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Fracking Fluids, NOW with Vitamin R
By: Surly1 Date: January 22, 2020, 6:55 am
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Fracking brine is radioactive, and franking field workers are
radiation workers. Who don't know it.
America’s Radioactive Secret
HTML https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/oil-gas-fracking-radioactive-investigation-937389/
Oil-and-gas wells produce nearly a trillion gallons of toxic
waste a year. An investigation shows how it could be making
workers sick and contaminating communities across America
[img
width=640]
HTML https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/oil-radioactivity-opener.jpg[/img]
[html]<div><a
href="
HTML https://www.rollingstone.com/author/justin-nobel/"<br
/>rel="author">Justin Nobel </a><time
datetime="2020-01-21T12:00:17+00:00"
itemprop="datePublished">January 21, 2020 7:00AM
ET</time></div> <p><em>Justin Nobel is writing a book about
oil-and-gas radioactivity for Simon & Schuster. This story was
supported by the journalism nonprofit <a
href="
HTML http://economichardship.org/"
rel="nofollow"
target="_blank">Economic Hardship Reporting
Project</a></em></p> <p><strong>In 2014, a muscular,
middle-aged Ohio man</strong> named Peter took a job trucking
waste for the oil-and-gas industry. The hours were long —
he was out the door by 3 a.m. every morning and not home until
well after dark — but the steady $16-an-hour pay was
appealing, says Peter, who asked to use a pseudonym. “This
is a poverty area,” he says of his home in the
state’s rural southeast corner. “Throw a little
money at us and by God we’ll jump and take
it.”</p> <p>In a squat rig fitted with a 5,000-gallon
tank, Peter crisscrosses the expanse of farms and woods near the
Ohio/West Virginia/Pennsylvania border, the heart of a region
that produces close to one-third of America’s natural gas.
He hauls a salty substance called “brine,” a
naturally occurring waste product that gushes out of
America’s oil-and-gas wells to the tune of nearly 1
trillion gallons a year, enough to flood Manhattan, almost
shin-high, every single day. At most wells, far more brine is
produced than oil or gas, as much as 10 times more. It collects
in tanks, and like an oil-and-gas garbage man, Peter picks it up
and hauls it off to treatment plants or injection wells, where
it’s disposed of by being shot back into the
earth.</p> <p>One day in 2017, Peter pulled up to an
injection well in Cambridge, Ohio. A worker walked around his
truck with a hand-held radiation detector, he says, and told him
he was carrying one of the “hottest loads”
he’d ever seen. It was the first time Peter had heard any
mention of the brine being <a
href="
HTML https://www.rollingstone.com/t/radioactive/"<br
/>data-tag="radioactive">radioactive</a>.</p> <p>The
Earth’s crust is in fact peppered with radioactive
elements that concentrate deep underground in
oil-and-gas-bearing layers. This radioactivity is often pulled
to the surface when oil and gas is extracted — carried
largely in the brine.</p> <p>In the popular imagination,
radioactivity conjures images of nuclear meltdowns, but
radiation is emitted from many common natural substances,
usually presenting a fairly minor risk. Many industry
representatives like to say the radioactivity in brine is so
insignificant as to be on par with what would be found in a
banana or a granite countertop, so when Peter demanded his
supervisor tell him what he was being exposed to, his concerns
were brushed off; the liquid in his truck was no more
radioactive than “any room of your home,” he was
told. But Peter wasn’t so sure.</p> <p>“A lot of
guys are coming up with cancer, or sores and skin lesions that
take months to heal,” he says. Peter experiences regular
headaches and nausea, numbness in his fingertips and face, and
“joint pain like fire.”</p> <p>He says he
wasn’t given any safety instructions on radioactivity, and
while he is required to wear steel-toe boots, safety glasses, a
hard hat, and clothes with a flash-resistant coating, he
isn’t required to wear a respirator or a dosimeter to
measure his radioactivity exposure — and the rest of the
uniform hardly offers protection from brine. “It’s
all over your hands, and inside your boots, and on the cuticles
of your toes, and any cuts you have — you’re
soaked,” he says.</p> <p>So Peter started quietly
taking samples of the brine he hauled, filling up old antifreeze
containers or soda bottles. Eventually, he packed a shed in his
backyard with more than 40 samples. He worried about further
contamination but says, for him, “the damage is already
done.” He wanted answers. “I cover my ass,” he
says. “Ten or 15 years down the road, if I get sick, I
want to be able to prove this.”</p> <p>Through a
grassroots network of Ohio activists, Peter was able to transfer
11 samples of brine to the Center for Environmental Research and
Education at Duquesne University, which had them tested in a lab
at the University of Pittsburgh. The results were
striking.</p> <p>Radium, typically the most abundant
radionuclide in brine, is often measured in picocuries per liter
of substance and is so dangerous it’s subject to tight
restrictions even at hazardous-waste sites. The most common
isotopes are radium-226 and radium-228, and the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission requires industrial discharges to remain
below 60 for each. Four of Peter’s samples registered
combined radium levels above 3,500, and one was more than
8,500.</p> <p>“It’s ridiculous that these
drivers are not being told what’s in their trucks,”
says John Stolz, Duquesne’s environmental-center director.
“And this stuff is on every corner — it is in
neighborhoods. Truckers don’t know they’re being
exposed to radioactive waste, nor are they being provided with
protective clothing.</p> <p>“Breathing in this stuff
and ingesting it are the worst types of exposure,” Stolz
continues. “You are irradiating your tissues from the
inside out.” The radioactive particles fired off by radium
can be blocked by the skin, but radium readily attaches to dust,
making it easy to accidentally inhale or ingest. Once inside the
body, its insidious effects accumulate with each exposure. It is
known as a “bone seeker” because it can be
incorporated into the skeleton and cause bone cancers called
sarcomas. It also decays into a series of other radioactive
elements, called “daughters.” The first one for
radium-226 is radon, a radioactive gas and the second-leading
cause of lung cancer in the U.S. Radon has also been linked to
chronic lymphocytic leukemia. “Every exposure results in
an increased risk,” says Ian Fairlie, a British radiation
biologist. “Think of it like these guys have been given
negative lottery tickets, and somewhere down the line their
number will come up and they will
die.”</p> <p>Peter’s samples are just a drop in
the bucket. 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. “All
oil-field workers,” says Fairlie, “are radiation
workers.” But they don’t necessarily know
it.</p> <p>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. With <a
href="
HTML https://www.rollingstone.com/t/fracking/"<br
/>data-tag="fracking">fracking</a> — which involves sendin
g
pressurized fluid deep underground to break up layers of shale
— there is dirt and shattered rock, called drill cuttings,
that can also be radioactive. But brine can be radioactive
whether it comes from a fracked or conventional well; the levels
vary depending on the geological formation, not drilling method.
