Justin Nobel: Okay but I guess the big takeaway for me was that, exposures, especially over the course of time in the industry, appear to be high enough to cause cancers in workers, can we say that? Or that’s been shown?

Andrew Gross: Definitely, definitely. 

Certainly going back many years they’ve had health physicists on their staff who have told them about the risks from the radiation. They bring in top-flight scientists on their side, and we beat them all the time because the reality is, you know, they are involved in making a lot of excuses and having to explain away things and our simple point is, ‘You are exposing people to radiation they shouldn’t be exposed to, and you’re not even telling them about it.’ Now the official stance in the federal government and internationally is any dose carries some risk, no matter how slight. With radiation, any dose can have an effect, so for them to say it is perfectly safe is just utterly irresponsible. 

Two hours of training with people and just a couple dollars worth of personal protective equipment can lower their risk 80 percent, easy. That’s what’s so crazy, it’s so short-sighted for these companies to not just do that. That is one of the problems, there is not any, you know, a sort of, one set of regulations, so it varies from state to state to state. But Pennsylvania is definitely the wild west when it comes to radiological health regulations. I’ve never seen anything like it. And for me, especially being a guy from Louisiana, that really strikes me as odd, that we’re so much better off down here than all of the people who are so smart up there. 

Nuclear Forensics Expert Dr. Marco Kaltofen: Sherlock Holmes with a Geiger Counter

Where Andrew was the salty guy who learned in the field, Marco is the careful scientist who is not afraid to go into the field. He has testified as an expert witness on radioactivity in numerous legal cases and before the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He has tracked radioactivity on five continents, a bit like Sherlock Holmes with a Geiger counter. He knows his radionuclides inside and out. In the 1990s, Marco said he would regularly be locked out of the buildings he needed to inspect in post-Soviet Eastern Europe while working for Greenpeace ensuring remote laboratories weren’t secretly constructing nuclear weapons. This was not a problem for Marco, he says. He simply had to test the doormats to know exactly what was going on inside the facilities. In St. Louis, Missouri in the 2000s, Marco helped solve a radiological mystery by tracing the radioactive daughter products leftover from 1950s uranium refining operations into local streams and people’s backyards. In more recent decades, Marco has turned his eye to oil and gas radioactivity, and fracking. What he’s found is a shocking revelation for anyone who thinks that oil and gas worker’s radioactivity exposures are insignificant.

He also is pretty good at explaining it all.

Marco Kaltofen: Now, first I understand, soil has a little bit of natural radioactivity. I mean our planet is made of star stuff, and guess what? Stars are radioactive. There’s a little bit of it leftover in our world, that’s why the core of our planet is molten. It’s the radioactivity that’s keeping it heated. There’s something we didn’t know. Lava is basically made from a radiation cooker. Well a little bit of that gets up here, we’re used to it, some of us die every year from it which is bad – but we’ve given a number and we said this number is normal and this number is not.

That’s a lot of words but essentially, you know, the words come down to ‘yes, the radiation is living in underground formations, we bring it to the surface, we don’t want it, it’s a waste, we don’t really know what to do with it.’ So all these different regulations are just trying to put lots of fingers in lots of dikes and plug a lot of leaks and try and keep this radiation under control once it’s at the surface.

The EPA needs to know, well, who made the radioactivity? And what were they thinking when they did it? And what product were they going to sell? Now for me, as the scientist, all of that is 100% irrelevant to radioactivity. Radioactivity is radioactivity. It’s physics and the nuclear physics in Massachusetts is exactly the same as the nuclear physics in Alabama and Washington and California. But as a regulator, we treat radiation from different places differently. So if an oil and gas company made a certain amount of radiation, they don’t have to report it and they don’t have to dispose of it in any particular way, they really don’t have to do a whole lot, they are exempt. Whereas if the same amount of radioactivity were made by a white-haired, pony-tailed researcher in Massachusetts, I’d be filling out forms and paying for disposal till the cows came home. The radiation might be the same, but because it came from the oil and gas industry we treat it differently. To a scientist, this is always a mistake. There’s no scientific reason for saying radioactivity from X is fine but radioactivity, eh, I don’t like yours, it’s bad. That’s something we have to get over. And it’s going to be difficult. It’s foolish to expend resources on radioactivity carefully in one case and carelessly in another. 

