Putnam: Ease Rules On Phosphogypsum TAMPA (WUSF) - Nobody really knows how many fish were killed in Tampa Bay when up to 60 million gallons of acidic wastewater escaped from an overflowing phosphate retention pond during Tropical Storm Frances.

And during Hurricane Jeanne, four and a half million gallons of wastewater overflowed from a phosphate retention pond near Bartow. That spill might eventually threaten the Peace River.

And with more hurricanes threatening to batter the state, there are moves to lessen the danger of another spill.

One way to do that is to reduce the amount of waste material that goes into those flat-topped hills known as "gypstacks." Twenty-four of these slightly toxic mountains dot Florida's landscape. And an estimated 30 million tons are added to those stacks every year.

But the federal government has banned the use of these byproducts of phosphate processing. Earlier this year, Congressman Adam Putnam held a meeting in Bartow with officials from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to try to change that.

He says the recent spill at Cargill Crop Nutrition has given new urgency to his efforts.

PUTNAM: Clearly, managing phosphogypsum stacks is going to be with us forever if we don't find alternative uses for them. And the water management issue, controlling the water at the top of those stacks, was an issue that we raised in the hearing and pointed to the dangers of, and it's really has, in my view fallen on deaf ears at the EPA. Maybe now, they understand the danger that we were attempting to make them aware of, and warn them about, and it might give them incentive to find additional uses and spread these stacks out, as opposed to creating what is the potential for an additional spill every single rainy season.

The Bartow Republican believes one way to reduce the problem is by loosening regulations that ban the use of phosphogypsum in commercial products such as wallboard and in roadbed construction.

Glenn Compton is president of Manasota-88, an environmental group based in Manatee and Sarasota counties. He says these proposals surface every time an environmental catastrophe strikes the phosphate industry.

COMPTON: We could have real concerns because the phosphogypsum that would be used in roadbeds or in other products that would be put forth would be a way of spreading radiation around with little oversight or little regulation. So ultimately, it would get out into the environment and cause health problems further down the road.

The EPA says the slight radioactivity in phosphogypsum rules out its use in commercial products. They say there's an increased chance of getting cancer if one breathes the radon emissions over a period of 70 years.

A spokesman for the agency in Washington, D.C. didn't want to go on the record, but did say some improvements are going to be made in the way the EPA oversees phosphate operations. But he says the ban on phosphogypsum is not going to change soon. He says there's no better approach to managing the waste than to keep it piled in the gypstacks.

That kind of policy does not sit well with Congressman Putnam.

PUTNAM: I think it's going to require additional legislation and continued Congressional oversight. Its bureaucratic arrogance at this point and they just need to know that we haven't stopped watching. We're going to continue to monitor much of this and push them and probe them and make them defend their position. Because I believe that sound science is on the side of using phosphogypsum for things other than stacking up on the side of Highway 60 and holding water with it.

The EPA has agreed to meet with researchers at the Florida Institute of Phosphate Research. The Bartow-based institute has investigated ways to reuse phosphogypsum. Those include using small doses as a soil additive, and as a raw material of glass, from which the radon glass could not escape. It can also be used to help organic matter decompose in landfills.

But environmentalists like Compton say that would merely take care of a small part of the overall problem of phosphate waste. The problem is only bound to get bigger, he says. That's because several more mines are being proposed in the southern Bone Valley area, as older mines are exhausted in Polk County. Mines have been proposed for eastern Manatee, Hardee and DeSoto counties.

COMPTON: We've for many years tried to put forward the idea that the entire industry needs to be looked at holistically, not just the mining impacts, but also the processing and ultimately the disposal of the phosphogypsum. This is a product that really causes pollution at every step of the way, from cradle to grave.

He says politicians need to determine whether this is an industry that needs to have greater oversight by environmental regulators. But that could be a hard sell in rural counties such as Hardee and DeSoto. Those counties offer few jobs and its existing industries were hit hard by Hurricane Charley. © Copyright 2012, WUSF