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SPECIAL EVENT: Gov. Jay Inslee on Climate Solutions in the Pacific Northwest

by AliceLandreneau Posted on March 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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Let’s say you’re tired of climate inaction. Let’s say you want to see somewhere in the United States that is actually, you know, doing things.

If so, then your focus probably ought to be on the states of the Pacific Coast. Recently Washington state, Oregon, California and the Canadian province of British Columbia reached an agreement to harmonize their climate and energy policies, a development that has the potential to not just accelerate greenhouse gas reductions, but also to catalyze a strong, clean, and resilient economy. That’s a big deal for a region that is home to 53 million people, and whose GDP is $2.8 trillion.

But there are challenges as well: While California and British Columbia have set a price on carbon (through a cap-and-trade program and a carbon tax, respectively), thus far Oregon and Washington have not. Meanwhile, a new battle is brewing over coal exports, one that potentially pits the Obama administration itself against the states of Oregon and Washington.

To discuss the climate outlook for the region, please join Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and other distinguished speakers and panelists for a special installment of Climate Desk Live—a partnership between the University of Washington’s College of the Environment, Climate Access, and Climate Desk, sponsored by Bloomberg BNA. Hosted by award-winning journalist Chris Mooney, the discussion will cover a range of key climate policy issues from coal terminals, to fuel efficiency standards, to carbon pricing, with an eye toward innovation and new energy solutions. The event will follow a March 27 Climate Desk Live panel in Vancouver, which will focus on the lessons learned from the first five years of British Columbia’s carbon tax.

The Seattle event will be Tuesday, April 1, from 3 pm to 5 pm Pacific Time, at the University of Washington Tower Auditorium, 4333 Brooklyn Ave NE, Seattle, WA, 98105. Advanced registration for this event is required. You can RSVP here, and join the event on Facebook here (but you will still need to RSVP). The event will be live-streamed here and also at climatedesk.org.

Featured Guests and Speakers:

Jay Inslee. A fifth generation Washingtonian, Jay Inslee was first elected to Congress in 1998, serving until 2012. He is the coauthor of Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean-Energy Economy, a book about the job-creating potential of the clean tech industry. As governor, Inslee’s top priority is growing Washington’s innovative industries such as clean energy, IT and life sciences, and strengthening existing industries such as aerospace, agriculture, maritime, and military.

Lisa Graumlich. Dr. Lisa J. Graumlich is the inaugural dean of the College of the Environment at the University of Washington, and the Prentice and Virginia Bloedel Professor. As a scholar, Graumlich pioneered the use of tree-ring data to understand long-term trends in climate, focusing on the mountains of western North America. She is actively engaged with a broad range of stakeholders to understand and respond to the impacts of climate change.

David Roberts. David Roberts is the senior staff writer at Grist, where he covers energy and energy politics. He has contributed to outlets including The New York Times, Outside, and Scientific American, and been featured on programs including MSNBC’s Up with Chris Hayes and The Rachel Maddow Show. His work has been hailed by thought leaders including Al Gore, Paul Krugman, and Michael Levi.

Paul Shukovsky. Paul Shukovsky is Pacific Northwest Correspondent for Bloomberg BNA. He previously worked as a reporter for the Miami Herald, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Tampa Tribune, UPI, and as a public television news producer/anchor alternately covering the environment, indigenous tribes, federal courts, federal investigative agencies, terrorism and national security issues.

(Other speakers may be announced.)

Moderated by:

Chris Mooney, Chris Mooney is an award-winning science and political journalist and the host of Climate Desk Live. He is the author of four books and the co-host of Inquiring Minds, a weekly podcast exploring where politics, society, and science collide.

Partners

Climate Access is a nonprofit network aimed at leveraging the public’s role in addressing climate disruption by increasing support for policy and involvement in shifting energy and sustainability behaviors. Climate Access consists of more than 2,000 leaders from nonprofits, government, and academia located in Canada, the United States, and 43 countries around the world. @climateaccess

Climate Desk is a journalistic collaboration between The Atlantic, the Center for Investigative Reporting, Grist, the Guardian, The Huffington Post, Mother Jones, Slate, and Wired aimed at exploring the consequences of a changing climate. It has a collective reach of more than 200 million people. @ClimateDesk

