Joliet is pushing the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency to more than double the concentration of cancer-causing radium it’s allowed to dump onto farmland in the south suburbs, expanding the potential for deadly radon gas in these increasingly urban communities.
Radium is a naturally occurring radioactive element abundant in deep-water wells in northern Illinois and throughout the Midwest. Cities such as Joliet that rely on these deep wells spend millions of dollars each year to remove radium from their drinking water. Some communities pay to dump radium in a landfill, but Joliet and others use a cheaper alternative, mixing it with waste material that is sold to farmers as fertilizer.
About 21,000 tons of Joliet’s radium-enriched fertilizer has been dumped on area farms since 2005 The city is petitioning the state EPA to allow it to dispose of more than twice the level of radium that’s currently allowed. If granted, it would be 10 times higher than what was considered safe just five years ago — rekindling concerns about the long-term exposure of concentrated radium on the soil.
“If they’re going to give an exception of this magnitude, we need to know what the science says. And we don’t have all those answers yet,” said Brian Anderson, director of the Illinois Natural History Survey at the University of Illinois. “It’s time to go out and do a scientifically designed study and really find out what’s happening to the environment.”
Dumping radium onto farmland is not believed to harm people, crops or wildlife, but some federal reports in recent years have raised questions about reintroducing radium into an urban environment. Of particular concern is when farmland is paved over to build homes and subdivisions, which happened throughout Chicago’s suburbs during the housing boom of the last decade.
As radium breaks down, it forms radon, an odorless gas that can become trapped inside homes and has been linked to cancer. So while some state officials say the radium in the fertilizer may not be harmful, especially in small quantities, others worry about the lingering effects of producing so much radon gas.
“My concern has always been that if it turns out there is a problem (with disposing radium), who’s left holding the bag?” Anderson asked. “Is it the poor farmer who thought that what he was receiving was beneficial to the land?”
Complicating the radium debate is that the two state agencies charged with policing it — the EPA and the Illinois Emergency Management Agency — don’t see eye to eye on the issue. In 1984, the former Illinois Department of Nuclear Safety (which later became a part of IEMA) decided that communities could not dispose of radium with radiation levels higher than 0.1 picocuries per gram on soil. Concentrations higher than that were thought to be unsafe.
But the EPA didn’t follow that instruction, and for 21 years after that agreement, it issued disposal permits to Joliet and two dozen other communities without enforcing that 0.1 standard. In fact, between 1984 and 2005, nobody can say how much radium was spread out over corn and soybean fields in Illinois because the EPA did not require communities to test for it.
It wasn’t until the federal government tightened drinking water standards in 2003 that the state EPA revisited the radium debate and, two years later, began to finally issue permits with the 0.1 standard, said Jeff Hutton, an environmental protection specialist with the Illinois EPA.
“(The EPA) had let it ride because we weren’t sure we were the ones to deal with this, and we weren’t certain it was a severe problem,” Hutton said. “The (EPA’s) position is that IEMA determines what the (safe) number should be. We’re not the experts on radiation — IEMA is.”
While Joliet officials and others argue that IEMA has been far too conservative in determining how much radium poses a threat, agency officials warn the widespread risks are still high.
“We don’t know how big a deal this is, but obviously this is something we’re very concerned about,” said Mike Klebe, an environmental specialist with IEMA. “Even if your home wasn’t built on soil (containing radium), that topsoil could have been used for backfill, or left in backyards, or used in parks, on ball fields, as potting soil.
“Once you start converting that land from farming to residential or commercial, nobody can say where that soil will end up.”
In 2007, the state increased the concentration of radium Joliet could dispose of on soil by 300 percent, boosting it from 0.1 to 0.4 picocuries per gram. Joliet is now seeking a threshold of 1.0 picocuries per gram — a 900 percent increase over the old “safe” limit. While some states, including Wisconsin and Colorado, set limits at 1.0 or higher, they impose stricter monitoring standards than Illinois. IEMA and the EPA argued this point when they rejected Joliet’s first proposal, a decision backed up in May by the independent Illinois Pollution Control Board.
But Joliet hasn’t backed down. On Dec. 3, it submitted a new proposal to the EPA, arguing that the existing state models for determining the radium threat are flawed. The agency is expected to respond by the end of February.
“We’re taking on this fight, not just for our purpose, but for the whole industry,” said James Eggen, Joliet’s director of public utilities. “The way these agencies work, they set the (radium) limit without having the science behind it. So we went out and did our own testing.”
Eggen said Joliet began removing radium from its drinking water in the 1980s but that the program expanded in 2007 after the construction of a large drinking-water treatment plant. The plant uses a chemical, hydrous manganese oxide, to bind with radium and other heavy metals. Radium is then filtered out, and the water goes through additional filtering before arriving in homes.
The radium is combined with municipal sludge containing human waste and other nutrients from Joliet’s wastewater treatment plants. This liquid sludge, containing about 5 percent solids, is shipped to suburban farms, where it is injected into the soil.
Joliet, Channahon, Bartlett and Batavia are among the roughly two dozen communities in Chicago’s suburbs that remove radium from drinking water and convert it to fertilizer or ship it to landfills. Radium levels in these deep-water wells vary, but in Joliet the levels are almost four times higher than U.S. safe drinking water standards, Eggen said.
That has put officials in Illinois’ fourth-largest city under pressure to remove the element to ensure safe drinking water. The current radium removal and disposal process to 18 local farms — spread across Will, Grundy and Kendall counties — costs the city about $10 million a year, Eggen said. But if the EPA does not allow Joliet to increase its radium output, the only alternative is to dump the radium-enriched fertilizer at a local landfill, at a cost of more than $48 million annually, he said.
That’s too steep a price for a community already mired in a budget mess, Eggen said, and gives plenty of incentive to continue the effort.
“We’ve looked at the long-term exposure risks, and we just don’t see a problem,” Eggen said. “The question of how much Joliet or any municipality should have to spend to dispose of (radium) should also be weighed against the public risks.”
Read the original article from Tribune News Services.
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