Talking about this front-page hackjob:
[New York Times] Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers
A much-repeated shock stat (even Rod Adams is repeating it) is this bit about deadly invisible radiation:
The level of radioactivity in the wastewater has sometimes been hundreds or even thousands of times the maximum allowed by the federal standard for drinking water. While people clearly do not drink drilling wastewater, the reason to use the drinking-water standard for comparison is that there is no comprehensive federal standard for what constitutes safe levels of radioactivity in drilling wastewater. [Specious nonsense. --uvdiv]
Drillers trucked at least half of this waste to public sewage treatment plants in Pennsylvania in 2008 and 2009, according to state officials. Some of it has been sent to other states, including New York and West Virginia.
Yet sewage treatment plant operators say they are far less capable of removing radioactive contaminants than most other toxic substances. Indeed, most of these facilities cannot remove enough of the radioactive material to meet federal drinking-water standards before discharging the wastewater into rivers, sometimes just miles upstream from drinking-water intake plants.
What's going on is simple. They are pulling up wastewater from fracking wells, which has dissolved minerals from surrounding shale rock, including radium. Radium is of course a trace mineral, and there's no selectivity for it in fracking fluids that I'm aware of (if there is, please correct me). So why is the concentration comparatively high? Easy: because it's a highly concentrated brine.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/02/27/us/natural-gas-documents-1.html#document/p406/a9941
(Page 406; this is from one of their leaked EPA documents. The slides start on page 391). So in pre-treatment wastewater we see up to 16,030 pCi/L of Ra-226, which is 3,000 times the EPA standard for drinking water. And we also see up to 428,000 ppm total dissolved solids, or 43% (!), mostly salt. It's not a stretch that these top concentrations occur in the sample samples, and for the same reason: you concentrate salt, you concentrate all the trace impurities in the salt.
Of course this wastewater is extremely dangerous to drink. It is 43% salt. It will kill you in minutes.
I'll repeat the stunningly stupid part where the Times tries to justify assessing 43% brine by drinking water standards:
While people clearly do not drink drilling wastewater, the reason to use the drinking-water standard for comparison is that there is no comprehensive federal standard for what constitutes safe levels of radioactivity in drilling wastewater
Indeed, there are no comprehensive federal standards for assessing the safety of drinking concentrated brine.
Some further thoughts.
Atomic Insights goes into the differences between tritium and radium, with the point of suggesting radium contamination is worse beacuse it is more toxic. I think this is mistaken. What matters is dose; and we're already normalizing for the toxicity differences. E.g. radium is an alpha emitter and has much longer biological residence (remains in bones for decades, compared to tritium being excreted with a 1-week half life). This is already accounted for in the EPA standards which every discussion seems to use as the reference point: tritium concentration standards are 4,000x higher than radium's, reflecting the relative toxicity. For tritium the level is the one derived from an effective dose limit of 4 mrem/year [1], which is currently defined [2] as 20,000 pCi/L (although this is not accurate); for Ra-226 and Ra-228 the limit is 5 pCi/L [1].
[1] http://water.epa.gov/drink/contaminants/index.cfm#Radionuclides
[2] http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/tritium-radiation-fs.html
According to [3], the 50-year CEDE (committed effetive dose equivalent) of Ra-226, by ingestion, is 4 mrem from 0.64 pCi/L drinking water, or 31 mrem at the 5 pCi/L regulatory level. (Note this is over 50 years, not an annual figure like tritium).
[3] http://www.ead.anl.gov/pub/doc/h-based_rad_air-dw_concns_plus_3.pdf
Eh ... It's the NYT. What did you expect?
ReplyDeleteYeah, this article is rather ridiculous. It's a shame that Rod is letting his biases get in the way of his good sense. If this article had been on elevated radium in ground water from uranium mining, I strongly suspect that Rod's take on the article would have been far different.
Here are some rough figures for natural radioactivity in drinks:
ReplyDeleteBeer...........................390 pCi/liter
Tap Water......................20 pCi/liter
Milk...........................1,400 pCi/liter
Salad Oil......................4,900 pCi/liter
Whiskey........................1,200 pCi/liter
Wow, milk contains fourteen-hundred-pico-curies-of-radioactivity. Salad oil is worse, it should not be legal to buy! And what to think of fertilizer, which contains over 60,000 picocuries per kg. Pico is a fancy word for saying not much at all. These journalists don't know nanos from femtos. Its prepostrous that anyone without an education can be a journalist.
http://www.lrb.usace.army.mil/fusrap/docs/fusrap-fs-radenvironment.pdf
Cyril -- to be fair, there's big differences in toxicity between radioisotopes, and food examples are some of the less toxic ones. Potassium-40 is a beta emitter, and besides it is bioregulated (not accumulated). Radium is an alpha emitter which accumulates in bones.
ReplyDeleteTrue, though much of the radiation in food can also be due to radium and thorium. Plants like heavy metals, and animals like plants. We eat plants and animals. We make all sorts of edible and non-edible products animal bones, too.
ReplyDeleteFertilizer from phosphate also contains lots of actinides, and hence Ra, Th, and U. In fact regular fertilizer contains much higher amounts of actinides and daughter products per liter than the highest values reported for the brine.
Needless to say, color televisions, the Vatican, and Denver are also highly radioactive. STAY AWAY from those things.
Well actually, there is one high enough to worry about - smoking two packs a day, 8 rem/year of polonium-210. Scary!
Cheers, Cyril
Let's take the numbers you provide (from available studies). EPA reports produced water from shale gas drilling has contaminants in the range of TDS (428,000 ppm) and Radium (16,030 pCi/l), which you report. Is it fair to say if we reduce TDS by a certain amount in sewage treatment plants or through dilution, we also reduce radium levels by the same amount. This is obviously an over simplification, but maybe you can suggest an alternative approach. So at TDS at 500 ppm, we end up with 18.7 pCi/l radium, which the EPA lists as above the standard for drinking water and has a health impact of "increased risk of cancer." So what do we find in water sample results? In Monongahela River in Pennsylvania, all available testing shows elevated TDS in diluted river water along a 70 mile stretch (520 - 862 ppm) as a consequence of shale gas drilling and treatment of produced water in local sewage treatment plants. This is fouling up equipment at steel mills and power plants, and ruining home appliances with high salt content and corrosion problems. At a minimum, it just plain tastes bad to have water at these levels of TDS concentrations. Reason to be concerned (or do you still recommend that we look the other way, fault NYT for generating unwarranted concern, and give the industry yet another pass on how it manages it's drilling wastes)?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09277/1002919-113.stm
http://s3.amazonaws.com/propublica/assets/monongahela/Mon_River_Project.pdf