Bloomberg BNA, a wholly owned subsidiary of Bloomberg, is a leading source of legal, regulatory, and business information for professionals. Bloomberg BNA has been delivering cutting-edge news and expert reference materials to EHS professionals for more than three decades, always with unstinting attention to detail and complete objectivity. Bloomberg BNA’s Energy and Climate Report continues this tradition, with specialized news and analysis on the legal requirements and policy developments surrounding climate change mitigation and adaptation, clean energy and energy efficiency, and corporate sustainability practices in the United States and abroad. @BBNAClimate

University of Washington College of the Environment is the largest environment-focused college in North America, with unparalleled depth and breadth in environmental systems: from the forests to the seas and from the depths of the earth to the edges of the solar system. In partnership with industry, government and nonprofits, the College is creating new leaders, advancing knowledge and forging sustainable solutions to the critical environmental challenges of our time. @UW_CoEnv

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SPECIAL EVENT: Gov. Jay Inslee on Climate Solutions in the Pacific Northwest

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Oil is spilling from trains, pipelines … and now barges

by GilbertCleburne Posted on February 25, 2014

Oil is spilling from trains, pipelines … and now barges

By

Shutterstock

The Mississippi River in New Orleans.

The oil industry is a champion of innovation. When it comes to finding new ways of sullying the environment, its resourcefulness knows no bounds.

An oil-hauling barge collided with a vessel pushing grain in the Mississippi River on Saturday, causing an estimated 31,500 gallons of crude to leak through a tear in its hull. The accident closed 65 miles of the already disgustingly polluted waterway upstream from the Port of New Orleans for two days while workers tried to contain and suck up the spilled oil.

The accident highlighted a little-noted side effect of the continent’s oil boom. Not only is crude being ferried from drilling operations to refineries in leaky pipelines and explosion-prone trains — it’s also being moved over water bodies with growing frequency. Bloomberg reports:

“We’re facing the imminent risk of a barge disaster or a rail disaster” as more oil is shipped to the Gulf of Mexico for refining, Jonathan Henderson, a spokesman for the New Orleans-based Gulf Restoration Network, said by phone after attending a meeting with U.S. Coast Guard officials. …

Barge and tanker shipments of crude from the Midwest to the Gulf Coast jumped from virtually nothing in 2005 to 21.5 million barrels in 2012, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The U.S. Gulf received a record 4.9 million barrels of crude from the Midwest in October.

And if the Coast Guard gets its way and lets frackers ship their wastewater on barges, next up could be spills of radioactive liquid waste containing undisclosed chemicals. 


Source
Mississippi Oil Spill Highlights Risk of U.S. Oil Boom, Bloomberg

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Oil is spilling from trains, pipelines … and now barges

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Duke Energy’s coal-ash spill has utterly ruined a river

by Sylvesterax6 Posted on February 6, 2014

Duke Energy’s coal-ash spill has utterly ruined a river

By

Experts have only just started getting a handle on the environmental and health impacts of Sunday’s spill of tens of thousands of tons of toxic coal ash from a shuttered coal plant in North Carolina. But you don’t need to be an expert to see that the spill into Dan River has done a lot of damage.  The pictures, videos, and personal accounts of the spill are astonishing in their grotesqueness. The AP reports:

An Associated Press reporter canoed downstream of the spill at the Dan River Steam Station and saw gray sludge several inches deep, coating the riverbank for more than two miles. The Dan had crested overnight, leaving a distinctive gray line that contrasted with the brown bank like a dirty ring on a bathtub.

[Brian] Williams, a program manager with the Dan River Basin Association, worried that the extent of the damage might not be fully understood for years.

“How do you clean this up?” he said, shaking his head as he churned up the ash with his paddle. “Dredge the whole river bottom for miles? You can’t clean this up. It’s going to go up the food chain, from the filter feeders, to the fish, to the otters and birds and people. Everything in the ecosystem of a river is connected.”

Before the spill, Duke Energy had insisted that its coal-ash dump sites posed no environmental threats. Now the company is still trying to figure out how to plug the gaping hole in a pipeline that allowed coal residue to flood out of holding ponds and into the river. From Bloomberg:

Duke’s priority is to stop the leak, Meghan Musgrave, a spokeswoman for the largest U.S. utility owner in Charlotte, said yesterday in a telephone interview. The rate of spillage declined Feb. 4 after the pond emptied and has fluctuated since then because of rain and repairs, Musgrave said. Duke estimates that the pond contained 992,000 tons of ash and that about 10 percent has spilled, she said.