Colorado and Wyoming seem to have lower radioactive signatures,
while the Marcellus shale, underlying Ohio, Pennsylvania, West
Virginia, and New York, has tested the highest. 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.”</p> <figure><img
aria-describedby="caption-attachment-937469"
src="
HTML https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/oil-radioactivity-second.jpg"<br
/>alt="October 2, 2019: The Red Bird Injection well seen in the
distance from Co Rd 3 in Vincent, OH. George Etheredge for
Rolling Stone" width="640" height="508" /> <p>Brine storage
tanks at an injection well near Belpre, Ohio. The state is home
to 225 injection wells. Felicia Mettler, a resident of Torch,
Ohio, started a volunteer group that monitors brine trucks. One
injection well sees more than 100 trucks a day, she says.
Photograph by George Etheredge for Rolling
Stone</p> </figure> <p>The advent of the fracking boom
in the early 2000s expanded the danger, saddling the industry
with an even larger tidal wave of waste to dispose of, and
creating new exposure risks as drilling moved into
people’s backyards. “In the old days, wells
weren’t really close to population centers. Now, there is
no separation,” says City University of New York
public-health expert Elizabeth Geltman. In the eastern U.S.
“we are seeing astronomically more wells going up,”
she says, “and we can drill closer to populations because
regulations allow it.” As of 2016, fracking accounted for
more than two-thirds of all new U.S. wells, according to the
Energy Information Administration. There are about 1 million
active oil-and-gas wells, across 33 states, with some of the
biggest growth happening in the most radioactive formation
— the Marcellus. And some regulations have only gotten
weaker. “Legislators have laid out a careful set of
exemptions that allow this industry to exist,” says Teresa
Mills of the Buckeye Environmental Network, an Ohio
community-organizing group. “There is no protection for
citizens at all — nothing.”</p> <p>In an
investigation involving hundreds of interviews with scientists,
environmentalists, regulators, and workers, <em>Rolling
Stone</em> found a sweeping arc of contamination —
oil-and-gas waste spilled, spread, and dumped across America,
posing under-studied risks to the environment, the public, and
especially the industry’s own employees. There is little
public awareness of this enormous waste stream, the disposal of
which could present dangers at every step — from being
transported along America’s highways in unmarked trucks;
handled by workers who are often misinformed and underprotected;
leaked into waterways; and stored in dumps that are not equipped
to contain the toxicity. Brine has even been used in commercial
products sold at hardware stores and is spread on local roads as
a de-icer.</p> <p>“Essentially what you are doing is
taking an underground radioactive reservoir and bringing it to
the surface where it can interact with people and the
environment,” says Marco Kaltofen, a nuclear-forensics
scientist at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. “Us bringing
this stuff to the surface is like letting out the devil,”
says Fairlie. “It is just madness.”</p> <p>The
extent of any health impacts are unknown, mostly because there
hasn’t been enough testing. Many doctors just aren’t
aware of the risks. For a time, in Pennsylvania, doctors were
even banned from discussing some toxic fracking exposures with
patients — the controversial “medical gag
rule” was struck down by the state’s Supreme Court
in 2016. Also, cancer from radiation often emerges years after
exposure, making it hard to pinpoint a cause. “It’s
very difficult,” says Geltman, “to say the exposure
is from the oil industry and not other things — ‘You
smoke too much, drink too much’ — and the
oil-and-gas industry is a master of saying, ‘You did this
to yourself.’”</p> <p>But a set of recent legal
cases argues a direct connection to occupational exposure can be
made. Expert testimony in lawsuits by dozens of Louisiana
oil-and-gas industry workers going back decades and settled in
2016 show that pipe cleaners, welders, roughnecks, roustabouts,
derrickmen, and truck drivers hauling dirty pipes and sludge all
were exposed to radioactivity without their knowledge and
suffered a litany of lethal cancers. An analysis program
developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
determined with up to 99 percent certainty that the cancers came
from exposure to radioactivity on the job, including inhaling
dust and radioactivity accumulated on the workplace floor, known
as “groundshine.” Their own clothes, and even
licking their lips or eating lunch, added exposure. Marvin
Resnikoff, a nuclear physicist and radioactive-waste specialist
who served as an expert witness, says that in every case the
workers won or the industry settled. “I can tell you this
industry has tremendous resources and hired the best people they
could, and they were not successful,” he says. “Once
you have the information, it is
indisputable.”</p> <p><strong>Radioactivity was first
discovered in crude oil,</strong> from a well in Ontario, as
early as 1904, and radioactivity in brine was reported as early
as the 1930s. By the 1960s, U.S. government geologists had found
uranium in oil-bearing layers in Michigan, Tennessee, Oklahoma,
and Texas. In the early 1970s, Exxon learned radioactivity was
building up in pumps and compressors at most of its gas plants.
“Almost all materials of interest and use to the petroleum
industry contain measurable quantities of radionuclides,”
states a never-publicly released 1982 report by the American
Petroleum Institute, the industry’s principal trade group,
passed to <em>Rolling Stone</em> by a former state
regulator.</p> <p><em>Rolling Stone</em> discovered a
handful of other industry reports and articles that raised
concerns about liability for workers’ health. A 1950
document from Shell Oil warned of a potential connection between
radioactive substances and cancer of the “bone and bone
marrow.” In a 1991 paper, scientists with Chevron said,
“Issues such as risk to workers or the general
public…must be
addressed.”</p> <p>“They’ve known about
this since the development of the gamma-ray log back in the
1930s,” says Stuart Smith, referencing a method of
measuring gamma radiation. A New Orleans-based lawyer, Smith has
been trying cases pertaining to oil-and-gas radioactivity for 30
years and is the author of the 2015 book <em>Crude Justice.
