Fracking has been in the news a lot lately. They drill down a couple of miles and then often drill horizontally for a distance. Water and a mix of proprietary chemicals are injected into the wells to “fracture” the rock strata and release trapped natural gas which is then pumped out of the well. There are many problems with this process. Some of the chemicals injected into the ground are toxic and even flammable. The chemicals contaminate the ground water in the area to the point where people are getting ill and tap water will burn like gasoline. There have been earthquakes in the areas where they are fracking and the fracking may be the cause. Water that is recovered from the wells has to be disposed of so it won’t contaminate surface water. This waste water has been injected back into the ground into caverns for disposal but a giant sinkhole opened up in Louisiana above on such cavern and people had to be evacuated from nearby homes.
The drilling process for fracking brings up mud and rock which has to be disposed of. Recently, at a Pennsylvania landfill, a truck carrying drill cuttings was rejected because the cuttings set of an alarm indicating radioactivity. The radiation was from radium-266 and was over eighty times the level that is acceptable at the landfill. The truck was sent back to the drill site to be redirected to a landfill that would accept higher levels of radioactivity.
Radium 226 is the result of the decay of naturally occurring uranium-238 in the soil and rock where the fracking drilling is taking place. It emits alpha and gamma radiation. It poses a serious threat to human health if inhaled or ingested. Radium 226 concentrates in bones and can cause cancer such as lymphoma, bone cancer, leukemia or anemia. Even outside of the human body, exposure to gamma radiation from radium-226 can increase the risk of cancers in all tissue and organs. However, these diseases can take years to develop so it is often difficult to prove the cause.
Aside from exposures from landfills, radium-226 is a threat to the public water supply. The water that comes out of the fracking wells may contain as much as sixteen thousand picoCuries of radioactivity per liter. The allowed level of radioactivity for waste water released into the environment is sixty picoCuries of radioactivity per liter. The EPA has a standard of five picoCuries per liter. That makes the fracking water three thousand times as radioactive as safe drinking water!
So far, Pennsylvania is the only state that requires landfills to monitor for radiation although fracking is taking place in at least thirty one states in the U.S. Only four of the thirty one fracking states have serious regulations for fracking operations. It is somewhat ironic that the cheap natural gas coming from fracking is reducing the demand on nuclear generation of electricity but carries its own radiation threats that will increase as fracking increases.
Fracking effluent pit – picture from peacecouncil.net
