Grassroots Environmental Education
A new report issued by Grassroots Environmental Education, a New York-based non-profit organization and authored by a former staff scientist for the National Council on Radiation Protection says that horizontal hydrofracking in the Marcellus Shale region of New York State is likely to produce significantly higher amounts of radioactive waste than previously believed, putting New Yorkers in danger, and that the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has not demonstrated the ability to properly analyze the potential impact of radiation exposure or take adequate steps to protect the public.
“Once radioactive material comes up out of the ground along with the gas, the problem is what to do with it,” says Doug Wood, associate director of Grassroots Environmental Education, who edited the report. “The radioactivity lasts for thousands of years, and it is virtually impossible to eliminate or mitigate. Sooner or later, it’s going to end up in our environment and eventually our food chain. It’s a problem with no good solution—and the DEC is unequipped to handle it.”
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), exposure to radium increases the risk of cancer. Radium also decays into radon, which is the second leading cause of lung cancer.
The report, Consideration of Radiation in Hazardous Waste Produced from Horizontal Hydrofracking, was authored by Ivan White, a career scientist with the congressionally-chartered National Council on Radiation Protection. There he helped develop computer programs for radiation risk assessment and assisted in the formulation of national policies on radiation protection for civilian and military personnel.
“Radioactive materials and chemical wastes do not just go away when they are released into the environment. They remain active and potentially lethal and can show up years later in unexpected places,” writes White. “They bio-accumulate in the food chain, eventually reaching humans. Under the proposal for horizontal hydrofracking in New York State, there are insufficient precautions for monitoring potential pathways or to even know what is being released into the environment.”
Many scientists, including senior scientists at the U.S. EPA have been similarly critical of the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation’s (DEC) seemingly cavalier attitude toward radioactive waste from gas drilling. In its comments on the dSGEIS submitted in January of this year, the EPA Region 2 recommended that the DEC withdraw its conclusion that exposure to radioactive material “[did] not indicate an exposure of concern” because it was based on insufficient data. It went on to suggest that the DEC needed to demonstrate “more vigilance in proper handling and disposal” of radioactive waste.
Various disposal methods for the thousands of tons of radioactive waste expected to be produced by fracking are being contemplated by DEC, including road spreading of radioactive wastewater for dust control and de-icing, attempted treatment of radioactive wastewater through dilution at water treatment plants before discharge into rivers, and burying of this material in injection wells or private landfills.
“None of these disposal methods adequately protect New Yorkers from eventual exposure to this radioactive material,” says Wood. “Spread it on the ground and it will become airborne with dust or wash off into surface waters; dilute it before discharge into rivers and it will raise radiation levels in those rivers for everyone downstream; bury it underground and it will eventually find its way into someone’s drinking water. No matter how hard you try, you can’t put the radioactive genie back in the bottle.”
Complicating disposal planning for radioactive waste is the fact that the half-life of Radium 226, one of the radioisotopes commonly found in the wastewater and sludge from fracking in the Marcellus shale, is 1600 years. Thus, in the year 3612, half of its radioactivity will remain.
Visit EcoWatch’s FRACKING page for more related news on this topic.
How can anyone in New York State government think that “hydrofracking” is a good thing?
I might understand that line of thinking if it were just a matter of campaign contributions from the gas and oil companies, but c’mon . . . who really thinks like that !?
Who? Oh, really . . .?
Money, Money, Money.
Nice drawing of where that radioactivity circulates in the air, soil and water.
We need a computer calculation to estimate the amounts of various forms of radiation that will be liberated from fracking 100,000 wells in Pa and 60,000 wells in NY that are actually planned to be drilled into that radioactive rock which harms nobody if left 1 mile underground.
After we have the amounts of the various radioactive librated materials, there should be done a study of how many people would be estimated to get sick or die and what health care cost is involved too.
Only after we have these numbers should we decide to drill or not to drill.
What does either the EPA or the New York DEP say about this report, if anything?
Make no mistake it is very real. Here in Arkansas when the squirrels started to lose their tails, lose hair, got tumors on their necks and died, I ask the Arkansas Dept of health who is monitoring the radiation as those are classic symtoms and was told it is not an issue. So then I sent them pictures of the squirrels and radioactive placarded trailers with drill bits and casing on several different dates headed back to Texas and got no reply. I see now that they just don’t placard the loads, but still see them regularly. So bottom line is the agencies to protect us from that will not address it because then the industry would have the expense of hazardous waste and lord knows we wouldn’t want to burden them with that cost our lives aren’t worth the sacrifice of their profit.
