Nobel at rollingstone on fracking waste: a gift that keeps on giving
"Oil fields across the country — from the Bakken in North Dakota to the Permian in Texas — have been found to produce brine that is highly radioactive"
"Tanks, filters, pumps, pipes, hoses, and trucks that brine touches can all become contaminated, with the radium building up into hardened “scale,” concentrating to as high as 400,000 picocuries per gram."
"Radium in its brine can average around 9,300 picocuries per liter, but has been recorded as high as 28,500. “If I had a beaker of that on my desk and accidentally dropped it on the floor, they would shut the place down,” says Yuri Gorby, a microbiologist who spent 15 years studying radioactivity with the Department of Energy. “And if I dumped it down the sink, I could go to jail.” "
“Legislators have laid out a careful set of exemptions that allow this industry to exist,”
"thanks to a single exemption the industry received from the EPA in 1980, the streams of waste generated at oil-and-gas wells — all of which could be radioactive and hazardous to humans — are not required to be handled as hazardous waste."
" the EPA determined that in order for oil-and-gas to flourish, its hazardous waste should not be defined as hazardous."
"The levels of radium in Louisiana oil pipes had registered as much as 20,000 times the limits set by the EPA for topsoil at uranium-mill waste sites. Templet found that workers who were cleaning oil-field piping were being coated in radioactive dust and breathing it in. One man they tested had radioactivity all over his clothes, his car, his front steps, and even on his newborn baby ... Pipes still laden with radioactivity were donated by the industry and reused to build community playgrounds. Templet sent inspectors with Geiger counters across southern Louisiana. One witnessed a kid sitting on a fence made from piping so radioactive they were set to receive a full year’s radiation dose in an hour."
"In Ohio, laws that enabled local communities to enforce zoning of oil-and-gas activities were systematically stripped during the 2000s and 2010s. Language snuck into one 2001 Ohio budget bill exempted the oil-and-gas industry from having to disclose safety information to fire departments and first responders. “A truck carrying brine for injection is the worst of the worst,” says Caggiano. “And it is going through your freeways, through your neighborhoods, through your streets, past your homes, past your schools, and the drivers are not trained in how to handle hazardous waste and don’t have to have a single piece of paper telling a fire chief like me what the hell they are carrying — it scares the fuck out of me.” "
"Neither Veolia nor Antero replied to questions on whether they were testing the steam for radioactivity. When asked if the agency was monitoring for such things, West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection official Casey Korbini said, “The WVDEP permits are in accordance with federal and state air-quality statutes, and radionuclides are not a regulated pollutant under these statutes.” He added, “This does not mean that radionuclides are prohibited; they are simply not regulated.” "
"sending solid oil-and-gas waste like drill cuttings to a low-level radioactive-waste facility could mean as much as a 100-fold increase in cost, so there’s an incentive for companies to get the waste into a regional landfill."
"The foul discharge of water passing through Westmoreland, called “leachate,” flowed downhill through a sewer pipe and into the Belle Vernon sewage-treatment plant, where superintendent Guy Kruppa says it was killing the microbes needed to digest the sewage. His facility has no ability to remove the radioactivity, he says. This means, as long as his plant was receiving the contaminated leachate, insufficiently treated sewage and radioactivity was being spewed into the Monongahela River, which runs through downtown Pittsburgh."
" “What this place is, essentially, is a permit to pollute,” says Kruppa. “It’s a free pass to go ahead and dump it in the river, because we don’t test for that stuff, we don’t have to. It’s a loophole. They found a way to take waste that no one else will take to the landfill and get rid of it in liquid form. Essentially, we are the asshole of the fracking industry.” "
“‘What have you done to go out and find all the radioactive waste you have dumped all over the United States for the past 120 years?’ And the answer is nothing.”
“There is a massive liability that has been lying silently below the surface for all these years,”
" “The critical component of the profit margin for these companies is that they can get rid of the waste so cheaply,” says Auch of FracTracker Alliance. “If they ever had to pay fair-market value, they wouldn’t be able to exist.” "
“They’ve known for 110 years, but they haven’t done anything about it,”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/oil-gas-fracking-radioactive-investigation-937389/I run around that part of the country a very great deal. They spray it on the roads, and i surely have breathed the dust countless times. And i dont even live around there.
sidd