Here are two different views of the mess the spill created:


Source
NC River Turns to Gray Sludge After Coal Ash Spill, AP
Duke Energy Battles to Halt Leak Amid Coal-Ash Regulatory Review, Bloomberg

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Duke Energy’s coal-ash spill has utterly ruined a river

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Fracking could be bad for babies

by gorso6 Posted on January 6, 2014

Fracking could be bad for babies

By

Shutterstock

Delegates at the annual get-together of the American Economic Association were presented with troubling data on Saturday that suggests Pennsylvania’s fracking boom is putting its youngest residents at risk. Bloomberg explains:

[R]esearchers … looked at Pennsylvania birth records from 2004 to 2011 to assess the health of infants born within a 2.5-kilometer radius of natural-gas fracking sites. They found that proximity to fracking increased the likelihood of low birth weight by more than half, from about 5.6 percent to more than 9 percent. The chances of a low Apgar score, a summary measure of the health of newborn children, roughly doubled, to more than 5 percent. …

Surprisingly, water contamination does not appear to be the culprit: The researchers found similar results for mothers who had access to regularly monitored public water systems and mothers who relied on the kind of private wells that fracking is most likely to affect. Another possibility is that infants are being harmed by air pollution associated with fracking activity.

We should point out that the study hasn’t been published or peer-reviewed yet, and that the apparent correlation is not, in itself, evidence of causation.

But the study builds on findings from 2012 that babies born near Pennsylvania frack wells were more likely to suffer from a range of health complications. And the researchers involved with this study were drawn from some heavyweight institutions – Princeton University, Columbia University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


Source
Study Shows Fracking Is Bad for Babies, Bloomberg

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Fracking could be bad for babies

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The southern half of Keystone XL is now filling up with oil

by JohnsieaJensen Posted on December 11, 2013

The southern half of Keystone XL is now filling up with oil

By

Elizabeth Brossa

TransCanada had a nice little party last weekend.

The company has been battling for years to win the State Department’s blessing to build the Keystone XL pipeline over the Canadian border to help export tar-sands oil to American refineries. Meanwhile, it has been building the southern leg of that same pipeline from Oklahoma to Texas.

On Saturday, the company started filling that southern leg with the sticky, polluting, climate-changing fuel that it will carry cross-country to the Texan refineries — crude oil.

The achievement, which followed a problem–plagued and deeply unpopular construction effort, was so momentous for the company that it noted the very minute of the event in its press materials: 10:04 a.m. Central Time.

From Fuel Fix:

The pipeline owner will need to fill the newly constructed line before it can begin delivering oil to refineries along the Gulf Coast, including those in Houston. TransCanada plans to fill the new pipeline system with about 3 million barrels of oil in the coming weeks, the company said. …

Although TransCanada is still waiting for approval to construct the northern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would connect with oil sands fields in Canada, the company has completed the $2.3 billion southern leg.

The line will be capable of bringing up to 700,000 barrels per day of oil to the Gulf Coast, providing more supplies of crude to refineries.

Still, it’ll be a few weeks before that oil actually gets to refineries. From Bloomberg:

The Calgary-based pipeline company estimates it will begin taking receipts and delivering oil in mid- to late January, a bulletin to shippers shows. …

“There are many moving parts to this process — completion of construction, testing, regulatory approvals, line fill and then the transition to operations,” [said a TransCanada spokesperson].

Let’s hope none of those moving parts include bits of the pipeline bursting out after a rupture. TransCanada already dug up and replaced many faulty sections of the pipeline, and anti-Keystone activists charge that the pipeline still contains numerous holes and flaws.


Source
Oil begins flowing through Keystone XL’s southern leg, Fuel Fix
TransCanada Keystone South Won’t Deliver Oil Before Mid-January, Bloomberg

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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The southern half of Keystone XL is now filling up with oil

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Northeast states pissed at Midwest states over coal pollution

by Lariaej7q7 Posted on December 9, 2013

Northeast states pissed at Midwest states over coal pollution

By

Shutterstock

The governors of eight Northeastern states are fed up with the air pollution that blows their way from states to their west.