</em>In Smith’s first case, in 1986, a six-month-pregnant
Mississippi woman was sitting on the edge of her bathtub and her
hip **** in half. Tests showed the soil in her vegetable garden
had become contaminated with radium from oil-field pipes her
husband had cleaned in their yard. “They know,”
Smith says. “All of the big majors have done tests to
determine exactly what risks workers are exposed
to.”</p> <p>“Protecting workers, individuals,
and the community who are near oil and natural-gas operations is
of paramount importance to the industry,” says Cornelia
Horner, a spokeswoman with the American Petroleum Institute. But
the organization did not reply to specific questions about
workers’ exposure to radioactivity. ExxonMobil and Chevron
recommended <em>Rolling Stone</em> direct its questions to the
American Petroleum Institute.</p> <p>Curtis Smith, a
spokesman with Shell, says, “This subject is the focus of
litigation that at least one Shell expert recently testified to
as part of a formal deposition.…Our top priorities remain
the safety of our employees and the environment. While the risk
of exposure to radioactive elements in some phases of our
operations is low, Shell has strict, well-developed safety
procedures in place to monitor for radioactivity as well as a
comprehensive list of safety protocols should radioactivity be
detected.”</p> <div><img
aria-describedby="caption-attachment-937477"
src="
HTML https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/disposal-1.jpg"<br
/>alt="disposal problems" width="350" height="350"
/> <p>Oil-and-gas waste pits like this one in Lycoming
County, Pennsylvania, vent radioactive radon gas, the
second-leading cause of lung cancer in the U.S. Two recent
studies show elevated levels of radon in homes near fracking
operations. Photo credit: Joshua B. Pribanic/”Public
Herald”</p> </div> <p>But the radioactivity in
oil-and-gas waste receives little federal oversight. “They
swept this up and forgot about it on the federal side,”
says Smith, the attorney. When asked about rules guarding
oil-and-gas workers from contamination, the Department of
Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration
pointed to a set of sparse letters and guidance documents, some
more than 30 years old. OSHA conducted “measurements of
external radiation doses to workers in the oil-and-gas
industry,” a representative says. “The
agency’s experience is that radiation doses” are
“well below the dose limits” that would require the
agency’s regulation.</p> <p>“The Nuclear
Regulatory Commission does not have statutory authority to
regulate naturally occurring radioactive material,” says
NRC spokesman David McIntyre. The agency has authority over
“materials stemming from the nuclear fuel cycle,” he
says, adding, “My understanding is that the Environmental
Protection Agency is the federal regulator
for…oil-and-gas wastes.”</p> <p>“There is
no one federal agency that specifically regulates the
radioactivity brought to the surface by oil-and-gas
development,” an <a
href="
HTML https://www.rollingstone.com/t/epa/"<br
/>data-tag="epa">EPA</a> representative says. In fact, thanks to
a
single <a
href="
HTML http://vjel.vermontlaw.edu/files/2015/05/Kron.pdf"<br
/>rel="nofollow" target="_blank">exemption</a> 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.</p> <p>In 1988, the EPA assessed the
exemption — called the Bentsen and Bevill amendments, part
of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act — and
claimed that “potential risk to human health and the
environment were small,” even though the agency found
concerning levels of lead, arsenic, barium, and uranium, and
admitted that it did not assess many of the major potential
risks. Instead, the report focused on the financial and
regulatory burdens, determining that formally labeling the
“billions of barrels of waste” as hazardous would
“cause a severe economic impact on the industry.”
Effectively, the EPA determined that in order for oil-and-gas to
flourish, its hazardous waste should not be defined as
hazardous.</p> <p>So responsibility has been largely left to
the states — a patchwork of laws that are outdated,
inconsistent, and easy for the industry to avoid. Of 21
significant oil-and-gas-producing states, only five have
provisions addressing workers, and just three include
protections for the public, according to <a
href="
HTML http://vjel.vermontlaw.edu/files/2018/02/Geltman_FP-2.pdf"<br
/>rel="nofollow" target="_blank">research by Geltman</a>, the
public-health expert. Much of the legislation that does exist
seems hardly sufficient. For example, in Texas, the
nation’s largest oil-and-gas producer, Department of State
Health Services spokeswoman Lara Anton says the agency
“does not monitor oil-field workers for radiation
doses,” nor are workers, including brine haulers, required
to wear protective equipment like Tyvek suits or
respirators.</p> <p>The first state to enact any protections
at all was Louisiana, in the late 1980s. “It was the only
environmental issue in Louisiana anyone ever sprang on me I
didn’t know anything about,” says chemical physicist
Paul Templet, who as the state’s lead environmental
regulator at the time ordered a study on oil-and-gas
radioactivity. The results horrified him.</p> <div><img
aria-describedby="caption-attachment-937482"
src="
HTML https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/disposal-2.jpg"<br
/>alt="disposal" width="350" height="465"
/> <p>Brine-spreading is used to suppress dust on dirt
roads, but “there appears to be a complete lack of data
indicating the practice is effective,” a 2018 study found.
Photo courtesy of Babst Calland</p> </div> <p>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. The industry was also spewing waste into coastal
waterways, and radioactivity was shown to accumulate in oysters.
