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Guest Commentary: Radioactive Shale Waste Hotter to Handle than Realized
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- In April, residents of Brier Hill joined Frack Free Mahoning Valley to appeal an order issued by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources that authorized Industrial Waste Control/Ground Tech Inc. to operate a plant at 240 Sinter Court in Youngstown.
The plant on Sinter Court will receive potentially radioactive brine, drill-cuttings, drilling mud and tank-bottom sludge from fracking operations that released shale gas.
Sinter Court lies along the Mahoning River, three-fourths of a mile due west of St. Elizabeth Medical Center.
Industrial Waste Control will clean tanks by decontaminating them of radioactive waste, conduct radiological surveys and store, characterize, and solidify fracking waste before shipping it elsewhere.
ODNR received the Industrial Waste Control application Feb. 7 and approved it March 6. ODNR did not release information of its action until April 10 – and then only because of a public records request – after the 30-day public comment period had expired.
The first public knowledge of this order occurred when Teresa Mills of the Center for Environmental Health and Justice notified my wife, Susie Beiersdorfer, co-founder of Frack Free. Mills had requested all permit applications from the ODNR Feb. 11. After two months of obfuscation and delays, she received the application submitted Feb. 7 on April 10.
The mayor of Youngstown, city council and planning department found out only after Mrs. Beiersdorfer went public with the information. The director of the Mahoning County Emergency Management Agency had no physical record of the approval until my wife sent him the documents May 12.
On April 21, The Business Journal was the first news outlet to inform the public. The appeal was filed April 22 and Frack Free held a press conference April 23, which The Journal was the only local news outlet to report.
The Youngstown plant is not unique in that Ohio Department of Natural Resources issued nearly identical orders to a 22 other Ohio plants.
Our concern about each order is that ODNR has no regulatory authority over the plants because it has yet to write the rules governing the sites. That means ODNR does not have any authority to inspect or enforce any violations because there are no rules to violate. The attorney who represents Frack Free has sued to revoke all 23 orders on the grounds that they were issued illegally because of the lack of rules.
Radionuclides contained in the waste Industrial Waste Control accepts pose a threat to humans because the radiation damages our cells and can result in cancer. The danger from radium is that it behaves similarly to calcium and can get into our bones if we ingest it. The subsequent radioactive decay can damage cells and result in cancer.
The health damage from radon gas occurs when it is inhaled and adheres to lung tissue. The subsequent radioactive decay can result in lung cancer, a leading cause for nonsmokers. Because uranium decays so slowly, its radioactive decay has not been linked with cancer. The main health impact of uranium is kidney damage.
The common unit of measuring radioactive decay is the picocurie (0.037 decays per second or one decay every 27 seconds). The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s safe limit for radium in drinking water is five picocuries per liter, about five parts per trillion.
The Ohio Revised Code sets the limit at 5pCi/g above natural background. According to its application, Industrial Waste Control considers 6.99 pCi/g to be the regulatory limit, which is most likely 5 pCi/g plus the EPA designated background of 2 pCi/g. The recommended EPA method for measuring radium in drinking water samples uses barium sulfate to precipitate the element from the of solution, a process that takes 21 days, before the precipitate can be analyzed.
A University of Iowa study suggests this method is inappropriate for fracking flow-back because of complications from the huge amounts of dissolved chemicals in the solution. The authors of the study suggest that gamma spectroscopy, which employs a high-purity germanium detector, is a more accurate method to measure radium in fracking flow back. This method also takes 21 days.
The Industrial Waste Control application says Austin Master Services LLC will use in-situ counting equipment. According to the May Shale Sheet, the company will use “in-situ gamma spectroscopy” with the resultant analysis taking only minutes. No information is provided on what type of detector would be used or how well it works on tons of drill cuttings.
A public records request by the Fresh Water Accountability Project reveals that Austin Master Services has applied for Trade Secret Designation for its technique. The company director has not returned my phone call.
The concentration of uranium in shale (four parts per million is typical) is twice that of other sedimentary rocks such as sandstone and limestone. Organic-rich shale has much greater concentrations and was mined for uranium during the early years of manufacturing atomic bombs. Oak Ridge, Tenn., the city the Manhattan Project built, was built there because of its proximity to the uranium-rich Chattanooga shale.
The reason why radioactive risk is associated with shale is identical to the reason the shale is fracked – organic matter. To better understand this, a quick chemistry lesson is in order. The loss of electrons is called oxidation and results in rust on iron and verdigris on copper.
Uranium has several states of oxidation, the two most common being uranous and uranyl. Uranyl dissolves readily in surface waters where uranous will precipitate out of solution to deposit minerals in reducing (opposite of oxidizing) environments, such as organic rich shale layers. The presence of organic matter in shale, which makes it valuable for fracking, is also responsible for the radioactive contamination.
In 1981, the U.S. Geological Survey published that Marcellus shale uranium contents are 10 to 20 times greater than average shale (41.1 ppm in Knox County versus 83.7 ppm in upstate New York). The flow back from the Marcellus is also high in radionuclides. A Duke University study of sediments downstream from an industrial brine treatment plant along Black Lick Creek, a tributary of the Allegheny River in Pennsylvania, measured concentrations of radium (14.7 to 237 pCi/g) that were up to 200 times greater than upstream.
This contamination is attributed to the Marcellus fracking flow back fluids released there. Since similar Pennsylvania fluids were pumped in the D&L Northstar 1 well in Youngstown and are accepted at the Patriot Water Treatment Plant in Warren, it is reasonable to suspect that over 20 million gallons of untreated radioactive-contaminated fluids were pumped under Youngstown and are regularly released into the Mahoning River. With oil companies in Pennsylvania producing 16,000 tons of radioactive materials in 2013, disposal of these huge amounts of radioactive drilling wastes is a serious problem.
The 450 million-year-old Utica shale is the oldest being fracked in this country. Unfortunately little to no information has been published on the uranium, radium and radon content of the Utica shale. This did not stop the Ohio Legislature in 2013 from defining the shale-gas drill-cuttings in Ohio, not as low-level radioactive waste, but as beneficial material that can be used to line landfills or spread on farmers’ fields.
Exemptions for the radioactive drill-cuttings were inserted into the 4,000-page Ohio budget at the last minute after little or no debate. In fact, Gov. John Kasich’s request to have the Ohio Department of Health oversee the radioactive waste was rejected in favor of ODNR – an agency with little or no expertise in radionuclide risk to the environment and public health. ODNR’s order also allows Industrial Waste Control to down-blend radioactive hot fracking waste, a process forbidden by the state health department for all other radioactive waste.
In summary, radioactive frack-waste will be trucked to Youngstown, tested in minutes by using a secret technique by a limited liability company, under no rules from the ODNR. As you would imagine, the residents of nearby Brier Hill are very concerned. It was only through citizen action that the public was made aware of potential risks that include potential accidents, spills, explosions and/or fires.
ODNR illegally ordered the company to begin work absent public comment and imposed no rules to inspect and regulate what’s happening there.
The author, Ray Beiersdorfer, is a professor in the Geological and Environmental Sciences Department at Youngstown State University.