In the latest high-profile move to crush the antiquated practice of burning coal in the U.S., the governors filed a petition with the EPA today that seeks more stringent air quality regulations on coal-burning states such as Ohio, Kentucky, and Michigan. That’s because pollution from those states’ coal-fired power plants reaches the Atlantic coastline, sickening residents there. From The New York Times:

[There is] growing anger of East Coast officials against the Appalachian states that mine coal and the Rust Belt states that burn it to fuel their power plants and factories. Coal emissions are the chief cause of global warming and are linked to many health risks, including asthma and lung disease.

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut, who is leading the effort by East Coast governors to crack down on out-of-state pollution, called it a “front-burner issue” for his administration. …

Mr. Malloy said that more than half the pollution in Connecticut was from outside the state and that it was lowering the life expectancy of Connecticut residents with heart disease or asthma. “They’re getting away with murder,” Mr. Malloy said of the Rust Belt and Appalachia. “Only it’s in our state, not theirs.”

And there’s more big air pollution news this week. From the Times:

The petition comes the day before the Supreme Court is to hear arguments to determine the fate of a related E.P.A. regulation known as the “good neighbor” rule. The regulation, officially called the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, would force states with coal pollution that wafts across state lines to rein in soot and smog, either by installing costly pollution control technology or by shutting the power plants.

Bloomberg reports on that “good neighbor” court case:

The Supreme Court will hear arguments over reviving an EPA rule that would limit sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions in 28 states whose pollution blows into neighboring jurisdictions. All are in the eastern two-thirds of the country.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struck down the rule. It said the regulation was too strict and that EPA didn’t give states a chance to put in place their own pollution-reduction plans before imposing a nationwide standard. The Obama administration and environmental groups are appealing.

Some energy companies have been powering down their coal-fired stations, citing financial losses, but plenty of coal-burning plants are still pumping out pollutants. In October, Wisconsin Energy Corp. sought permission to shutter its 407-megawatt Presque Isle coal-fired power plant in Michigan. The request was denied by the regional grid operator, which said the region couldn’t manage without the power plant’s electricity supply. The grid operator is now in talks over compensation, to help the energy company continue operating the plant at a loss.

The Supreme Court case could decide the fate of Presque Isle and many other coal plants, so it’s one to watch. Another air-pollution case is also being argued tomorrow, this one in the D.C. Circuit Court over the EPA’s mercury rules. “This is the biggest day for clean air in American courts — ever,” John Walke of the Natural Resources Defense Council told Bloomberg.


Source
Eastern States Press Midwest to Improve Air, The New York Times
Obama’s Pollution-Control Agenda Goes to Court Tomorrow, Bloomberg

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Northeast states pissed at Midwest states over coal pollution

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Nuclear industry scores a big win, but still no solution for nuclear waste

by cuppyteen Posted on November 21, 2013

Nuclear industry scores a big win, but still no solution for nuclear waste

By

NRC

Construction efforts at Yucca Mountain were abandoned in 2010, leaving an empty tunnel in a mountainside.

So long as the U.S. government is going to stand around shrugging its shoulders over the nation’s growing nuclear waste stockpile, it must stop charging nuclear power plant owners $750 million a year in waste-storage fees.

That was the ruling of a federal appeals court on Tuesday. It’s the latest twist in a decades-long saga over the fate of the plutonium and other radioactive waste that’s piling up at nuclear plants across the country — more than 70,000 tons so far.

In 1987, Congress directed the federal government to prepare a nuclear waste dump site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The government has collected about $30 billion in fees from nuclear power plants to fund the project since then, and spent $15 billion on the controversial project, Bloomberg reports.

But for some reason the plan to dump all that waste in the Nevada countryside is not popular among Nevadans, most notably Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D). He helped convince the Obama administration in 2010 to abandon planning and construction efforts for the Yucca Mountain waste repository.

In August, a federal appeals court declared that decision illegal, saying it ignored the 1987 law, and ordered the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to resume the Yucca planning efforts. The NRC says it lacks the needed funds, but it has begun begrudgingly moving forward with “an incremental approach.”

Meanwhile, power plant operators have been suing the U.S. government, successfully forcing it to pay their nuclear waste storage bills. That’s because the government has been collecting fees to pay for a solution to the waste problem but has failed to provide one. Last week alone, courts ordered the U.S. Department of Energy to compensate three power plant owners to the tune of more than $200 million for waste storage costs.

