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Marvin’s Garden: A Monopoly Draw on Your Taxes… and Health

"Go directly to Jail, Do not pass Go."
 

This is the second of a two-part series. The first part is available here.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission says it does not have statutory authority to regulate naturally occurring radioactive material. It gestures to EPA. EPA points a finger to OSHA. OSHA nods in the direction of NRC. So the matter is mainly left to the states, none of which monitor oil-field, refinery, transportation, pipeline, or gas station workers for radiation exposure.

The levels of radium in Louisiana oil pipes had registered as much as 20,000 times the limits set by the EPA for topsoil at uranium-mill waste sites. Templet found that workers who were cleaning oil-field piping were being coated in radioactive dust and breathing it in. One man they tested had radioactivity all over his clothes, his car, his front steps, and even on his newborn baby. The industry was also spewing waste into coastal waterways, and radioactivity was shown to accumulate in oysters. Pipes still laden with radioactivity were donated by the industry and reused to build community playgrounds. Templet sent inspectors with Geiger counters across southern Louisiana. One witnessed a kid sitting on a fence made from piping so radioactive they were set to receive a full year’s radiation dose in an hour. “People thought getting these pipes for free from the oil industry was such a great deal,” says Templet, “but essentially the oil companies were just getting rid of their waste.”

— Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone credits Dr. Marvin Resnikoff with raising the issue with Pennsylvania regulators in 2015. Resnikoff, whom I profiled in the previous installment, is a physicist specializing in nuclear waste. Resnikoff has published that radioactive contamination is wide-spread in the oil and gas industry, from well-head to refinery to end-of-life, such as the bitumen in asphalt roadways.

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Descending the Peak

When Peak Oil struck the US supply in 2005, the industry already had a game plan. It surprised more than a few peak-oilers who had predicted economic armageddon (but not all of us, if you had been reading this blog for the past 20 years). Hydrofracturing, or “fracking” was a method Big Oil had used to get at “tight” oil and gas formations such as deep rock or coal shale. It involves injecting water, sand, and/or chemicals (brine) into a well at high pressure, causing the rock to open cracks, and regurgitate fossil hydrocarbons. While fracking is more expensive and short-lived than conventional extraction, if you drill enough holes fast enough, you can keep pace with demand and even return to exporting as a country, which is exactly what happened in the United States.

After a (radioactive) fracking fluid is injected into the well, a significant portion returns to the surface as flowback water, which contains a mix of water, chemicals, and naturally occurring substances from the shale that make it more radioactive. Brine trucks transport this wastewater to treatment facilities or disposal sites, which is often just a euphemism for the side of the road or a nearby creek.

In the summer of 2017, Siri Lawson noticed a group of Amish girls walking down the side of a dirt road near the horse farm where she lives with her husband in Farmington Township, Pennsylvania. The girls, dressed in aprons and blue bonnets, had taken off their shoes and were walking barefoot. Lawson was horrified. She knew the road had been freshly laced with brine.

Radioactive oil-and-gas waste is purposely spread on roadways around the country. The industry pawns off brine — offering it for free — on rural townships that use the salty solution as a winter de-icer and, in the summertime, as a dust tamper on unpaved roads.

Brine-spreading is legal in 13 states, including the Dakotas, Colorado, much of the Upper Midwest, northern Appalachia, and New York. In 2016 alone, 11 million gallons of oil-field brine were spread on roads in Pennsylvania.

— Rolling Stone

Soon after fracking began in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia some 12,000 brine trucks began operating. None carried a radioactivity placard. An injection well may need more than 100 brine trucks daily, about one every 14 minutes. Pennsylvania brine truck drivers and well operators complain of burning rashes and odd swelling, not realizing that those were the same warning signs that atomic veterans had after witnessing nuclear tests in the atolls or deserts, only to die of cancer 30 years later. Accidents involving overturned trucks have contaminated drinking water with radium.

Silverio Caggiano, a near 40-year veteran of the Youngstown fire department and a hazardous-materials specialist with the Ohio Hazmat Weapons of Mass Destruction Advisory Committee. “If we caught some ISIS terrorist cells dumping this into our waterways, they would be tried for terrorism and the use of a WMD on U.S. citizens,” says Caggiano. “However, the frack industry is given a pass on all of this.”

— Rolling Stone

And because it attaches to dust, the radium “can be resuspended by car movement and be inhaled by the public,” Resnikoff wrote in a 2015 report.

Which brings us back to those GEN-IV reactors that China is building and that many technophiles and even some misguided environmentalists think the US and EU should cut red-tape on and race to deploy. Even if the weapons proliferation and conflict vulnerability of these reactors were somehow taken out of the equation, and even if they were operated entirely by armies of robots who could care less about genetic damage, there is still the basic biological dilemma we face by making such a bargain.

No Immediate Danger

Given the entire nuclear fuel cycle, and the inevitable releases of toxic radionuclides at every step, on top of the century-old oil and gas industry now being carried to new exponents of production (despite the Paris Agreement), what is happening is that we are increasing the global ambient level of radioactivity on Earth. It is a planetary boundary that has not yet made the official chart of the Stockholm Resilience Center. And yet, the eminent epidemiologist Doctor Sister Rosalie Bertell, in her seminal book, No Immediate Danger, warned many decades ago there may come a point in time when two curves cross. One is the curve of growing resident radioactivity. The other is the trend of reduced human immunity due to the accumulated genetic and epigenetic damage. We may not see the crossing coming or note its passing. But by the time we observe the phenomenon and respond, our extinction as a species will be preordained and unstoppable.

There is no reason to go that route, or even take the slightest risk in that direction. Every good thing we could get from nuclear power, we can already get from the power of the Sun, harnessed benevolently in countless forms. Every bad thing we could get by taking the nuclear path make that choice not just financially and morally unacceptable, but insane.

References

Bates, A., Shutdown: Nuclear Power on Trial, Summertown: Book Publishing Co (1979).

Berman, Art, Shale Oil and the Slurping Sound, The Great Simplification #100

Gent, E., China Demonstrates the First Entirely Meltdown-Proof Nuclear Reactor, Singularity Hub, July 26, 2024

Grantham. Jeremy, Pollution, Population and Purpose, The Great Simplification #99

Radioactive Waste Management Associates: Books and Articles.

Resnikoff, M. Fracking: Has the USGS Been Co-opted by the Oil and Gas Industry?, HuffPost Nov 7, 2012

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