with a Pennsylvania group called the Clean Air Council, I inspected several pipes in 5D’ s Cecil storage yard. I’ d encountered fracking waste like this before and knew it was reasonable to suspect the pipes were radioactive. On the day we weree there, two large gaps in the fence made it freely accessible to the public. Theree were no signs warning against trespassing or about the presence of radioactivity.
I returned later that week with Yuri Gorby, a former U. S. Department of Energy scientist who worked at the Pacificc Northwest National Laboratory and the Hanford Nuclear Site. Clad in a pair of protective latex gloves, Gorby gathered peels of rusty metal that had flaked off the pipes, a type of waste generated in oil and gas development that the industry refers to as pipe‐scale. Gorby placed the material in plastic bags, and labeled them, later to be sent off to labs for analysis.
Next, using his Geiger counter— a Ludlum 3000 Digital Survey Meter— Gorby examined several of the thousands of pipes dumped at the site. One pipe, with an opening wide enough for a child to crawl into it, had a dose rate of
4.88 milliroentgens per hour, nearly 1,000 times the location’ s background radiation levels. A 2016 report of the International Association of
Oil
& Gas Producers considers radiation levels greater than twice background to be a contaminated workspace that“ should be surveyed for loose contamination” and“ promptly cleaned up and drummed.”
My reporting has shown that industrial sitess in Appalachia that appear abandoned may end up getting visited by kids, to party, to play, or just to check things out. A child who spent five hours inside that pipe would be exposed to radiation levels that blow past limits that the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency established to protectt workers cleaning up radioactive waste sites. If that child happened to fall asleep inside the pipe for a full day, they would awaken with an exposure surpassing the annual radioactivity limits set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Yuri Gorby, a former federal energy scientist, tested pipes in the waste yard for radiation.( Credit: Justin Nobel)