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Fracking Produces More Radioactive Waste than Nuclear Power Plants
A frack load more. Every fracking day.
Fracking puts more hazardous radioactive material into the environment than all the US nuclear power plants combined. About a Fukushima worth a month. Another Chernobyl every six months. Three Mile Island ? Fracking child’s play: one truckload of processed frack sludge has more radioactive material in it than all the leakage at Three Mile Island.
The US nuclear industry produces about 2,000 tons of hazardous waste a year that has to be stored in a secure location. A frack truck can haul about 22 tons of processed sludge – that requires storage in a hazardous radioactive waste facility. So a convoy 100 frack trucks carries the equivalent volume of a year’s supply of nuclear industry waste.
That plus the fatalities from fracking, gas compressor explosions, and gas line blasts make fracked gas by far the deadliest form of energy in the US. A bigger body count in a month than nuclear energy in 50 years. More fatalities in a quarter than coal in a year.
More accidents in a year than in the entire history of the solar and wind energy industries, world-wide.
We are not talking about the theoretical release of radioactive material into the air and water. We are talking about an industry that is effectively mining radium – billions of pounds of radioactive material as a byproduct of drilling horizontal wells through shale. Then processing those radioactive materials into even more concentrated hazardous radioactive sludge.Processed radioactive drilling waste is a form of TENORM (“technologically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive material”)—that is, naturally occurring radioactive material (NORM) that has been concentrated or otherwise made more accessible to human exposure.Even the water that comes back as flowback from shale wells is radioactive. The radioactivity of shale brine in New York is as high as 15,000 picocuries per liter. The background radiation at the surface of is about 1 picocurie per liter.
Unlike nuclear waste, frack waste is very loosely regulated. The feds barely regulate it and the state regulators get the fat envelopes to look the other way. So a lot of fracking’s radioactive legacy just gets dumped: In a river, on roads, in landfills, or abandoned barn near you. Plus fracking is a great way to cook a planet.
So much for “Clean Energy.” Has your town or county banned frack waste ? What are you waiting on ? Another frackastrophe ?
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