Marco also has some good thoughts on the inevitable, “Why” and “How” questions – Why has this been allowed to happen? How has this been allowed to happen?

Marco Kaltofen: There are a lot of jobs where the regulatory agencies have not caught up. Changing regs takes a long time. At a minimum, consider it takes a change of administration for most new environmental laws to come through. That’s certainly true now. And the time frame for regulation is measured in a decade or more. So we haven’t even got people looking at the problem yet at the upper levels of managing agencies. So, certainly, your average inspector is going to be unfamiliar with many of these different things. 

If you’re working with radioactive material, it’s normal for people to bring their work home with them. You work in the oil fields, your clothes have oil on them, your washing machine has oil on them, your spouse probably makes you wash all your stuff separately, some people even have a separate washing machine but I’m collecting data, whereas people in the house are collecting dose. They’re getting exposed to that material that the worker brings home. So really it’s a family affair. Now the harder question is not, ‘where do you find the traces of radioactivity’, –  the hard one is, ‘how is it actually affecting people – what can they do to reduce their dose and reduce their risk? What are you going to do about all this data now?’ And suddenly it’s less scientific and now it’s a decision about policy and ethics and desire and the emotional feeling of safety, and then there’s a bit of human rights sprinkled in – in that, is it okay to expose someone to a dose that you think is acceptable but you haven’t really worked that out with them? There’s an element of consent that’s missing. 

“If Only I Would’ve Known”

In 2019, two years after leaving the job, Tom McKnight was diagnosed with thymoma cancer. Although he received a successful operation to remove the tumor, doctors later discovered nodules on his lung, and a growth on a bone in his hip. Survival rates, Tom found on the American Cancer Society’s website, are scary. No matter who wins this next presidential election, odds are that by the time Americans vote again for president in 2024, Tom will be dead.

Now let’s make it very clear – Tom does not believe his cancer is linked to his oil and gas work. But as he describes it, if you have no idea you are being exposed to radioactivity, you also have no idea how to avoid its harms.

Tom McKnight: I’ve seen people stick their finger in it and stick it in their mouth before, but for the most part we have all tasted brine because sometimes it splashes up, you know. And I’ll tell you, to be honest you know, we were, I was probably guilty of it more than others, but when I was working around it when it was time to eat, sometimes I would open my sandwich bag and I would try to roll the sandwich baggy down over my hand and never touch the sandwich, but yeah I’m pretty sure I ate some dirt though too. Every potato chip you ate, you touched.

Of course if we knew that there was a radiation problem we would have taken precautionary steps and made sure we had respirators, and made sure we had the right uniforms and gloves and protective PPE for that, you know, and it would have cost them more money. And I go back to what I said 3 or 4 times through our conversation, that if we are forewarned with what’s gonna happen we can deal with it, but if we ignore it, it’s just silently out there, polluting our environment, getting our people sick. You know, and it’s an unrecognized cost of the oil companies by not having to deal with it. 

In retrospect, I sure wish I would have had some training, and been prepared for it. At least at that point I kind of could have went in with my eyes open, and then I wouldn’t have had anybody to blame but myself, and we probably would have had established job practices that would have eliminated our exposure to things we didn’t even know we were being exposed to. So, do I feel bad? In retrospect, sure, I feel bad. I feel a little mad, because I just can’t believe that management, and the oil companies, did not know there was a good bit of radiation in there.

I loved the economical impact, that was awesome, that was great. You know, but my point in life was, all my children were coming up in age. One was going to college, one was already in college, one was getting ready to go, and it just made life easy, you know. It was just so easy to peel ‘em off a couple hundred bucks for groceries or fill a car with groceries and go visit them. I paid off my Visa that I never had paid off since like 1982. It just made it so that I could buy the house that I was living in versus just living in my mother-in-laws house, you know. So it was a, the carrot that was out there was really big, I sure appreciated it. But at what cost? I surely wouldn’t knowingly want to put radioactive brine on the roads to keep dust down, or radioactive brine in the, in the ice control trucks in the winter to keep the ice melted. That’s insane. 

Justin Nobel: This, by the way, is legal in at least 12 US states, including Michigan, New York, Ohio and, until very recently, Pennsylvania.

