America’s #Radioactive Secret

Oil-and-gas wells produce nearly a trillion gallons of #ToxicWaste a year. An investigation shows how it could be making workers sick and #contaminating communities across America.

"Breathing in this stuff and ingesting it are the worst types of exposure. You are irradiating your tissues from the inside out.”

by Justin Nobel

"In a squat rig fitted with a 5,000-gallon tank, Peter crisscrosses the expanse of farms and woods near the #Ohio / #WestVirginia / #Pennsylvania border, the heart of a region that produces close to one-third of America’s #NaturalGas. 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 #InjectionWells, where it’s disposed of by being shot back into the earth.

"One day in 2017, Peter pulled up to an injection well in #CambridgeOhio. 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.

"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.

"'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.'

"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."

Read more: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/america-s-radioactive-secret?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us

#Secrecy #OilAndGasIndustry #Fracking #Radon #Radium #Ohio