Florida state of emergency with millions of gallons of “radioactive wastewater”

This seems like mostly schadenfreude. What does it matter to you if they pay or we all do, assuming that we have more than enough as a society to pay for it, i.e. the benefits of capitalism outweigh the losses.

The only impact is potential moral hazard, but that could be prevented with loss of licenses, etc.

I feel compelled, from the tone of the comment, to point this out:

Limited liability isn't some surprise side effect of a corporation's legal structure, it is often right there in the name (Ltd, LLC, Pty Ltd, etc).

Yes that structure lets people get away with harmful shenanigans. The system is biased towards optimism. Feature, not bug. The benefits and strengths of this have so far completely outweighed the costs to the point where the argument against limited liability no longer has a leg to stand on.

The bonds and insurance idea is a much better way to play the situation.

> The only solution is to force companies to put up bonds or insurance sufficient to ensure this kind of devastation is properly paid for by private parties.

Agreed, but in this case, it apparently was paid for by insurance. The next sentence in the paragraph antattack quoted is: "(Its insurance company wound up footing the bill.)"

It's still horrible from an environmental perspective, but at least Florida taxpayers didn't pay the cleanup bill.

Hunt them down. Make them drink it.

No after-the-fact mechanism works against risks that take decades to materialise. Responsibility always dilutes faster than environmental toxins. Evidence is lost. Most senior decision-makers have died. Shareholders changed ten times over, etc...

That, plus misplaced optimism and time discounting combine to render even the strongest signal (i. e. the death penalty) blunt as to actually changing behaviour.

These disasters need to be stopped in the planning & licencing phase. For that, you'd need a state government that actually cares, and an EPA that isn't completely gutted every four to eight years.

Coal operations have slurry ponds where they store the sludge from washing the coal. And coal power plants have fly ash ponds which are bad for the environment. We’re shutting down the coal plants but these ponds will be around forever.

Here is a map of ash ponds from power plants

https://earthjustice.org/features/map-coal-ash-contaminated-...

Here’s a link to the slurry spill I lived through with no water for days

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_County_coal_slurry_sp...

And here’s some pictures of the “impoundments” https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/8693/coal-sludge-im...

Edit to add this quote:

“ Although coal impoundments have a relatively low rate of failure, their extreme size—some hold more than a billion gallons of sludge—makes any breach potentially devastating.”

There is a gruesome death trap in Montana, https://www.hcn.org/issues/48.22/latest-thousands-of-snow-ge...

Is this the kind of mines that produce phosphate for fertilizer?

> There's not much that can be done with it because essentially (not basically) it is acid

Couldn't you neutralize it by (say) dumping in a bunch of baking soda? Or lye? (Hm, what actually happens if you mix sulfuric acid with lye? Do they neutralize each other, or turn into something even nastier than the sum of its parts? That'll teach me to blow off high school chemistry.)

> because essentially (not basically) it is acid'

Haha, I see what you did there...lol. Touche, good sir.

Yes, capitalism is very gay that way

And even flourish - lack of humans more than compensates high radioactivity levels, as the Tchernobyl example has shown.

Phosphate industry waste water has a pH of 1.5-2. The ponds are sterile and a lovely azure despite what Google Maps shows. Nothing grows on their banks naturally, though with substantial remediation over a couple of decades, it's possible to surround the pond with a ring of pines and grass...this is the Florida phosphate industry's "land and lakes" program.

From time to time Florida developers have built housing developments on "land and lakes" tracts. It usually ends badly because the ground is unstable (still settling after all being mined), though post-tensioned prestressed concrete slab foundations can be used to reduce cracking (but not eventually uneven floors).

In my experience with phosphate industry sludge ponds, nothing much grows. I just looked at aerials from a tract southeast of Bartow that was under consideration for development in 1997. It had been out of service for almost twenty years back then. The ponds are no longer obviously toxic, but there is still does not appear to be normal Florida native vegetation along any of the shorelines.

Not surprising given how acidic phosphate sludge water is.

The fact that sea water can be stored in the leaking stacks over in Manatee county speaks to how sterile they are. The salinity of seawater is deadly to typical terrestrial plants.

Probably not what they were referencing, but it made me think of "The Expert" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

All mine.

Have you ever eaten a banana?

My point is that some types of radiation carriers are easier to ingest (or breathe in) than others.

So did animals in Chernobyl.

Not great but not terrible

Something radioactive enough to significantly increase your chances to have cancer in your lifetime can have no indication at all at the time of exposure. It's one reason it's important to be so careful about radioactive waste and it's disposal.

The processed sludge from sewer plants is still sometimes used as a fertilizer.

That's not at all what I said or mean.

Working with nature means using natural systems to produce food with less human energy and fossil fuels, and chemicals, and cutting down forests.

A quick quote from the referenced work:

""" The pragmatic and practical approach to the main body of this work largely omits reference to those visions or beliefs classifiable as spiritual or mystical; not because these are not a normal part of human experience, but because they are arrived at as a result of long contemplation or intense involvement with the mysteries that eternally surround us.

We may “dream" understanding, but it is something we cannot demand, define, or teach to others; it is for each of us to develop. There are things that nobody else can help us with, but in a book written to help people make real-life decisions, to build new landscapes, to regenerate damaged forests, and to lighten our load on earth, the present need is for clear and practical approaches. In the preceding chapters, well-tried and common- sense techniques and strategies of earth restoration have been described and figured.

All of this comes to naught if we, as a people, continue to invest in arms and destruction, to permit land abuse, and to fail to tackle the social and political impediments to reclaiming desertified and abused lands, or even to prevent the poisoning of land. Thus, the following sections give strategies for change in the social and economic areas of society.

These strategies may, in fact, be of more assistance to real change than the skills of land management, for society has far more competent farmers and engineers than it has ethical ... """

Have you read their link? That doesn’t seem like the charitable interpretation of their views, though I share your desire to avoid that fate.

Not only this but ancient agriculture supported fewer humans with a lot more work. This romanticized idea of growing food the old fashioned way and forget today’s busy way of life omits the part of doing nothing but growing food from not figuratively dawn to dusk. I spent some time in my youth farming the old fashioned way: hand tools only, carrying water from somewhere else, removing pests and weeds by hand. It is a terribly labor intensive process that managed to supplement my family’s food needs but not eliminate the need for purchased food by any means. We managed to do literally nothing else. We certainly couldn’t have fed anyone else since we didn’t have any kind of excess.

I don’t like industrial food. It is killing the planet abs pretty quickly. But it’s not doing it because farmers are evil. It’s because it the cheapest way to produce food. If we as a society want to go to a place where food costs 10-100x as much while availability goes down by about the same amount, let’s figure out how we will prevent mass starvation and population decline. But if the GP expects that farmers will switch to compost abs hand tools, they should probably expect to pay a lot more for a lot less food.