I strive for accuracy in this blog. I recently encountered a very disturbing story. All news accounts I have seen trace back to a single article published by on Truthstream Media on March 6, 2015. This is a website created by Aaron Dykes and Melissa Melton. They claim to have found newspaper articles from the 1960s which say that contractors and the U.S. government worked together in the development of a system for injecting cement mixed with low-level nuclear waste from weapons development into fracking wells drilled in the Conasauga shale formation which lies under parts of Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia.
The U.S. Defense Department had little concern about environmental damage when it started the U.S. nuclear weapons program in the 1940s. The Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington States is still cleaning up the mess the DoD left there where millions of gallons of low-level waste was just poured into dirt trenches and allowed to soak into the ground. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico which is charged with disposing of similar waste just had a drum of waste explode, releasing plutonium and americium into the environment. The WIPP will be shut for several years while they work on repairing the damage.
There are five articles in Texas newspapers in 1964 that mention the waste fracking program. Four of them have identical text and the fifth has the same text with a few minor changes. The accounts talk about how Union Carbide which operates the nuclear materials division of the U.S. Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee teamed up with Halliburton. Halliburton's contribution was the creation of a special cement. The low-level waste was mixed with the cement and the mixture was injected into a well. The injected mixture fracked the earth around the well hole. After forty eight hours, the mixture hardened into a solid layer underground.
Fracking is very controversial. The supporters talk about energy independence and jobs. The critics talk about polluted ground water, release of methane which exacerbates global warming and the occurrence of earthquakes near fracking wells in what had been stable geology. If it is true that the U.S. government, Union Carbide and Halliburton started fracking nuclear waste in 1960, this should have been public long ago.
The big question at this point is whether or not the U.S. government has any records that specify where this waste was injected into fracking wells. It would also be nice to know how long this program lasted. Considering the fact that the documentation at Hanford was very shoddy with respect to disposal of similar waste, it is possible that the records of this waste fracking do not exist. This is regrettable because it would allow a study of long term effects of using this method of nuclear waste disposal. Liquids and gases from fracking escape into the ground water and atmosphere near fracking sites. It would be informative to compare the location of clusters of cancers and birth defects with the sites where nuclear waste was injected into the ground.
Conasauga shale:
