Journalist Justin Nobel was trying to wrap his head around fracking and gas development in the Marcellus and Utica shale in Pennsylvania and Ohio. So he spent two weeks on the ground, learning from residents and activists in the region. At the end of his trip, a community organizer happened to mention something about radioactivity in the waste produced from gas development. That was two years ago.
INVESTIGATION: OIL AND GAS WORKERS EXPOSED TO RADIOACTIVITY FROM DRILLING WASTE
KARA HOLSOPPLE JANUARY 31, 2020
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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.
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 ...
Nobel’s investigative piece, America’s Radioactive Secret, about the dangers of radioactive oil and gas waste was published recently in Rolling Stone. The piece focuses on worker and community safety and health concerns over the wastewater that comes up out of oil and gas wells and the regulatory black hole that puts people at risk.
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