Radioactive Waste 160 - States Are Unable to Properly Regulate Radioactive Waste from Oil and Gas Drilling and Fracking
I have blogged before about problems with disposal of radioactive filters that look like big socks used to trap radioactive particles coming out of fracking well operation. Some of these radioactive elements have half-lives of over fifteen hundred years. North Dakota has a law against dumping these sock filters in landfills so they are supposed to be transported to other states for proper disposal. Instead, a lot of frackers are just dumping them by the road or in community dumpsters and walking away.
Annually, the oil and gas industry in the U.S. produces over twenty billion barrels of wastewater and millions of tons of solid wastes including naturally occurring radioactive materials from the soil such as uranium. Some of this liquid and solid waste contains so much radioactivity that it is dangerous to be close to it.
Unfortunately, unlike other U.S. industries that produce toxic liquid and solid wastes, the oil and gas industry enjoys an exemption from the national environmental laws that govern the handling of toxic waste. The EPA issued a ruling in 1988 to this effect. This means that the responsibility for regulation of such waste falls on individual states. In the past ten years, many states have just not been able to deal with the rising tide of waste from shale drilling. It may be that the state regulators have not dealt with drilling operations in the past. Sometimes there are not sufficient state funds to ramp up environmental protection. In some cases, powerful oil and gas interests are able to buy politicians who prevent strong regulations from being passed or enforced.
Recently, the Western Organization of Resource Councils (WORC) issued a report on the situation. They reviewed the state regulations for dealing with radioactive waste from oil and gas operations in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming. The report said, "...state regulatory frameworks remain sparse, where they exist at all."
The report gives details of a series of illegal dumping incidents in the state of North Dakota These incidents involve the filter socks that I have talked about before. In 2014, an Associated Press investigation found that there have been over one hundred and fifty attempts to dump radioactive waste at landfills in North Dakota that were not licensed to accept such waste. In all of these cases, state regulators did not fine or impose any sort of sanction on any of the entities which attempted the dumping. The WORC report points out that North Dakota is the only state that has what can be considered a "relatively comprehensive" regulatory framework for dealing with the radioactive materials generated by oil and gas drilling operations.
The Chairman of the WORC said that "Oil and gas companies essentially handle and dispose of radioactive waste at their own discretion. Some have resorted to the cheapest option, illegally dumping it." As oil prices have dropped over the past year, concern has risen about illegal waste disposal as a way of reducing operating costs.
Environmentalists are very worried that if radioactive waste is dumped in landfills that are not constructed to isolate it, rainfall and water runoff could carry the radioactive particles into rivers, streams and ground water that provide drinking water. The companies treating water for human consumption may not have any idea that there are radioactive contaminants in their sources. It is estimated that over five hundred thousand tons of drill cuttings and shale gas waste products have been dumped in municipal landfills around the U.S.
Last August, a coalition of environmental groups stated that they were preparing to sue the EPA to force it to draft regulations to control the radioactive and toxic waste generated by the oil and gas industry. The EPA had assumed that the states were capable of drafting and enforcing regulations that would be adequate. In spite of efforts by Western states to improve and expand radioactive waste regulation, they are still far from accomplishing that goal.
