America's Radioactive Secret

[Newest Reality]

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

In 2014, a muscular, middle-aged Ohio man 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.”

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.

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 radioactive.

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.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/oil-gas-fracking-radioactive-investigation-937389/

[Tech]

1. This is a little terrifying.

[appalachiablue]

2. K/R

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcellus_Formation

[mountain grammy]

3. It's really amazing how strong greed is. It'll kill us all, literally.

[Mickju]

4. I saw this the other day.

It is shocking and horrifying. We can add this to all the other shocking and horrifying things that are happening and will be happening.

[Newest Reality]

5. I was thinking...

There was a post about the Radium Girls and here we are, once again, only it's getting spread haphazardly and has a tendency to concentrate.

To think, they sell it to you to melt snow and ice and spray it on your roads. That's just amazing. Oh, just some radium. Nothing to see here folks and don't be communists about oil, gas and profit. You need us!

So, then, for more and more people the future will be cancer as common as colds.

"Hi, how are ya'? I have cancer x. The kids have had it for a while and the wife does now, too. Our dogs and cats all have cancer and the local wildlife is not looking so good. We see a lot of big tumors on them, extra heads, fur and feather loss, etc."

"Oh, yeah, I know. Me too, I just got my diagnosis. My kids are dead from cancer and my parents are in hospice. The wife looks pretty pale and she's weak for hers. Well, that's life. Cancer! We don't even have pets because they just die too fast these days. Even our tropical fish developed sores all over and just started floating at the top of the tank, one-by-one!"

"Oh, I have to go fill up my SUV."

"Me too! I am sure glad we at least have gasoline and it's cheap. Do you think we need so ice melt on hand, yet?"