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. “People thought getting these
pipes for free from the oil industry was such a great
deal,” says Templet, “but essentially the oil
companies were just getting rid of their
waste.”</p> <p>Templet introduced regulations
protecting waterways and setting stricter standards for worker
safety. The news reverberated across the industry, and <em>The
New York Times</em> ran a front-page story in 1990 headlined <a
href="
HTML https://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/03/us/radiation-danger-found-in-oilfields-across-the-nation.html"<br
/>rel="nofollow" target="_blank">“Radiation Danger Found i
n
Oil Fields Across the Nation.”</a> Another <a
href="
HTML https://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/24/us/2-suits-on-radium-cleanup-test-oil-industry-s-liability.html"<br
/>rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><em>Times</em> story that
year</a> reported that the radiation measured in oil-and-gas
equipment “exposes people to levels that are equal to and
at times greater than workers receive in nuclear power
plants,” and that pending lawsuits “may ultimately
decide whether oil companies can be held responsible for
billions of dollars in expenses associated with cleaning up and
disposing radioactive wastes at thousands of oil-and-gas sites
around the nation.”</p> <p>But the issue soon faded
from the news. Discussion around it has remained mostly in the
confines of arcane reports by regulators. Even in academia, it
is an obscure topic. “There’s no course that teaches
this,” says Julie Weatherington-Rice, an Ohio scientist
with the environmental-consulting firm Bennett & Williams who
has tracked oil-and-gas waste for 40 years. “You literally
have to apprentice yourself to the people who do the
work.” The lack of research and specialization has made it
hard to reach a consensus on the risks and has facilitated the
spread of misinformation. There is a perception that because the
radioactivity is naturally occurring it’s less harmful
(the industry and regulators almost exclusively call oil-and-gas
waste NORM — naturally occurring radioactive material, or
TENORM for the “technologically enhanced”
concentrations of radioactivity that accumulate in equipment
like pipes and trucks). But the radioactivity experts
<em>Rolling Stone</em> spoke to dismiss the “naturally
occurring” excuse. “It makes no sense,” says
Kaltofen, the nuclear-forensics scientist. “Arsenic is
completely natural, but you probably wouldn’t let me put
arsenic in your school lunch.”</p> <p>As for the
“banana red herring,” as Kaltofen calls it —
the idea that there’s no more radioactivity in oil-and-gas
waste than in a banana — “I call bullshit,” he
says. They emit two different types of radiation. The
potassium-40 in bananas predominantly emits beta particles that
barely interact with your body; radium emits alpha particles,
which are thousands of times more impactful and can swiftly
mutate cells. He compares them this way: “If I pick up a
.45-caliber bullet and throw it at you, or if I put the same
bullet in a .45-caliber pistol and fire it at you, only one of
these things will cause you serious harm.”</p> <p><a
href="
HTML http://www.depgreenport.state.pa.us/elibrary/GetDocument?docId=5815&DocName=01%20PENNSYLVANIA%20DEPARTMENT%20OF%20ENVIRONMENTAL%20PROTECTION%20TENORM%20STUDY%20REPORT%20REV%201.PDF%20"<br
/>rel="nofollow" target="_blank">An oft-cited 2015 study</a> on
TENORM by Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental
Protection determined there are “potential radiological
environmental impacts,” but concluded there was
“limited potential for radiation exposure to workers and
the public.” But Resnikoff, the nuclear physicist, wrote
<a
href="
HTML https://www.delawareriverkeeper.org/sites/default/files/Review%20of%20PA%20DEP%20NORM%20Study-12.14.15%20FINALdocx.pdf"<br
/>rel="nofollow" target="_blank">a scathing critique of the
report</a>, saying it downplayed the radioactive gas radon,
misinterpreted information on radium, and ignored the
well-documented risks posed by the inhalation or ingestion of
radioactive dust.</p> <p>And this past summer, Bemnet
Alemayehu, a radiation health physicist with the Natural
Resources Defense Council, toured oil fields in Ohio, West
Virginia, and Pennsylvania with <em>Rolling Stone</em>, taking
samples, including some of Peter’s brine.
Alemayehu’s report is due out later this year, but he
says, “The data I am seeing is that some oil-and-gas
workers” — including maintenance workers and haulers
like Peter — “should be treated as radiation
workers.”</p> <div><img
aria-describedby="caption-attachment-937486"
src="
HTML https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/disposal-3.jpg"<br
/>alt="disposal problems" width="350" height="467" /> <p>A
brine-truck crash near Carrolton, Ohio. Photo credit: Anonymous
Carrolton Resident/Fractracker
Alliance/<span>Fractracker.org</span></p> </div> <p><str
ong>Brine
haulers are a ghost fleet.</strong> No federal or state agency
appears to know how many drivers like Peter are out there, how
long they’ve been working, how much radioactivity their
bodies have accumulated, or where this itinerant workforce might
be living.</p> <p>But the Department of Transportation does
have jurisdiction over the roads, and there are rules on
hazardous materials. Any truck with a load that contains more
than 270,000 total picocuries of radium-226 must be placarded
with a radioactivity symbol, meet strict requirements for the
container carrying the radioactive substance, uphold
hazmat-training requirements for drivers, and travel only on
approved routes. “That would generally mean not driving
near a waterway or source of drinking water, or on routes
through areas that may be more populated, or a school,”
says a DOT spokesman. Resnikoff, who assessed the DOT rule in
2015, said the standard brine truck in Pennsylvania would be
“1,000 times above DOT limits.” Which would mean
they’re breaking the law. “There isn’t
anything specifically preventing them from doing that,”
says the DOT spokesman. Testing, he said, is the responsibility
of the operator at the wellhead who dispatches the brine to the
hauler, and so the system mostly relies on
self-reporting.</p> <p>Ted Auch, an analyst with the
watchdog group FracTracker Alliance, estimates there are at
least 12,000 brine trucks operating in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and
West Virginia. He says he has never seen one with a
radioactivity placard. “There are all sorts of examples
for how often these things crash,” says Auch. In 2016, <a
href="
HTML https://www.barnesville-enterprise.com/article/20160315/NEWS/303159060"<br
/>rel="nofollow" target="_blank">a brine truck overturned</a> on
a
bad curve in Barnesville, Ohio, dumping 5,000 gallons of waste.
The brine water flowed across a livestock field, entering a
stream and then a city reservoir, forcing the town to
temporarily shut it down. (The EPA safe drinking-water limit for
radium is 5 picocuries per liter). In a 2014 crash in Lawrence
Township, Ohio, a brine truck traveling south on Bear Run Road
flipped over a guardrail and rolled down a steep bank, striking
a home.</p> <p>In the tiny town of Torch, Ohio, elementary
school archery instructor Felicia Mettler founded Torch CAN DO,
a volunteer group that monitors for spills and crashes of brine
trucks. One injection well they track in the area sees more than
100 brine trucks a day, about one every 14 minutes. “This
is why it’s so important we document everything,”
she says. “I don’t think we’re gonna stop it
today, I don’t think we’re gonna stop it five years
from now, but someday it’s gonna
help.”</p> <p>Even without crashing, the trucks are a
potential hazard. Haulers often congregate at local restaurants
and truck stops where half a dozen or more brine trucks may be
lined up in the parking lot, says Randy Moyer, a former brine
hauler in Pennsylvania who says he quit the job when burning
rashes and odd swelling broke out across his body after only
four months. “I warn waitresses who serve guys getting out
of these waste trucks,” says Gorby, the former DOE
engineer — a driver sloshed with brine could be shedding
dust particles with radium. “The consensus of the
international scientific community is that there is no safe
threshold for radiation,” says Resnikoff. “Each
additional exposure, no matter how small, increases a
person’s risk of cancer.”</p> <p>In
Pennsylvania, regulators revealed in 2012 that for at least six
years one hauling company had been dumping brine into abandoned
mine shafts. In 2014, <a
href="
HTML https://www.cleveland.com/court-justice/2014/08/youngstown_contractor_sentence.html"<br
/>rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Benedict Lupo,</a> owner of a
Youngstown, Ohio, company that hauled fracking waste, was
sentenced to 28 months in prison for directing his employees to
dump tens of thousands of gallons of brine into a storm drain
that emptied into a creek that feeds into the Mahoning River.
