51–60 of 109 posts
We're drowning in headlines these days that I feel like this story really fell through the cracks. People who live near fracking really need to know this.
Most of the worlds commercial helium is mined from natural gas, which may have fractions as much as 5%. This helium is thought to be from uranium decay emitting alpha particles and not primordial helium.
I used to do the soil lab testing for a guy that dealt with this waste in my state. They did permitting and paid farmers to be able to spread it on their fields and tell them it is good for them and will make the soil more fertile. It can be either the salt brine or the more hydrocarbon based stuff that was basically like tar being spread on the farmer’s pasture. He himself wrote the laws that the state government ju…
> they weren’t informed about the real dangers of what was being spread. I wonder how many of them would even care. This week the EPA dismantled the Clean Water Rule. The primary backers for this were farmers and developers.
This week, the EPA rolled back an Obama-era executive order interpreting the Clean Water Act. Hard to see how rescinding a three year old executive order could “dismantle” a 47-year old statute.
The Obama-era interpretation was ridiculous on top of everything else. The Wikipedia article is actually pretty good:
> The Clean Water Act is the primary federal law regulating water pollution in the United States. The language of the Clean Water Act describes itself as pertaining to ‘Waters of the United States’. These the act defines as ‘navigable waterways’, which connects the act to constitutional authority to regulate interstate commerce. Two U.S. Supreme Court decisions, in 2001 and 2006, interpreted the law to include waters not presently navigable that were formerly navigable that might be readily dredged to be restored to navigation or be made available for navigation. The scope of these decisions cast into doubt lower court decisions interpreting the act’s authority to extend regulatory authority to streams, wetlands, and small bodies of water not navigable in the sense of the interstate commerce clause.
So the Clean Water Act says the EPA can regulate ”the waters of the United States,” which is defined consistent with “navigable waters,” contemporaneous with Congress’s Commerce Clause authority over navigable waterways. The Obama EO extended it to include even small bodies of waters like ponds, such that farmers would have to get EPA permits to make modifications on their own land that was nowhere near navigable waters.
Maybe we need a law that requires permitting of everything that could affect any body of water no matter how small, because it’s true that pollution can flow from such waters into navigable waters. Maybe there is a way to even make such a law constitutional (e.g. setting up state regulation of water bodies that fall outside the commerce clause). But the Clean Water Act is not that law, and the permitting framework under the CWA is not appropriate for farmers doing work on land far from rivers and lakes.
So just because farmers supported rolling back this rule, why would you assume they’d be okay with radioactive materials polluting their land? Is there any room in our politics to acknowledge that agencies sometimes overreach, and just because you want to push back on that overreach doesn’t mean you want get rid of the agency or long-standing laws entirely?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alpha particles generally cannot penetrate the skin, much less clothing or shoes. Betas can get through skin but probably not shoes. There is some energy dependence. Secondary decays and energy transitions often emit gamma rays as well which can go through everything, but the majority of the energy with these nuclides are alphas and betas. These are primarily dangerous because they're water soluble and present an ing…
> These are primarily dangerous because they're water soluble and present an ingestion and inhalation hazard. Once a large amount of a strong alpha-emitter is in your intestines it can really cause damage. So since the workers are getting it all over their hands and feet, which probably has sweat on it, would it pose a danger? Also, would getting it on wounds like cuts be dangerous as well?
Again, if high dose rates get in your body there is risk.
Sounds like these people need some health physicists and probably better PPE and training.
We should avoid blanket statements of danger that do not have dose rate numbers in them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like you're trying to correct something that is already correct in the article, as soon as in paragraph 4. > The Earth’s crust is in fact peppered with radioactive elements that concentrate deep underground in oil-and-gas-bearing layers. This radioactivity is often pulled to the surface when oil and gas is extracted — carried largely in the brine.
The article does a good job. I'm referring to the headline. For example, nuclear reactors produce radioactive material by fissioning barely-radioactive uranium into highly-radioactive fission products but take great care to not release it. Fracking releases naturally-occurring radioactive materials. Also: "is peppered with" does not imply naturally-occurring. Someone biased to think all radiation is man-made could ea…
> There are over 1 million active oil-and-gas wells across 33 states This is insane. One well per 300 inhabitants of the USA. How is that even economically viable?
Have you ever looked at Google maps/Earth of Texas? Zoom out to a couple thousand feet, and look at all of the little white dots across the surface. Each one of those little dots is a fracking well. Seeing it from this view is quite shocking. Look at how close houses/schools/etc are next to these well sites.
(31.6643861, -103.0348924) Dropped pin Near Winkler County, TX https://goo.gl/maps/J2zi8VwD2QjKUpbk8
We're drowning in headlines these days that I feel like this story really fell through the cracks. People who live near fracking really need to know this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they weren’t informed about the real dangers of what was being spread. I wonder how many of them would even care. This week the EPA dismantled the Clean Water Rule. The primary backers for this were farmers and developers.
> I wonder how many of them would even care. This week the EPA dismantled the Clean Water Rule. This week, the EPA rolled back an Obama-era executive order interpreting the Clean Water Act. Hard to see how rescinding a three year old executive order could “dismantle” a 47-year old statute. The Obama-era interpretation was ridiculous on top of everything else. The Wikipedia article is actually pretty good: > The Clean…
Yes, but what we're seeing under the current Trump administration isn't a "sometimes" thing. It's become an effort to systemically rollback as many regulations as they could in order to allow for greater profits. They have gutted anybody of power within the EPA and replaced then with pro-corporate drones and climate change deniers.
> The new rules make it easier to take out protections for threatened animals and plants and allow federal agencies to conduct economic assessments when deciding whether to protect a species from things like construction projects in a critical habitat. The rules also remove tools used by scientists to predict future harm to species from climate change. [1]
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/24/5-major-trump-climate-rollba...
> The White House and the EPA had tried to stop the report from being published. [2]
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-water-foreverchemical...
[3] https://www.voanews.com/usa/trumps-epa-moves-loosen-radiatio...
Note that these are just from the past few weeks. There has been much more over the past few years that you can google if you'd like to dig it up.
Now measure coal waste.
There's a lot. A lot more than I imagined according to a DOE seminar I sat through. It's interesting because an incredibly small fraction of coal (coal varies a reasonable amount in composition across geological regions) contains various radioactive isotopes with long high-lifes. When you burn/combust coal, especially without care and consideration in the process, a lot of these small components are released in the a…
There have also been population health studies in communities that live adjacent to where coal ash is dumped in the US. As I recall, it is correlated with a small but detectable (around 1% IIRC) increase in cancer incidence rates relative to local control populations, and largely attributed to the thorium component of the waste.
> There are over 1 million active oil-and-gas wells across 33 states This is insane. One well per 300 inhabitants of the USA. How is that even economically viable?
You bribe politicians into removing regulations to lower the costs