Tom McKnight: And I would certainly do without any kind of economic better lifestyle to save our environment, you know, that’s.. that’s nuts. It’s just nuts, and then to have the governmental agencies that could be responsible for this shuffling off responsibility and saying, ‘hey, that’s the other guy and that’s not me,’ and then the industry totally just, you know, operating like, ‘well let’s just keep them between themselves and we can go do our jobs’ – it’s wrong, you know, and I don’t think there needs to be new laws, I think they need to tie everything together and have some accountability. 

You know, if they know that that’s there, they know that those regulatory agencies are ignoring the problem or passing the buck, they’re gonna shrug and say, ‘hey we’re just operating within the boundaries that are set up for us.’ It’s America. It’s capitalism, yo.

It’s like I’ve always told my kids, there’s a difference between right, and right to the letter of the law.

While Tom was working as a brine hauler, Brandon was experiencing something similar in another part of the massive Marcellus oil patch and coming to the petrifying realization that even when he was being protected by his employers against radioactivity, he was not being fully protected.

When a radioactive element “decays” it blasts off a tiny explosive piece of matter or energy – what we know of as “ionizing radiation.” The three main types of concern are gamma rays, beta particles and alpha particles. While alpha particles can be blocked by a piece of paper or your skin, and gamma rays can go through feet of concrete and steel and may seem the scariest. In an occupational setting like the oil and gas field, it is actually beta particles, and especially alpha particles, that are typically the most concerning. This is because radioactive elements that emit alpha particles such as radium can become airborne as dust, drift through the air or be blown about by the wind and easily be inhaled or ingested. Once inside the soft organ-filled space of your fluid body – or lodged in your bones – an alpha particle’s explosive charge can shred DNA to pieces, causing mutations in your genetic material that can potentially affect future generations and obliterate cellular structures, creating the possibility for the development of tumors that can lead to fatal cancers.

Brandon Novogradac: I guess to me it’s like, this wouldn’t even be a conversation if companies had been more up front about what they’ve known for decades. 

Cause we had respirators out there at all times. You know, cause we were dealing with volatiles that you could filter out with these respirators, and if there were particles that were like alpha and beta emitters then it’d be nice to have the respirator on so we’d not be breathing these particles in. And we were not metering for alpha and beta emitting particles, so like, yeah that sucks. That’s really frustrating. 

So if we had known, at all, that this was even remotely a possible issue, we would’ve had a policy in place to minimize our exposure so fast. And we probably wouldn’t have been back out there doing that until we did so…

And as far as the disposal of the stuff, so that’s the other part of this, like you said, is the leaching from the landfill to the streams, I mean there’s so many breakdowns on that side of it that it’s hard to even know where to start and boy, we could really spread the blame out. But at some point what it comes down to with things like this is someone has to step up and do the right thing and make themselves be accountable, man or woman, because otherwise it’s just a circle of finger pointing and no change ever happens. 

Radiation is one of those things where it’s kind of a good place, to draw the line between what should be, like, a moderate level of concern and a severe level of concern. I feel the same way about asbestos, actually, too. Cause once you breathe asbestos in your body…it’s going to keep doing damage for a long long time. So, these are sort of gifts that keep on giving, you know. Gifts that you don’t want. 

But as a worker, though, it’s deeply disturbing that I’ve seen, since then, studies that point to… even without knowing whether or not it is going to cause harm, like the fact remains that we knew about it and the potential was there. So…just pretty cavalier to not at least advise the workers who were handling it. I mean, cause now it’s not just an environmental issue anymore. Now it’s like, this is an injury issue. This is when people start to get sued. You know, with stuff like this. 

So yeah. No bueno. 

Louisiana-Based Oil & Gas Radioactivity Attorney Stuart Smith: Who’s Got the Cojones?

Like Dr. Emily Caffrey and Dr. Jan Johnson, many health physicists in America have not dug into the data and added up the doses to show that this industry is endangering thousands of oil and gas workers, and may already have endangered thousands more. Countless numbers, and nameless names, because health physicists have failed to appropriately examine the issue. They have not raised the alarm bell. Instead it is left to the independent journalists, and quirky scientists, and industry workers with enough courage to go against a mountain of momentum of the most powerful industry on earth and blow the whistle…and it is left to the trial lawyers, the most hated scum of the earth — at least according to world’s richest industries that is. As like with Dark Waters, or Erin Brockovich, it is often their work that serves as the only way into justice. For in America, for better or worse, it all ends up in a court.

And when it comes to oil and gas radioactivity, an Erin Brockvich or Robert Bilott has not yet been nationally anointed, but when one finally is, it will probably be the relentless, occasionally crass, often charming, New Orleans-born attorney Stuart Smith. He tried his first oil and gas radioactivity case against Shell and Chevron in the Mississippi oilfields in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and has become one of the go-to lawyers nationwide on complicated radioactivity cases, and the most prominent lawyer in the field of oil and gas radioactivity. He wrote a book about it all that was published in 2015 called “Crude Justice” and he knows the oilfields of Louisiana and Mississippi like the back of his hand. But the Marcellus is new to Stuart. While Stuart was not prepared to go on the record, citing that he was still involved in sensitive cases in this field, he previously told me for a story published in April for the environmental investigative site DeSmog Blog,

“I have litigated several cases that showed that oilfield waste caused cancer. All the big majors have known about this for many decades. The regulators are obviously aware of it too, it’s just that they don’t have the political cojones to do anything about it.” And when it comes to the workers, being unknowingly exposed to radioactivity contamination by multinational corporations that know full-well, Smith explained–“These men are guinea pigs.”

And yet in our conversation with Dr Emilly Caffrey and Dr Jan Johnson of the Health Physics Society they repeatedly said the amount of radioactivity involved in oil and gas production was not enough to affect the health of the workers. When it came to dosage, which is a way to measure how much radioactivity the human body has taken in, they kept bringing up the number 10.

Emily Caffrey: You can’t tease out an association between radiation and cancer at doses below about 10 REM.

REM stands for Roentgen Equivalent Man and is one of the main ways of measuring the amount of ionizing radiation deposited in human tissue, or put more simply, a measure of how much radiation your body absorbed. So Dr. Caffrey gives us this magic number of 10, and yet from reading through the dose reconstructions in Stuart’s cases one sees that some workers measured cumulative doses estimated to be as high as 33,000 REM, and regularly in the range of 100 to 1,000 REM. But the tragedy is, a thorough dose reconstruction as laid out in Stuart’s cases has never been done for Marcellus oil and gas workers.

As Smith had told me earlier, for my Rolling Stone story published in January, They Know. “All of the big majors have done tests to determine exactly what risks workers are exposed to,” Smith said. “One question I ask these companies, what you have done to go out and find all the radioactive waste you have dumped all over the United States for the past 120 years. And the answer is nothing.”

Dr. Julie Weatherington-Rice: “They’re Going to Die”

What’s odd when you start to dig into the topic of oil and gas waste and radioactivity is that at first it seems to be this giant black box, and it is hard to find any information. And then suddenly you cross a certain threshold, you read the right paper, or click in the right Google search word combination, and suddenly you are deluged with prominent reports. And then you meet someone like Dr. Julie Weatherington-Rice, an earth scientist with the Ohio-based firm Bennett & Williams who has been studying oil and gas waste since she did her master’s thesis on the topic back in the late 1970s. In the 1980s she worked on a commission for Ohio’s governor that assessed the health risks associated with spreading oilfield brine on roads, and she has been on brine ever since. Her notes of easy-to-express concern, outrage, and grief were like coming across a clear-sighted oracle in a clearing, in the middle of a forest of regulators where everyone is speaking babel.

Julie Weatherington-Rice: Well, the salt itself will kill ya! The salt levels are terrible. Just being splashed by this stuff will cause all kinds of skin problems. Inhaling it in a vapor is very dangerous. You’ve got a number of volatile organic compounds and some have volatile organic compounds in it, the standard ones that you’re looking for are BTEX, which are benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene, and xylene. But there are a whole slew of other ones as well that are included. They all have health regulations. And exposures to the levels in the brine are significant enough to be a demonstrated hazard. And the heavy metals, all the concerns of the health damage from the heavy metals – you’ve got barium, you’ve got lead, and you’ve cadmium, and you’ve got strontium, name every awful heavy metal that’s on the list, and I will tell you it’s there in some levels. So the things that you’re concerned about are the volatiles, the semi-volatiles, the heavy metals, the chlorides and sulfides are huge, and then as we’ve learned later – the radioactivity part.

