."
"In mid-September of 2016 in Tampa, Florida, News Channel 8 reporter Steve Andrews received an alarming phone call. A sinkhole had opened in Mulberry, a small city in Polk County about 30 miles to the east.
“I went up to the assignment desk and asked them to send the chopper up,” Andrews, who retired in 2020, recounted. “The guys radioed back and said, ‘Man, this looks like something from the moon.’” He later added: “It looked like a crater, like you could just drop down straight to hell.”
The sinkhole, which measured 152 feet across at its widest point and 220 feet deep as of October of that year, had opened beneath a 700-acre phosphogypsum stack, a pyramid-like structure of radioactive waste created during the fertilizer production process. The sinkhole sent 215 million gallons of acidic water into the Floridan aquifer, a major source of drinking water for the state.
According to a 2019 report from the Fertilizer Institute, an estimated 734 million tons of phosphogypsum have accumulated in the United States — a number the industry group projected to steadily increase each year. That material sits in more than 70 similar open-air piles, which can be hundreds of feet tall and hundreds of acres wide, rising above the horizon like powdery mountains the color of ash."
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