While large bodies of water like lakes and rivers can dilute
radium, Penn State <a
href="
HTML https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b04952"<br
/>rel="nofollow" target="_blank">researchers have shown</a> that
in streams and creeks, radium can build up in sediment to levels
that are hundreds of times more radioactive than the limit for
topsoil at Superfund sites. Texas-based researcher Zac
Hildenbrand has shown that brine also contains volatile organics
such as the carcinogen benzene, heavy metals, and toxic levels
of salt, while fracked brine contains a host of additional
hazardous chemicals. “It is one of the most complex
mixtures on the planet,” he says.</p> <p>Officials
found the creek in the Lupo incident to be “void of
life” after the contamination, prosecutors said. But
downstream, no one notified water authorities or tested water
supplies for possible radioactivity, says Silverio Caggiano, a
near 40-year veteran of the Youngstown fire department and a
hazardous-materials specialist with the Ohio Hazmat Weapons of
Mass Destruction Advisory Committee. “If we caught some
ISIS terrorist cells dumping this into our waterways, they would
be tried for terrorism and the use of a WMD on U.S.
citizens,” says Caggiano. “However, the frac
industry is given a pass on all of this.”</p> <p>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 **** out of
me.”</p> <figure><img
aria-describedby="caption-attachment-937520"
src="
HTML https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/RollingstoneBrine_004-siri-lawson.jpg"<br
/>alt="October 3, 2019: A portrait of Siri Lawson. George
Etheredge for Rolling Stone" width="600" height="750"
/> <p>Siri Lawson became ill after brine was spread on the
road near her home in rural Pennsylvania. Photograph by George
Etheredge for Rolling Stone</p> </figure> <p><strong>In
the summer of 2017,</strong> Siri Lawson noticed a group of
Amish girls walking down the side of a dirt road near the horse
farm where she lives with her husband in Farmington Township,
Pennsylvania. The girls, dressed in aprons and blue bonnets, had
taken off their shoes and were walking barefoot. Lawson was
horrified. She knew the road had been freshly laced with
brine.</p> <p>Radioactive oil-and-gas waste is purposely
spread on roadways around the country. The industry pawns off
brine — offering it for free — on rural townships
that use the salty solution as a winter de-icer and, in the
summertime, as a dust tamper on unpaved
roads.</p> <p>Brine-spreading is legal in 13 states,
including the Dakotas, Colorado, much of the Upper Midwest,
northern Appalachia, and New York. In 2016 alone, 11 million
gallons of oil-field brine were spread on roads in Pennsylvania,
and 96 percent was spread in townships in the state’s
remote northwestern corner, where Lawson lives. Much of the
brine is spread for dust control in summer, when contractors
pick up the waste directly at the wellhead, says Lawson, then
head to Farmington to douse roads. On a single day in August
2017, 15,300 gallons of brine were reportedly
spread.</p> <p>“After Lindell Road got brined, I had a
violent response,” reads Lawson’s comments in a 2017
lawsuit she brought against the state. “For nearly 10
days, especially when I got near the road, I reacted with
excruciating eye, nose, and lung burning. My tongue swelled to
the point my teeth left indentations. My sinus reacted with a
profound overgrowth of polyps, actually preventing nose
breathing.”</p> <p>The oil-and-gas industry has
“found a legal way to dispose of waste,” says
Lawson, 65, who worked as a horse trainer but is no longer able
to ride professionally because of her illnesses. Sitting in her
dining room, surrounded by pictures she has taken to document
the contamination — brine running down the side of a road,
an Amish woman lifting her dress to avoid being sprayed —
she tells me the brine is spread regularly on roads that abut
cornfields, cow pastures, and trees tapped for maple syrup sold
at a local farmer’s market.</p> <p>“There is
nothing to remediate it with,” says Avner Vengosh, a Duke
University geochemist. “The high radioactivity in the soil
at some of these sites will stay forever.” Radium-226 has
a half-life of 1,600 years. The level of uptake into
agricultural crops grown in contaminated soil is unknown because
it hasn’t been adequately studied.</p> <p>“Not
much research has been done on this,” says Bill Burgos, an
environmental engineer at Penn State who co-authored a bombshell
<a
href="
HTML https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325460511_Environmental_and_Human_Health_Impacts_of_Spreading_Oil_and_Gas_Wastewater_on_Roads"<br
/>rel="nofollow" target="_blank">2018 paper</a> in
<em>Environmental Science & Technology</em> that examined the
health effects of applying oil-field brine to roads. Regulators
defend the practice by pointing out that only brine from
conventional wells is spread on roads, as opposed to fracked
wells. But conventional-well brine can be every bit as
radioactive, and Burgos’ paper found it contained not just
radium, but cadmium, benzene, and arsenic, all known human
carcinogens, along with lead, which can cause kidney and brain
damage.</p> <p>And because it attaches to dust, the radium
“can be resuspended by car movement and be inhaled by the
public,” Resnikoff wrote in a 2015 report. Research also
shows that using brine to suppress dust is not only dangerous
but pointless. “There appears to be a complete lack of
data indicating the practice is effective,” reads <a
href="
HTML https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4beb/9a0db2e18f04719f938145ad2b1cff2302ca.pdf"<br
/>rel="nofollow" target="_blank">a 2018 paper</a> published in t
he
<em>European Scientific Journal.</em> In fact, it notes, the
practice is “likely counterproductive for dust
control.” As Lawson puts it, “It is a complete ****
myth that this works. After brine, the roads are
dustier.”</p> <p>But the new buzzword in the
oil-and-gas industry is “beneficial use” —
transforming oil-and-gas waste into commercial products, like
pool salts and home de-icers. In June 2017, an official with the
Ohio Department of Natural Resources entered a Lowe’s Home
Center in Akron and purchased a turquoise jug of a liquid
de-icer called AquaSalina, which is made with brine from
conventional wells. Used for home patios, sidewalks, and
driveways — “Safe for Environment & Pets,” the
label touts — AquaSalina was found by a state lab to
contain radium at levels as high as 2,491 picocuries per liter.
