nuclear-news

State regulators are caught between environmental and public health groups demanding more regulation and the industry, which says it’s already taking proper precautions. As scientists debate the impact of small amounts of radiation on cancer risks, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says there’s not enough evidence to say what level is safe.

Left to police the waste, state governments are increasing their scrutiny of well operators. Pennsylvania and West Virginia are revising limits for acceptable radiation levels and strengthening disposal rules. North Dakota’s doing the same, after finding piles of garbage bags filled with radioactive debris in an abandoned building this year. “We have many more wells, producing at an accelerating rate, and for each of them there’s a higher volume of waste,” said Avner Vengosh, a professor of geochemistry at Duke University in Durham,North Carolina, who’s studied the issue. Without proper handling, “we are actually building up a legacy of radioactivity in hundreds of points where people have had leaks or spills around the country.”

Source: North Dakota Dept of Health via Bloomberg

The waste is a byproduct of the drilling renaissance that has brought U.S. oil and natural gas production to its highest levels in three decades — while also unlocking naturally occurring radium from rock formations far underground…….

Radium Contamination

The issue is shale rock, the dense formations found to hold immense reserves of gas and oil. Shale often contains higher levels of radium — a chemical element used in industrial X-ray diagnostics and cancer treatments — than traditional oil fields, Vengosh said.

Freeing gas and oil is a water-intensive process called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in which drill bits cut thousands of feet through shale fields to make way for high-pressure water streams that pulverize the rock. The process displaces radium-tinged subterranean water that comes up through the wells, where it can taint soil and surface equipment. Radiation levels can build up in sludges at the bottom of tanks, pipeline scale and other material that comes in extended contact with wastewater.

Buried Waste

Some states allow the contaminated material to be buried at the drill site. Some is hauled away, with varying requirements for tracking the waste. Some ends up in roadside ditches, garbage dumpsters or is taken to landfills in violation of local rules, said Scott Radig, director of the North Dakota Health Department’s Division of Waste Management.

In that state’s Bakken oilfields, “it’s a wink-and-a-nod situation,” said Darrell Dorgan, a spokesman for the North Dakota Energy Industry Waste Coalition, a group lobbying for stricter rules. “There’s hundreds of thousands of square miles in northwestern North Dakota and a lot of it is isolated. Nobody’s looking at where all of it is going.”…….http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-15/radioactive-waste-booms-with-oil-as-new-rules-mulled.html