The Advocate is clearly very strongly against it. It's hard to sift through their opinions to simply get the facts on this one. But essentially Mosaic is trying to expand their storage outward rather than upward because it's safer, especially with the quality of the soil in the area.

Expanding it would help the facility stay viable for another 50 years. But these large mounds (150' tall) are also an environmental concern to the Blind River area if these storage facilities ever break. So far the existing mount hasn't broken, but part of side closest to LA3125 has shifted and required repair. There is concern that the maintenance of these mounds would fall on the taxpayers if/when Mosaic can no longer maintain them.

Full Article

quote:
More than five years after its massive mound of radioactive mining waste began inexplicably shifting in St. James Parish, Mosaic Fertilizer is asking state regulators to declare complete its emergency efforts to halt the pile and to allow it to build a new wing that would cover more than 330 acres of farm land.

Barred from reusing the waste or dumping it in the Mississippi River, as companies once did, Mosaic has piled up the material for decades on hundreds of acres behind its Uncle Sam plant. The mound grew so high that a few years ago aviation warning lights were required near its roughly 200-foot peak.

Known as phosphogypsum, the chalky, whitish material laced with slightly radioactive elements and heavy metals is inextricably linked to Mosaic's production of phosphate fertilizer through the Uncle Sam plant and its sister Faustina facility along the river.

quote:
Gypsum is left over from turning mined phosphate rock into phosphoric acid, which is used in the process to make Mosaic's fertilizer across the river at the Faustina plant, company officials say.

But, for every ton of phosphoric acid made at Uncle Sam, 5.5 tons of waste gypsum are left over, Mosaic says in regulatory papers.

Visible from the Sunshine Bridge, the waste gypsum is pumped as a slurry from the Uncle Sam plant up into large lakes atop various levels of the huge mound near Convent, gradually raising the height of the pile.

Probably in late 2018, the waste pile began shifting, coming to regulators' attention in January 2019 and prompting emergency measures to slow the mound's northward movement toward La. 3214.

quote:
The new wing would start in a cane field in front of the current waste pile and along La. 3214 and eventually be stacked against the northern slope of the pile that was moving, according to schematics in regulatory filings.

Mosaic officials say the weight and pressure of the new wing should help halt any more movement in the north slope, while giving the weak spot underground time to squeeze down and stiffen further under the pressure of the existing pile.

quote:
"We’ve had operations in St. James Parish for 55 years. Today, on both sides of the river, we employ a total of 300 people plus another 200 contractors," said Jackie Barron, Mosaic spokeswoman. "Many of those family members have called the parish home for generations. The extension allows us to continue to do the important work we started five decades ago, producing a critical source of domestic fertilizer relied on by farmers across the country."

This post was edited on 2/26/24 at 12:15 pm