Stolz, the Duquesne scientist, also had the product tested and
found radium levels registered about 1,140 picocuries per
liter.</p> <p>“AquaSalina is 400-million-year-old
ancient seawater from the Silurian Age” that
“contains a perfect natural balance of chlorides uniquely
suited for snow and ice management,” Dave Mansbery, owner
of Duck Creek Energy, the Ohio-based company that produces
AquaSalina, tells <em>Rolling Stone</em>. “We recycle and
repurpose this natural water to a higher purpose.” He told
regional news station WKRC that he soaked his sore feet in
AquaSalina.</p> <p>Mansbery said that he tested for heavy
metals and saw “no red flags.” Asked if he tested
for radioactive elements, he stated, “We test as required
by the state law and regulatory
agencies.”</p> <p>“Every time you put this
solution onto your front steps you are basically causing a small
radioactive spill,” says Vengosh, the geochemist, who has
examined AquaSalina. “If you use it in the same place
again and again, eventually you will have a buildup of
radioactivity in the sediment and soil and create an ecological
dead zone.” But Ohio’s Department of Health
concluded AquaSalina poses a “negligible radiological
health and safety risk.”</p> <p>“Reading their
study shows it’s about equal to eating a banana a
week,” says Mansbery. “Sorry, AquaSalina does not
fit the narrative sought by many haters of the oil-and-gas
industry.”</p> <p>CPI Road Solutions, an
Indianapolis-based snow- and ice-management company, sells
hundreds of thousands of gallons of AquaSalina each winter to
the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission and Ohio Department of
Transportation, says Jay Wallerstein, a company VP. Supporters
tout that the product has been approved by Pacific Northwest
Snowfighters, the nation’s most-respected organization for
evaluating de-icing products. But Snowfighters official Jay
Wells says, “PNS has not tested AquaSalina for radioactive
elements” and that “radium-226 is not a standard
test for de-icing products.”</p> <p>Meanwhile, Ohio is
pushing forward with legislation to <em>protect</em> the
practice of brine-spreading. State Senate Bill 165 would slash
environmental safeguards and make it easier for products like
AquaSalina to be developed. In Pennsylvania, Lawson’s case
had led the state’s DEP to acknowledge brine-spreading
violated environmental laws, and the practice was halted last
year. But Pennsylvania House Bill 1635 and Senate Bill 790
unsuccessfully tried to greenlight brine-spreading again, and
even restrict the DEP’s ability to test products. In
October, the state Senate passed the bill without debate;<span>
its fate remains <a
href="
HTML https://www.timesobserver.com/news/local-news/2020/01/brine-on-dirt-road-usage-remains-cloudy/"<br
/>rel="nofollow" target="_blank">up in the air</a> in the
state’s House of
Representatives.</span></p> <p><strong>On a sunny day in
September 2018,</strong> I meet with Kerri Bond and her sister,
Jodi, at an injection well next to a shopping plaza in Guernsey
County, Ohio. As people dine on fast food and shop for the
latest iPhone, trucks unload brine into giant tanks where it
will wait to be shot back into the earth. The sisters, both
nurses, had grown up wandering the region’s woods and
creeks. “We thought it was Shangri-la,” says Kerri.
In 2012, a leasing company held a meeting at a church in town,
she recalls. “They told everyone they were going to be
millionaires. People were high-fiving.” Residents signed
documents enabling the Denver-based energy company Antero
Resources to begin fracking on their land. As with many people
who live near fracking operations, which involve storing and
mixing toxic chemicals plus a torrent of carcinogenic emissions
when drilling begins, Kerri and Jodi quickly started to notice
problems.</p> <figure><img
aria-describedby="caption-attachment-937526"
src="
HTML https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/RollingstoneBrine_005-silverio-caggiano.jpg"<br
/>alt="October 3, 2019: A portrait of Fire Chief Sil Caggiano at
the Youngstown, OH, Fire Department. George Etheredge for
Rolling Stone" width="600" height="750" /> <p>“A truck
carrying brine for injection is the worst,” says Ohio fire
chief Silverio Caggiano. “Drivers don’t have to have
a single piece of paper telling me what they are carrying. It
scares the f— out of me.” Photograph by George
Etheredge for Rolling Stone</p> </figure> <p>Animals on
Kerri’s farm dropped dead — two cats, six chickens,
and a rooster. A sheep birthed babies with the heads fused
together. Trees were dying. One evening Kerri was watching a
show about Chernobyl’s radioactive forests, and she felt
like she recognized Ohio. She bought a hand-held radiation
detector on Amazon and recorded radiation three to seven times
the normal level for southeastern Ohio in her backyard, she
says. In 2016, an Ohio Department of Health official visited and
said not to worry as long as people weren’t exposed to
these levels on a regular basis, she recalls. “Hey,
dude,” Bond told him, “we are living
here.”</p> <p>Ohio, because of its geology, favorable
regulations, and nearness to drilling hot spots in the
Marcellus, has become a preferred location for injection wells.
Pennsylvania has about a dozen wells; West Virginia has just
over 50. Ohio has 225. About 95 percent of brine was disposed of
through injection as of 2014. Government scientists have
increasingly linked the practice to earthquakes, and the public
has become more and more suspicious of the sites. Still, the
relentless waste stream means new permits are issued all the
time, and the industry is also hauling brine to treatment plants
that attempt to remove the toxic and radioactive elements so the
liquid can be used to frack new wells.</p> <p>In Ohio, no
public meetings precede the construction of these treatment
facilities, many locals remain unaware they exist, and the Ohio
Department of Health does not regularly monitor them. They are
under the exclusive oversight of the Ohio Department of Natural
Resources.</p> <p>To store radioactive waste, or recycle,
treat, process, or dispose of brine and drill cuttings,
companies simply submit an application that is reviewed by the
chief of the ODNR. They’re called “Chief’s
Order” facilities, and Ohio has authorized 46 of them.