And now, Tuesday’s ruling threatens to cut off funding that could be used to pay for an eventual solution, if one is ever forthcoming. From Bloomberg:

The U.S. Department of Energy was ordered by a federal appeals court to move toward ending a fee utilities pay for nuclear waste disposal because the government has no alternative to the canceled Yucca Mountain repository. …

Because the agency hasn’t come up with a legally adequate fee assessment, it was ordered to send Congress a proposal to change the fee to zero until it “chooses to comply with the act as it is currently written, or until Congress enacts an alternative waste management plan,” the court ruled.

The decision today was hailed by the utilities and nuclear power-plant operators who brought the suit and have been frustrated with the Obama administration’s decision to stop work on Yucca without providing an alternative.

Nobody in the administration seems to want to think about the country’s nuclear waste problem — even though they’re all too happy to promote the construction of new reactors.

Some members of Congress, meanwhile, are trying to establish a new bureaucracy to give the waste conundrum the attention it deserves. The Nuclear Waste Administration Act [PDF], sponsored by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and currently before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, would create a nuclear waste administration and a process for finding sites where the waste could be stored.

Finding such sites would, of course, be a most unenviable task.


Source
Summary of the Nuclear Waste Administration Act of 2013, U.S. Senate
Nuclear Reactor Waste Fees Ordered to Zero by Appeals Court, Bloomberg

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Nuclear industry scores a big win, but still no solution for nuclear waste

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Arizona utility scores tiniest possible victory in war on solar

by GeoffreyBlaine Posted on November 15, 2013

Arizona utility scores tiniest possible victory in war on solar

By

David Crummey

Arizona Public Service Co. isn’t very happy that so many of its customers have solar panels. It wants to sell electricity to them, not the other way around. So it has been campaigning to convince regulators to impose new rules that would make it more expensive for customers to maintain solar arrays on their roofs.

Currently, under a net-metering program, the utility must buy excess power produced by customers’ rooftop solar panels. It’s been proposing that it should pay a lot less for that power — $50 to $100 less a month.

On Thursday, following two days of hearings, regulators at the Arizona Corporation Commission voted 3-t0-2 to reject the utility company’s bid. Instead, they imposed a fee on new net-metering customers that will work out to about $5 a month. Current net-metering customers are exempt from the new fee. 

Bloomberg reports:

Arizona is one of 43 states that require utilities to buy solar power from customers with rooftop solar systems. This lowers consumers’ monthly power bills and reduces revenue for the power companies. The decision at a hearing yesterday in Phoenix validates APS’s position that the arrangement is unfair because it shifts some of the costs of maintaining the grid to consumers who don’t have photovoltaic panels.

Arizona Public Service — and other electric utilities around the country — argue that solar-generating customers aren’t paying their fair share of upkeep for the power grid and other infrastructure.

Solar companies like SolarCity and Sunrun and environmental groups like the Sierra Club argue that imposing additional costs on solar-panel owners will slow the adoption of renewable energy. 

For now, Arizona Public Service scored only a small victory. Solar supporters aren’t happy about the fee increase, but they’re breathing a sigh of relief that it wasn’t 10 times bigger.

“The commission’s decision was being watched by utilities nationwide,” reports the Associated Press. “Utilities in other states have been pushing similar arguments and seeking the same sorts of rate increases.”

You can be sure debate over this issue will continue to rage across the country.


Source
Arizona Regulators Impose Power-Grid Fees for Solar Roofs, Bloomberg

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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More corn grown in U.S. this year than ever before. Thanks, biofuels.

by Obeey99 Posted on November 6, 2013

More corn grown in U.S. this year than ever before. Thanks, biofuels.

By

Shutterstock

Cars and cows are slurping up the largest corn crop ever grown in the U.S.

With the fall corn harvest three-quarters done, traders are anticipating a yield of about 14 billion bushels, Bloomberg reports. That exceeds forecasts and is 30 percent greater than last year. Growers are thanking agreeable weather for this year’s early and bountiful harvest, a notable shift after last year’s drought woes.

The amount of land used to cultivate corn has been growing during the past 25 years, displacing grasslands and other crops. Meanwhile, the amount of corn grown per acre has tripled since the 1950s due largely to new varieties and heavy doses of herbicides and fertilizers, which have been polluting waterways and fueling algae blooms.

