New Angle for Reporting on Oil and Gas Industry — Radioactive Waste

An oil and gas field in Wyoming. The author warns of what he calls the continuing public health catastrophe of the industry’s radioactive footprint. Photo: © ecoflight.

Feature: New Angle for Reporting on Oil and Gas Industry — Radioactive Waste

By Justin Nobel

If you are a reporter who covers climate change, I ask you to focus for a moment on a Canadian graduate student named Eli Franklin Burton, who in 1904 poured oil from a well in Petrolia, Ontario, into a “large three-litre flask supported in a water bath,” heated that with a Bunsen burner, ran the vapors recovered through a set of tubes and discovered “a highly radioactive gas obtained from crude petroleum.”

This was radon, currently America’s second leading cause of lung cancer deaths.

Radon travels to the surface with both oil and natural gas at levels high enough to generate public health risks and, over time, cancer and deaths, says a 1973 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report, “Assessment of Potential Radiological Health Effects from Radon in Natural Gas.”

The EPA has not updated this report in the 50 years since. And the problem has not gone away in the age of fracking.

For example: New Yorkers are now reliant on fracked gas that the industry’s own accounting has demonstrated to be spiked with enough radioactivity to cause, over time, lung cancers and deaths, a situation that my reporting showed to be encouraged and enabled by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his longtime romantic partner.

And this is just the beginning of the oil and gas industry’s radioactive nightmare.

 

Measuring the risk

The industry has long known about this threat, and has long been petrified that the government will regulate its radioactive emissions and waste.

A 1982 report of the American Petroleum Institute’s Committee for Environmental Biology and Community Health of its Department of Medicine and Biology warns of radon’s health risks to communities and workers, stating: “Almost all materials of interest and use to the petroleum industry contain measurable quantities of radionuclides that reside finally in process equipment, product streams, or waste.”

My own journey into investigating this topic started in 2016, when I began reporting on oil and gas wastewater injection wells for Rolling Stone magazine.

 

A community organizer told me an

oil and gas operator in Ohio had made

a liquid deicer out of radioactive oil and

gas waste for home driveways and patios.

 

In 2018, an Ohio community organizer told me an oil and gas operator in that state had made a liquid deicer out of radioactive oil and gas waste for home driveways and patios. The company claimed this product was “Safe for Environment & Pets” and had been selling it at Lowe’s.

Since then, I’ve been able to tunnel into the continuing public health catastrophe of the industry’s radioactive footprint.

 

Radioactive spew

Drilling rig with brine pipeline. Photo: U.S. Department of Energy via Flickr Creative Commons (United States government work).

A lot more comes to the surface at oil and gas wells than just oil or gas.

First, there’s the liquid waste, a radioactive spew innocently called brine.

A year’s worth of brine produced just in the United States could, if put into barrels and stacked atop one another, reach the moon and back 28 times.

Tanks and trucks that hold brine accumulate a highly radioactive sludge at levels that can be tens of thousands of times greater than background radiation levels.

An even more vile and toxic waste stream called flowback includes fracking sand and chemicals upchucked back to the surface.

Due to elevated levels of uranium and thorium in the black shale formations presently being fracked, even the seemingly innocuous drill cuttings — crushed rock and dirt unearthed in the process of drilling a well — can be too radioactive for local landfills.

And yet, many people still say there is nothing to see here, the levels aren’t that bad.

 

Unwitting exposure

The greatest threat may be to the oil and gas industry’s shadow network of radioactive waste workers.

Unaware of the risks, they shovel and scoop the waste, mixing it with lime and coal ash and ground-up corncobs in an attempt to lower the radioactivity levels, without appropriate protection, sometimes in just T-shirts.

 

They eat lunch and smoke

cigarettes and occasionally

have barbecue cookouts in this

absurdly contaminated workspace.

 

They eat lunch, smoke cigarettes and occasionally have barbecue cookouts in this absurdly contaminated workspace.

Sludge splattering all over their bodies, brine and flowback splashing across their faces and into their eyes and mouths, radioactive dust swirling around everywhere. 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 at a local hotel, further spreading contamination.

Unlike the cosmic radiation an airline passenger is exposed to, or the X-rays of a CT scan, moving around radioactive oil field sludge or scale invariably creates dust and particles, which an unprotected worker may easily inhale or ingest, thereby bringing radioactive elements inside their body where they can decay and fire off radiation in the intimate and vulnerable space of the lungs, guts, bones or blood. The predictable end result: cancer.

“These men are guinea pigs,” Stuart Smith, the Louisiana attorney who has successfully brought cases on oil and gas worker radiation exposures against some of the industry’s largest corporations — ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron — told me in 2020.

 

Sweeping the problem under the carpet

The U.S. oil and gas industry currently disposes of 96% of its wastewater — both brine and flowback — at injection wells.

There are presently 181,431 oil and gas wastewater injection wells in the country, or 11 for every Starbucks. Operators inject 2 million gallons of waste into these deep underground holes every minute.

Unfortunately, injection is a scientifically meritless process and a landscape-level example of sweeping radioactive waste under the carpet.

“We really do not know what happens to the wastes down there,” Stanley Greenfield, assistant administrator for research and monitoring at the newly formed EPA, told a 1971 conference between industry and government experts on underground waste management. “We just hope.”

“It is clear,” Theodore Cook, with the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, stated at that same 1971 conference, “that this method is not the final answer to society’s waste problems.”