Companies have to submit a radiation protection plan as part of
the application, and ODNR spokesman Steve Irwin says all
facilities are inspected regularly. But worker protections and
knowledge of the risks still seem to be lacking.</p> <p>In
2014, at a now-defunct Ohio company operating under
Chief’s Order, EnviroClean Services, inspectors discovered
a staff clueless of basic radiation safety, operating without
protective gear, with no records or documentation for the waste
they were receiving, and no instrument to measure it except a
pocket Geiger counter that appeared to have never been used. One
entry on the form documenting the inspection asks for an
“Evaluation of individuals’ understanding of
radiation safety procedures.” The inspector noted:
“Unable to evaluate — no radiation safety procedures
being used.”</p> <p>Last April, I met with an
oil-and-gas waste-treatment-plant operator at a restaurant
beside a dusty truck stop in the panhandle of West Virginia.
Cody Salisbury left Las Vegas as a teenager and bartended his
way across the country before ending up in the Texas oil fields,
he says, chowing down barbecue wings as we talk in a quiet
corner booth, his phone buzzing repeatedly. “It comes as a
sludge, a nasty mess, and we separate the solids, the oil, and
the water,” says Salisbury, not divulging other treatment
details but alluding to a secret sauce. He is upgrading a waste
plant and has helped build two others in Ohio. The opening of
one, just a few hundred feet from a nursing home, was attended
by Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, who applauded the “regulatory
relief” that made it possible.</p> <p>Salisbury and
all of the workers at his plants wear dosimeter badges, which
measure external radiation exposure, and they’ve always
registered low numbers, he says. Most oil-and-gas waste
facilities in Ohio issue dosimeters to their workers, says an
ODNR representative, and they haven’t observed anyone
that’s exceeded the annual occupational-exposure limit.
But dosimeters, says Kaltofen, the nuclear-forensics scientist,
don’t register alpha particles — the type of
radiation emitted by radium — and aren’t able to
track what a person may have inhaled or ingested. So they
aren’t providing insight into the key exposures these
workers are likely incurring.</p> <p>“These guys are
so proud of their jobs,” says Weatherington-Rice, the
Ohio-based scientist, “and they’re working with this
stuff and they go home and they’ve got this on their
clothes — they can end up contaminating their family as
well. This is how this stuff works.”</p> <p>I ask
Salisbury if he and the workers have to wear radiation
protective gear, and he shakes his head: “There’s
not enough radioactivity in it — I ain’t never seen
anyone wearing a respirator.” When asked if he is
concerned about radon, he says he has never heard anything about
it. “There’s more radioactivity coming off a
cigarette, a banana, a granite countertop,” he
says.</p> <p>Even at facilities touted to be the best of the
best, there still could be risks. Peter, the Ohio brine hauler,
tells me about the Clearwater plant in West Virginia, a $300
million fracking-waste treatment facility completed in 2018 and
run by a partnership between Antero and the French water- and
waste-management company Veolia. Kevin Ellis, an Antero vice
president, described the facility as the “best project
like this in the world. Bar none. Period.”</p> <p>The
plant was abruptly “idled” in September after less
than two years of operation because of a steep drop in gas
prices. One day last year, before it closed, Peter and I drove
out toward the hulking facility. As we approached, I saw thick
plumes of whitish-gray steam rising out of a series of cooling
towers. An engineering report the plant filed with the state
showed emissions from treatment tanks were being vented to the
atmosphere, after first being routed to a thermal oxidizer, a
piece of equipment that can destroy hazardous pollutants —
but not radon, says Resnikoff.</p> <p>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.”</p> <p><strong>“Son of a ****,
he’s loaded,”</strong> says Jack Kruell on a rainy
evening this past spring. Kruell, a 59-year-old contractor, is
watching a dump truck headed toward Pennsylvania’s
Westmoreland Sanitary Landfill, just down the road from his home
in Belle Vernon, about 25 miles from Pittsburgh. It’s been
accepting fracking waste since 2010.</p> <p>The end of the
line for much of the radioactive solid waste produced from
extraction, like drill cuttings and the sludge filtered out of
brine, is the local dump. Kruell used to keep a pair of Geiger
counters on the spice rack in his kitchen to monitor the
regularly above-normal levels.</p> <p>There are facilities
that treat drill cuttings and sludges,
“downblending” them with less-radioactive waste to
obtain a brew with a radiation content low enough to be accepted
at regional landfills. Otherwise, they have to be sent to a
low-level radioactivity waste site out in Utah, says Troy Mazur,
a radiation safety officer I speak to from Austin Master
Services, a downblending facility in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio.
“I would not like to divulge too much about our process
internally,” says Mazur. “There is waste that comes
in that goes directly to a low-level radioactivity site,”
he says. “It is all based on an economic
decision.”</p> <figure><img
aria-describedby="caption-attachment-937529"
src="
HTML https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/RollingstoneBrine_003jack-kruell.jpg"<br
/>alt="October 2, 2019: A portrait of Jack Kruell in Belle Verno
n,
PA. George Etheredge for Rolling Stone" width="600" height="750"
/> <p>Pennsylvania resident Jack Kruell kept a pair of
Geiger counters on his spice rack to monitor the radioactivity
from a dump near his home outside Pittsburgh. Photograph by
George Etheredge for Rolling Stone</p> </figure> <p>A
2013 report co-authored by Resnikoff calculated that sending
solid oil-and-gas waste like drill cuttings to a low-level
radioactive-waste facility could mean as much as a <a
href="
HTML https://www.fractracker.org/a5ej20sjfwe/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/13-6-Resnikoff-hilited-Hydraulic-Fracturing-Radiological-Concerns-for-Ohio.pdf"<br
/>rel="nofollow" target="_blank">100-fold increase in cost</a>,
so
there’s an incentive for companies to get the waste into a
regional landfill.</p> <p>A letter from a whistle-blowing
employee of Westmoreland to one of Kruell’s neighbors last
April told of “numerous overlooked DEP violations”
and “dumping of frackwater material and sludge in excess
of legal limits.”</p> <p>The company “is getting
away with everything that they can,” the letter said.
