March 2024 Networker: Radioactive Exposures |
| Volume 29 (3), March 2024 |
| Our work at SEHN involves a remarkable degree of concentric circles and overlapping spheres of people and topics. Some of our collaborations are intentional and some arise organically as we continue with ongoing commitments as well as engage new areas of work. In this edition of The Networker we’re featuring an introduction to radioactive exposures as they are created by the oil and gas industry. The impetus for this focus right now is the forthcoming book by our colleague, science journalist and author Justin Nobel: Petroleum-238: Big Oil's Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It. As Justin’s work focuses uniquely on a current, ongoing threat to worker health, Dr. Sandra Steingraber’s column this month takes us back to the horrors endured by the “Radium Girls” in the early 1900s. Justin often speaks of the influence that our fracking science Compendium had on his now years-long commitment to researching this particular health and safety crisis linked to oil and gas extraction. When we helped bring together Justin and Compendium co-author Dr. Larysa Dryszka in a webinar last month, it was a wonderful continuation of their now frequent collaboration. Sandra Steingraber and I have worked with Dr. Dryszka since the founding of Concerned Health Professionals of New York. We can’t imagine not having access to the deep expertise and warm collegiality of either. Justin writes, We live on a radioactive planet, and oil and gas happens to bring up some of Earth’s most interesting, and notorious, radioactive elements. They can be concentrated in the formation below, and further concentrated by the industry’s processes at the surface. From day one, which in the United States was 1859, the US oil and gas industry has had no good idea what to do with this waste. “…no good idea what to do with the waste.” Many of us have emphasized this staggering fact as it relates to the oil and gas industry: we’ve seen unlined waste pits, dumping at inappropriate sites (both legally and illegally), the out-of-control seismic effects of waste injection wells, and more. We also know this fact holds true for other industries that create toxic and radioactive contamination and waste. My last piece on the Santa Susana Field Lab touched on the faltering start to a cleanup of an infamous “burn pit” on the site, 15,408 cubic yards of heavily contaminated soil—including with radioactive components—since the 1960s. This waste will start out traversing suburban streets on a long journey to a waste facility that will accept it in some other western state. No good idea what to do with the waste, that’s for certain. As I read through author Justin’s Author’s Note for the book, which we’re honored to print here, I came across the name of Dr. Marco Kaltofen, with whom Justin consulted. Dr. Kaltofen said, “With fossil fuels, essentially what you are doing is taking an underground radioactive reservoir and bringing it up to the surface where it can interact with people and the environment.” As it happens, he is also the lead author on a crucial paper that documented that kind of interaction, but in this case between radioactivity generated by human activity (nuclear experiments) and a fire (which could also be said to be fueled by human activity). The paper addresses the extent to which the 2018 Woolsey Fire, which began at the Santa Susana Field Lab, spread radioactive microparticles into the surrounding community. We’re concerned with both ongoing, unmitigated radioactive contamination and exposures that Justin is revealing as no one else has, as well as the implications of historic radioactive legacies. March 28, 2024 is the 45th anniversary of the partial nuclear meltdown of the Unit 2 reactor of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station on the Susquehanna River near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. We’re pleased to co-sponsor a special webinar on that day, centered on Dr. Heidi Hutner’s new film “RADIOACTIVE: The Women of Three Mile Island.” The webinar will focus on “Gender, Environmental Justice, and the Future of Nuclear Power.” In addition to Dr. Hutner and her team, the panel will include Stanford University Professor Mark Jacobson, whose work on the transition away from oil and gas and to renewable energy—not including nuclear—has been invaluable to us. Register here. We’re honored to partner with all those I mention here as well as others to—as Justin writes— know these realities and so be able to change them. Carmi Orenstein, MPH, Editor |
Petroleum-238: Big Oil's Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It
Author’s Note |
| In Paris France there are fine cafés and famous landmarks but what nobody really knows is at the other end of a building known as Le V, on the northeast side of the city is a portal that leads to a secret pile of fracking waste in the woods of West Virginia. A lot more comes to the surface at an oil and gas well than just the oil and gas, including billions of pounds of waste every day across the US, much of it toxic and radioactive. My journey into this topic started when an Ohio community organizer told me someone made a liquid deicer out of radioactive oilfield waste for home driveways and patios that was supposedly “Safe for Pets” and had been selling it at Lowe’s. As you will see, this indeed was the case. And unraveling how that came to be turned into a 20-month Rolling Stone magazine investigation, which won an award with the National Association of Science Writers, and eventually became this book. It almost doesn’t seem real, you might deny it, but really all that has happened here is a powerful industry has spread harms across the land, its people, and more so than anyone, their very own workers, and did what they could to make sure no one ever put all the pieces together, and no one ever has—until now. Many people tell me there is nothing to see here, the levels aren’t that bad, but unfortunately this is the same thing the oil and gas industry’s shadow network of radioactive waste workers have often been told. So they work on, shoveling and scooping waste, mixing it with lime and coal ash and ground up corncobs in an attempt to try and lower the radioactivity levels, without appropriate protection, sometimes in just T-shirts, eating lunch and smoking cigarettes and occasionally having barbecue cookouts in this absurdly contaminated workspace. Sludge splattered all over their bodies, liquid waste splashing across their faces and into their eyes and mouths, inhaling radioactive dust, waste eating away their boots, soaking their socks, encrusting their clothes, which will often be brought home and washed in the family washing machine, or a local hotel, further spreading contamination. Oilfield waste has been spilled, spread, injected, dumped, and freely emitted across this nation. And contamination has been discharged—sometimes illegally, often legally—into the same rivers America’s towns and cities draw their drinking water from. Just the other month I visited an abandoned fracking waste treatment plant on a large US river where unknowing local kids had been partying. It was littered with beer cans and condoms and parts of it were more deeply contaminated with radioactivity than most of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. I was there with a former Department of Energy scientist and his Geiger counter issued a terrifying alarm—at around 2 milliroentgens per hour. He had samples tested at a radiological analysis lab and discovered the radioactive element radium to be 5,000 times general background levels. Continue Reading |
Repercussion Section: Luminous Cockpits, Radium Girls, and Fracking Boys |
| by Sandra Steingraber, SEHN Senior Scientist |
| Last month, this column considered the ways in which the military demands of World War I gave rise to the modern branch of earth science called hydrogeology. During that conflict, combatants were quartered for long periods of time in forward bases that were literally entrenched in the earth. They needed groundwater to stay out of their dugouts, and they also needed clean water for themselves and their warhorses to drink. To both those ends, geologists accompanied the allied troops into of the battlefields of the Western Front and figured out how to identify, assess, and exploit aquifers. The first World War was the last major conflict involving soldiers on horseback—with the huge quantities of water that cavalries require—but it was also the first conflict involving soldiers in airplanes. And those pilots, flying high above the trenches, needed to see their instrumentation at night. Engineers served this particular military exigency by developing new technology, namely, paint laced with radium and phosphor (aka zinc oxide, which fluoresces when exposed to energy). This concoction, called Undark, made cockpit instruments and gunsights glow in the dark. *** Radium, chemical symbol Ra, inhabits the bottom left corner of the periodic chart of elements, three squares below calcium. Keep that fact in mind. We’ll come back to it. Famously discovered and named by Marie Curie in 1898, the element radium is considered a naturally occurring radionuclide, but it is mostly found deep under the ground, sometimes in groundwater aquifers, most often bound up with uranium ores. All forms of radium are radioactive, meaning as it decays, radium emits ionizing radiation—subatomic particles or electromagnetic waves with energy sufficient to knock electrons off of surrounding molecules. Continue Reading |
|