There is already plenty of radioactive waste being accepted in in NYS in several landfills owned by Casella Inc. One in Lowman near Elmira, one two miles northwest of Painted Post at the Hakes’ Landfill, one in Angelica.
Steuben County is ready to accept it at their county waste facility. The leachate from all is being sent to a facility in Bath NY (Steuben County Seat) to be “treated” and then dumped into the Cohocton River, a tributary of the Chemung which joins the Susquehanna further east.
Some of the radioactive waste is being mixed with sewage sludge and spread on farmlands near Cameron NY in Steuben County by a company named Dickson. NY is already being fracked in most ways but the actual HVSWHF drilling.
The New York times has put together an Excel spreadsheet on the radioactive values for several hundred wells in PA. With that data, I was able to calculate the mean gross alpha value for 183 wells as 4,857 picoCurries per liter. The EPA “safe” upper limit is <15 pCi/ L. These wells average 324 times above the safe upper limit. For the spreadsheet, go to:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/us/DRILLING_DOWN_SERIES.html Go to 11th entry: “Regulations Lax . . .” subheading with Excel spreadsheet
Gross alpha is a radionuclide that gives off ionizing radioation.
I forgot to mention that many prospective shale plays have old gas wells scattered about. Many of these wells were not properly plugged when “decommissioned.”. Others had casing pipe pulled out to cash in on the value of scrap steel. This is very important because when shale is fracked, paths of egress for natural gas, heavily metals, TENORMS (the mother of all bureaucratic euphemism – deserves Big Brother/Ministry of Truth top honors) can be created into these old wells. From there, easy paths to aquifers and the atmosphere exist. For brief mention of this issue, see Lee Smiths detailed analysis of a large Encana frack well in Michigan:
(1) http://www.ourmidland.com/opinion/sopinioncolumns/article_82b28e00-61ca-5ba8-81a7-2855d170542a.html
(2) http://www.ourmidland.com/opinion/sopinioncolumns/article_2d847d9b-602e-5164-9da5-d8a259bf35a6.html
(3) http://www.ourmidland.com/opinion/sopinioncolumns/article_14b7b055-ea9d-5668-b120-059213bb2a50.html
(4) http://www.ourmidland.com/opinion/article_8d0e3c87-7e24-5f37-bb13-d8c78ab3adea.html
(5) http://www.ourmidland.com/opinion/sopinioncolumns/article_9d1e8a66-e8a4-52a9-8d9d-dd896f1c1352.html
On scrap steel: do you think metal thieves will let frack wells alone when they are abandoned by hit and run gas cos.? These wells can leak bad gunk for decades.
Let me add to what Mary F, Gundrun Scott and Wm. Rau say above: In 2011 Commissioner Martens upheld an ALJ ruling dismissing a challenge to the expansion of the Chemung County landfill, for the sole purpose of diverting the county’s waste to other landfills in order to dedicate most of the space to disposal of Pennsylvania Marcellus shale drill cutting wastes. See my website for the underlying documents. The challenge asserted that the waste is up to 25 more radioactive than background and is processed and concentrated, making it illegal to dispose in a NY landfill under current rules. DEC Staff took the “seemingly cavalier attitude” noted in the article above, that the waste is like gravel mining waste, not processed or concentrated. Therefore, according to Staff, it does not matter how radioactive it is, nor does it matter what the consequences are of allowing substantial volumes of radium 226 into the waste mass of the landfill, and the landfill’s leachate, ultimately discharged to the Chemung River and the Cheaspeake watershed by the City of Elmira, whose treatment plant takes the leachate but has no means of removing its radioactivity. Because drill cuttings are neither processed nor concentrated, they are not TENORM and no regulation bars disposal in a landfill or consideration of downstream consequences. This is the ruling Commissioner Martens affirmed.
Goodbye Santos and BHP! And all your CSG and under ground mining mates, good to see you go BEFORE you totally destroy OUR water and prime agricultural land. Please go very soon!