 

Regulatory deficiencies

As excellent reporting by some of my colleagues has shown, injection wells have not only triggered earthquakes but are now leaking their waste back to the surface across America.

So it’s not surprising that even conservative oil and gas communities tend to despise injection wells. Or that the industry is energetically trying to pivot away from them and instead promoting the idea of “treating” oil and gas waste.

The problem is this waste contains an incredibly complex mixture of contaminants, including all the radioactivity. And as that same 1982 American Petroleum Institute report states, treatment systems “must recognize the fact that radioactivity cannot be modified or made inert by chemical means.” Attempts to remove it risk transforming “a very dilute source of radioactive materials into a very concentrated source.”

Which explains why, when I visited an abandoned fracking wastewater treatment plant in northern West Virginia two years ago with an Ohio environmental organizer and a former Department of Energy scientist, we found a site more contaminated with radioactivity than 99% of the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

It was harrowing to discover local kids had been partying there. But while the EPA acknowledged “contamination at the Site is uncontrolled” and “human exposure to radionuclides by inhalation, absorption, or ingestion is possible,” the partiers weren’t the only potential victims.

The people most intimately exposed were the plant’s workers, who had been told they were doing the prideful job of greening the industry’s waste.

The CEO of the firm that ran the place told me they “followed all regulations.” But unfortunately, the radioactivity brought to the surface in oil and gas development has never been federally regulated and remains unregulated.

 

While radiation generated in

nuclear energy and medicine was

brought under regulations, the oil and

gas industry’s radioactivity never was.

 

After the use of nuclear weapons in World War II, radioactivity was to be regulated by the Atomic Energy Commission, and later by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. While radiation generated in nuclear energy and medicine was brought under regulations, the oil and gas industry’s radioactivity never was.

Furthermore, the industry was granted a federal exemption in 1980 that legally defined its waste as nonhazardous, despite containing toxic chemicals, carcinogens, heavy metals and radioactivity.

This same exemption allows oilfield waste to be transported from foreign countries and deposited in the desert of West Texas. I have been there, and the company that runs the place has threatened legal action.

 

Responsibility to report

There are other journalists on this beat:

• Martha Pskowski, Kiley Bense and Dylan Baddour with Inside Climate News, covering all threads of the oil and gas waste spiderweb
• Sharon Kelly, Julie Dermansky and Nick Cunningham at DeSmog, covering everything from the industry’s hidden documents to radioactive fracking waste in Argentina, and in Dermansky’s case, photographing the stuff
• Mark Olalde, ProPublica, and Nick Bowlin, Capital & Main, who teamed up to cover a multitude of problems posed by injection wells
• Joshua Pribanic and Melissa Troutman at Public Herald, who have been on the beat longer than anyone
• New Yorker contributing writer Eliza Griswold, who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning book that describes the health harms oil and gas waste posed to one southwest Pennsylvania community
• And at The New York Times, investigative reporter Ian Urbina, who wrote 10 in-depth and eloquent pieces in his 2011-2012 “Drilling Down” series. Among many other stunning reveals, his reporting exposed how Pennsylvania was enabling copious amounts of the oil and gas industry’s radium to be discharged into the waterways that numerous Pennsylvania communities draw their drinking water from.

Yet America’s top newspapers and broadcast networks have generally abdicated their responsibility to the American public to report on this alarming public and worker health assault — how many times have you heard CNN or MSNBC issue a live report from one of the daily fracking-related spills or explosions occurring nationwide?

The New York Times, which not only has a celebrated investigative desk but a remarkable climate section, has abandoned fracking country. If you ask me, they should have set up bureaus in fracked America just like they do in war zones.

This big-media fracking blackout has also helped to erase the institutional memory of reporting like Urbina’s, leaving America’s leading newspapers and networks without the on-the-ground knowledge and capacity to comprehend the complex mechanics, infrastructure and subterfuge of this incredibly aggressive, deceitful and sloppy industry and its waste.

 

Engagement across the political spectrum

However, this lack of watchfulness, coupled with the industry’s inherent nature to, in a world of paltry regulations, tend toward corner-cutting and contamination, has created an environment ripe for some extraordinary science and environmental journalism.

And as odd as it may seem, the political moment is also ripe.

I have done interviews for progressive college papers and ultraconservative podcasts. Certainly these two disagree on climate change and much else. But both have shown the ability to understand the oil and gas radioactive waste problem — that the nation’s most powerful industry, backed by a compliant slew of government agencies, has been enabled to contaminate not just the nation’s water, air, land, soil and crops, but also the lungs, blood and bones of their very own workers and other community members.

And so, my colleagues, I invite you to join in this battle for accountability, health and justice.

I am happy to be in correspondence with anyone who wants to investigate deeper, whether it be from the angle of journalism, scientific research or public health.

Justin Nobel writes on science and the environment for Rolling Stone, Harper’s and other U.S. magazines, investigative sites and literary journals. He has been published in “Best American Science and Nature Writing” and “Best American Travel Writing.” His 2020 Rolling Stone magazine story, “America's Radioactive Secret,” won a National Association of Science Writers award and inspired his latest book, “Petroleum-238: Big Oil's Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It.” His work on this topic also has been published in law review journals and scientific research journals and taught at Harvard’s School of Public Health. His recent reporting has been supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism at the City University of New York’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 10, No. 11. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.