USDA

But the most dramatic change in recent years has been the skyrocketing demand for corn to brew ethanol. That’s not due to a resurgent national appetite for white lightning moonshine. Rather, it’s due to the EPA’s renewable-fuel mandate, a controversial regulation requiring biofuels be blended into gasoline. The mandate was created under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, substantially expanded in 2010, and it continues to be expanded.

USDA

The spike in demand for corn to fuel vehicles threatens natural areas and human food supplies, leading many environmentalists to oppose the biofuels mandate. From an August post by the Environmental Working Group:

The harm done to consumers and the environment by the federal biofuels mandate is destined to grow worse as a result of the recent decision to once again increase the amount of corn ethanol that must be added to the nation’s gasoline supply.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s August 6 announcement underscores the need to reform the federal program known as the Renewable Fuel Standard. The law requires refiners to blend both conventional biofuels — corn ethanol — and advanced biofuels, such as soy biodiesel and cellulosic ethanol made from plant materials, into the supply of motor vehicle fuel. But with advanced biofuel technologies slow to commercialize, corn ethanol fills about 85 percent of the overall biofuels mandate.

EPA’s decision means that refiners must increase from 13.4 billion gallons to 13.8 billion gallons the amount of corn ethanol blended into gasoline this year. This is a clear sign that U.S biofuels policy is on the wrong track and must be reformed before more damage is done to the nation’s soil, water and air, and the global climate.

Environmentalists aren’t the only ones opposed to the biofuels mandate. Oil companies don’t like it either — for very different reasons, of course.


Source
Corn Futures Fall to Three-Year Low on U.S. Crop Outlook, Bloomberg
More Corn Ethanol In 2013 Means Environment, Consumers Lose Out, Environmental Working Group

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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More corn grown in U.S. this year than ever before. Thanks, biofuels.

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Frackers are flushing radioactive waste into rivers

by u60uurf Posted on October 4, 2013

Frackers are flushing radioactive waste into rivers

By

Kordite

Blacklick Creek in Pennsylvania.

Frackers often treat their wastewater a little bit like sewage, passing it through water treatment plants and then flushing it into streams and rivers. It may be an improvement on pumping the stuff back into the ground, which can trigger earthquakes, but new research reveals that this can be a dangerously shitty approach to managing frack water.

Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, entails injecting water and chemicals into the ground to break up underground rocks and release oil and gas. When that water burbles back to the surface, however, it comes back laced with traces of metals, isotopes, and other pollutants that normally sit harmlessly deep beneath the soil.

Fracking FAQ: The science and technology behind the natural gas boom

Duke University researchers studied a fracker’s wastewater treatment plant in Pennsylvania and found it removed more than 90 percent of the radioactive radium from the wastewater. But that’s not nearly enough: The researchers

report in the journal Environmental Science and Technology

that the radioisotopes that are slipping through the cracks in the treatment system are accumulating in alarming levels in Blacklick Creek, where the wastewater is dumped.

Radium levels in the sediments at the dumping point in the creek, which eventually flows into the Allegheny River, were found to be 200 times greater than background levels. They were “above radioactive waste disposal threshold regulations, posing potential environmental risks of radium bioaccumulation,” the scientists wrote. From Bloomberg’s coverage:

“The absolute levels that we found are much higher than what you allow in the U.S. for any place to dump radioactive material,” Avner Vengosh, a professor at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University and co-author of the study, said in an interview. “The radium will be bio-accumulating. You eventually could get it in the fish.”

Hydraulic fracturing or fracking has been blamed for contaminating streams and private water wells after spills from wastewater holding ponds or leaks from faulty gas wells. Today’s report exposes the risks of disposing of the surging volumes of waste from gas fracking. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is developing new standards for disposing of gas drilling waste.

Blacklick Creek is already something of an aquatic wasteland, turned orange and acidic by runoff from hundreds of abandoned mines — a misfortune that residents and government agencies have been trying to mend. The latest finding is bleak news not only for the fate of those restoration efforts, but for the safety of creeks and rivers throughout the nation that are becoming dumping grounds as oil and gas companies cash in.


Source
Impacts of Shale Gas Wastewater Disposal on Water Quality in Western Pennsylvania, Environmental Science and Technology
Radiation in Pennsylvania Creek Seen as Legacy of Fracking, Bloomberg

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Frackers are flushing radioactive waste into rivers

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