I try not to get too angry when I read about the misdeeds of companies handling radioactive waste but sometimes it is difficult. Many of my blogs focus on the nuclear industry, nuclear reactors and their waste, mining of uranium, nuclear weapons, etc. but today I am going to talk about an industry that at first glance is not related to nuclear issues. I am talking about fracking.
The fracking industry is raping the landscape all over this country, polluting the aquifers and ground water and causing earthquakes, in the quest for cheap natural gas. Although inexpensive natural gas is eroding the support for building more nuclear reactors, one of the waste products in the sludge pumped out of fracking wells consists of natural radioactive uranium in the soil and rock which also contains trace amounts of radium. Radium is very dangerous to biological systems. During fracking operations, there are large cloth filters that capture some of the uranium and radium from fracking operations as waste is pumped out of fracking wells.
North Dakota is home to major fracking operations. An estimated seventy five tons of fracking waste is being pumped out of fracking wells daily in ND. Fracking filters cannot be disposed of in North Dakota landfills if they are emitting more than five picocuries. There are no disposal options in ND for filters emitting more than five picocuries. If companies are caught trying to dispose of such filters in ND landfills, the fine is a thousand dollars a filter. It has been reported that many filters are being improperly disposed of in ND to avoid the cost of shipping them out of state to a legal disposal area.
An Indian reservation found that fracking filters were being tossed into dumpsters and garbage cans on the reservation. Whole flat bed truck trailers full of bags of fracking filters have been found abandoned along ND roads. In the tiny town of Noonan near the Canadian border, old buildings on the property of a closed gas station were found to contain hundreds of bags of highly radioactive fracking filters. The owner of the property is a fugitive wanted on larceny charges. It is unclear whether or not the owner is aware of and complicit in the use his buildings for dumping fracking filters.
The State of North Dakota has no office or staff that is monitoring and attempting to control the illegal dumping of fracking filters in ND. This is a horrible example of an polluting industry moving into a poor state and just doing anything it wants to make a profit. All of the pretty ads about clean cheap natural gas that are appearing on TV are based on a lie. The gas is cheap because the people drilling and operating the fracking wells are dumping the environmental damage and public health threats on the citizens of ND and pocketing the profits from selling the natural gas. If the actual damage to the ecosystem were to be factored into the cost of natural gas, it would not be anywhere near as cheap as is being advertised. I have seen studies that indicate that if the environmental costs of fracked natural gas are factored in, it is no cleaner that burning coal in power plants. The illegal dumping of fracking filters in ND as if it were one big garbage dump is an outrage and if the State of North Dakota cannot afford to stop it, then the Federal government should get involved and prosecute the dumpers.
Illegally abandoned fracking filters in North Dakota:
