shalereporter | Here’s a problematic fracking by-product that never occurred to me: radioactive socks.
When I first read the phrase I thought of of weary drillers
trudging out of fracking fields late at night, invisible but for a
glowing green inch of material between their shoes and trouser hems. But
then I kept reading and discovered the socks in question were actually
filter socks, which look like tube socks designed for an elephant.
When chemical-laced water is injected into the
ground during a hydraulic fracturing operation, some of it returns to
the surface and must be collected. The flowback contains water,
chemicals, salts, metals and organic compounds; it all passes through
filter socks, which capture the solid particles. The liquid is disposed
of in various ways, and filter socks are disposed of at municipal and
residual waste landfills.
Unless they happen to be radioactive.
This is quite a problem in North Dakota, where
naturally occurring radioactive material (NORM) is common in certain
parts of the Bakken shale. North Dakota landfills will not accept waste
with radioactive levels higher than 5 picocuries per gram, and the
average filter sock’s level ranges from five to eighty, although one did
clock in at 374.
A year ago, after landfill Geiger counters began
clicking incessantly, the government helpfully distributed pamphlets
listing businesses that would accept radioactive waste. Since the
nearest ones were in South Dakota, Colorado and Utah, this has led to a
spate of radioactive sock dumping.
Thirty were found during a cleanup day at the
Fort Berthold Reservation. A hundred were found in a Williston city
garbage can. 250 were dropped into a container box near New Town and
picked up by an unsuspecting trucker. Last spring, after the snow melted
in Tioga, a “large sack of them” were found along a highway. “They
appeared to have fallen off a truck,” reported a local paper, just like
the radioactive rod that fell off a truck in Texas, and the radioactive
gauge that fell off a truck in West Virginia.
“There are only a few places that have facilities
designed to take radioactive materials, and North Dakota is not one of
them,” says Kurt Rhea, the CEO of the Colorado-based radioactive waste
removal company Next Generation Solutions. Rhea’s company has contracts
with certain companies fracking the Bakken shale; picking up a container
of waste, trucking it out of state, and disposing with it properly
costs about $8,000. He guesses that approximately 20% of North Dakota's
radioactive waste is being disposed of properly. What about the rest?
“Good question,” he responds.
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