“I am writing to you because I know your quality of life
is being affected and I don’t want you to get a raw
deal.” The Westmoreland Sanitary Landfill did not reply to
questions from <em>Rolling Stone.</em></p> <p>But what
worries Kruell most is a metallic dust he has noticed speckling
his bushes and grass, and the pain he gets when he mows his
lawn. “The day after I cut the grass, I have pain in my
bones so bad I can’t move,” says Kruell. “Like
someone taking a drill bit and drilling into your bone without
anesthetic.”</p> <p>“These are the people who I
worry about most,” says Weatherington-Rice, because metals
like radium can easily become airborne with small clay particles
in dust. “You put it up on top of the landfill and put a
wind over it, what do you think is going to happen?” she
says. “Radioactive metals and other heavy metals are going
to settle out over communities and people downwind. They are all
hazardous, and they will all kill you eventually if you get
enough of them in you.”</p> <p>There are at least five
landfills in West Virginia that accept drill cuttings, at least
five in New York, 10 in Ohio, and 25 in Pennsylvania. Most of
the drill cuttings are from fracking and can be radioactive.
“We have never knowingly buried very large quantities of
known low-level radioactive waste in a generic, municipal
solid-waste landfill originally designed for household
garbage,” Bill Hughes, an industrial electrician who
served 15 years on a board overseeing the municipal landfill in
West Virginia’s Wetzel County, wrote to the West Virginia
Department of Environmental Protection. The dangers involved, he
said, “might not be known for generations.” In 2018,
when I met Hughes, who is now deceased, he told me the issue of
dealing with the industry’s radioactive drill cuttings
“blindsided” state agencies. “They really
weren’t sure how to regulate this,” he
said.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>“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 **** of the fracking
industry.”</p> <p>Kruppa tried for months to make the
Pennsylvania DEP act on the dilemma, but to no avail. “DEP
has no evidence…that would indicate levels of heavy
metals or radioactive elements in leachate,” says
spokeswoman Lauren Fraley. The agency is not worried about the
leachate entering Pennsylvania rivers. She says the DEP
concluded there was “no immediate or significant harm to
human health or the environment, given the enormous volume of
water in the receiving river.”</p> <p>But in May, a
county judge ordered the landfill to stop sending the sewage
plant its leachate. And there are risks even when there’s
a large body of water to dilute the contamination: A 2018 study
found that in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny River, oil-and-gas
waste was accumulating in the shells of freshwater
mussels.</p> <p>“We are putting things in the river
and don’t know what we’re doing, and we might be
putting people at risk,” says Kruppa. “At times it
seems like I am the only one not playing ball here, and everyone
else, including the DEP, is turning their heads and telling us
there’s no problem.”</p> <p><strong>Despite dire
climate warnings,</strong> the U.S. oil-and-gas industry is in
the midst of an epic boom, what a 2018 Department of Energy
paper calls an “oil-and-gas production renaissance.”
Pipelines, power plants, and shipping terminals are being
developed across the nation at a dizzying pace.</p> <p>But
in the excitement of this boom there is little mention of the
pipes, pumps, and filters in these plants that will become
coated with radioactivity. Or of the fountain of radioactive
brine and drill cuttings spewing forth from wells. Or of the
workers being exposed, the land being
contaminated.</p> <p>“One question I ask these
companies,” says Smith, the New Orleans lawyer,
“‘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.”</p> <p>A 2016 lawsuit by environmental
groups forced the EPA to reassess its monitoring of oil-and-gas
waste, which it had not done since before the fracking boom. But
in 2019 the agency concluded “revisions…are not
necessary at this time.”</p> <p>When I checked in with
Peter around the holidays he had collected a new batch of
samples and said anxiety levels among brine haulers were at an
all-time high. “The other drivers are getting
scared,” he says. “Guys are wanting to get
tested.”</p> <p>“The workers are going to be the
canaries,” says Raina Rippel of the Southwest Pennsylvania
Environmental Health Project, a nonprofit public-health
organization that supports residents impacted by fracking.
“The radioactivity issue is not something we have
adequately unpacked. Our elected leaders and public-health
officials don’t have the knowledge to convey we are
safe.”</p> <p>But knowledge is out there. Radium can
be detected in urine; a breath test can pick up radon. Because
radium builds up in bone, even a body buried in a cemetery could
convey details of someone’s exposure, says Wilma Subra, a
Louisiana toxicologist who first started tracking oil-and-gas
radioactivity in the 1970s.</p> <p>“There is a massive
liability that has been lying silently below the surface for all
these years,” says Allan Kanner, one of the nation’s
foremost environmental class-action lawyers, whose recent cases
have included PFAS contamination and the Deepwater Horizon oil
spill. “The pieces haven’t all really been put
together, because the industry has not really been telling the
story and regulators haven’t been telling the story and
local doctors aren’t informed, but at some point I expect
you will see appropriate and reasonable litigation emerge on
this.”</p> <p>If so, it could have a devastating
impact on the fossil-fuel industry, especially if tighter
regulations were put in place and oil-and-gas waste was no
longer exempted by the EPA from being defined as hazardous
waste. “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.”</p> <p>“It has been
argued,” says Liz Moran, with the New York Public Interest
Research Group, “that if you close the loophole, you would
put the industry out of business.” When asked what would
happen to the industry if the EPA exemption were removed,
University of Cincinnati legal scholar Jim O’Reilly,
author of 53 textbooks on energy development and other topics,
replied with a single word:
“Disaster.”</p> <p>Radioactivity “is the
way into the Death Star,” says Melissa Troutman, an
analyst with the environmental group Earthworks. The industry is
afraid of two things, she says, “losing money, and losing
their social license.” The high cost of drilling relies on
a continual infusion of capital, and “the number of
operational risks and bottlenecks continues to grow,”
states a 2018 article by the energy consultancy group Wood
Mackenzie. But while the industry is continuously supported by
Wall Street cash, social license may be a more difficult coffer
to refill.</p> <p>Paul Templet, the former secretary of the
Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality and the first
state official to tackle oil’s radioactivity issue, is now
79 years old and lives with his wife in an adobe house in New
Mexico. But he has to return to Louisiana once every couple of
months to serve as an expert in lawsuits over oil-field
contamination. In recent years, a growing group of landowners
has discovered that the oil-and-gas wells that brought them
riches also tarnished their property with heavy metals and
radioactivity. “Almost everywhere we test we find
contamination,” says Templet. There are now more than 350
of these legacy lawsuits moving forward in the state.
Proceedings are sealed, and it is difficult to tally sums across
all cases, but Templet says it’s fair to say that what
began as a little nibble on the industry’s pocketbook has
turned into a forceful tug. “They’ve known for 110
years, but they haven’t done anything about it,”
says Templet. “It’s the secret of the
century.”</p> [/html]
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