About 980 million liters of radioactive water have leaked into Florida’s main underground source of drinking water, officials in the US state say. The leak occurred after a huge sinkhole opened up under a phosphate fertilizer plant near Tampa, damaging the stack where waste water was stored. The water contained phosphor-gypsum, a slightly radioactive byproduct from the production of fertilizer, BBC reported. The phosphate company Mosaic said the leak posed no risk to the public. It added the contaminated water had not reached private supplies and the firm was recovering it using pumps. “Groundwater moves very slowly,” senior Mosaic official David Jellerson was quoted as saying by AP. However, Jacki Lopez, Florida director of the Center for Biological Diversity, told Reuters: “It’s hard to trust them when they say ‘Don’t worry,’ when they’ve been keeping it secret for three weeks.” The sinkhole, about 14 meters in diameter, at Mosaic’s New Wales facility in the town of Mulberry was discovered by a company worker on August 27. The sinkhole later caused the waste pond to drain and the contaminated water has now seeped into the aquifer.