The hazards are known. It’s just that nobody has been in a place to do anything about it because the industry is sacred. They’re getting Hail Mary passes, they’re sacred. And as long as they’re making the contributions that they’re making at the federal and state level, and as long as we’ve got the government that we’ve got, they’re going to continue to be successful. The only way we’re really going to turn this around is to vote everybody out of office that takes contributions from the oil and gas industry.

And what about the workers like Tom and Brandon, the pinballs stuck in the middle of the toxic machine? Dr. Weatherington-Rice does not mince words:

Julie Weatherington Rice: Yeah, yeah, they’re going to die. They’re going to die, okay? I mean my father died of chemical exposures. My husband’s father died of chemical exposures. We’ve had generations after generations of workers who have died from chemical exposures of all different kinds. And sometimes it’s gotten the attention of, you know, the CDC and NIOSH and folks like that and OSHA, and sometimes it has not. We have much better rules and regulations for a lot of industries than we used to have, but oil and gas and coal are the outlaws. So, in a general sense, we are much, much, much smarter about chemical exposure than we were when my dad was the health and safety officer in all the places he ever worked. But, you know, what was safe one year, the next year the safety level was 1000x lower. So all of the guys that he was with were all the canaries in the cages, and they all had the exposures – so they all died. And there was enough death that people woke up and decided they needed to do something about it, and that’s why we’ve got the rules that we’ve got. 

Behind A Veil: The Health Physics Society

There are the workers like Tom and Brandon and people on the ground taking samples like Andrew and Marco – often with considerable academic expertise – and then there are the “Health Physicists.” Technically, they are a profession devoted to protecting people and their environment from potential radiation hazards. Or, as the banner on the website of the Health Physics Society notes, “specialists in radiation protection.” The Health Physics Society is a professional organization composed largely of state and federal radiation regulators and various independent and academic scientists.

The scientists we spoke to, Dr. Emily Caffery and Dr. Jan Johnson, repeatedly conveyed to us that they were speaking for themselves, and that their words did not represent the views of the Health Physics Society. Both health physicists say that it is important for workers to be protected and be informed about the materials they are handling, yet continue to stress that radioactivity levels in the oil and gas industry are not enough to endanger workers.

Justin Nobel, one of the authors of this article, put out an article earlier this year in Rolling Stone magazine, the result of a 20-month reporting and research effort that laid out the incredibly sloppy way the Marcellus oil and gas industry is handling radioactive materials and multiple different pathways of concern for workers, Dr. Johnson and Dr. Caffrey helped pen a Rebuttal promoted on the Health Physics Society website that stated the article had some “egregious errors” and boldly stated: “Radiological exposures at the levels experienced in the oil and gas industry are orders of magnitude below where any observable effects will occur.” Soon after our talk with Dr. Johnson and Dr. Caffrey, this rebuttal was retracted. In our conversation, when asked if they thought oil and gas workers should be treated as radiation workers, as workers in the nuclear industry or medical radiation scientists are, Dr. Johnson said, “No, I do not. They do not receive doses that would qualify them to be radiation workers.”

Jan Johnson: My concerns are primarily that oil and gas TENORM be managed appropriately, and in accordance with the science as, as we know it, and that the regulations reflect the science accurately. You know, you have to understand that radiation is all around us, it’s in the air we breathe, it’s in the soil we walk on, we are all exposed to radiation every day. We know what the effects are at higher levels, um, but we don’t see any biological effects at levels in the range of background, so those are the things we know. 

Emily Caffery: Part of our purview as the Health Physics Society, and specifically the “Ask The Experts,” is to look for news articles, TV shows, Chernobyl, Bosch Season 6, things like that, that come out and respond to them, because when we read that article a number of us noted the, some of the errors in that article, and we feel that it’s our job within our purview to respond to inaccurate information and to put out correct information. 

And yet, here is the problem – Caffery and Johnson were unaware of some pretty important research.

In 1982, scientists with the oil and gas industry’s massively powerful lobby, the American Petroleum Institute, put out a report entitled “An Analysis of the Impact of the Regulation of ‘Radionuclides’ as a Hazardous Air Pollutant on the Petroleum Industry.” The report assessed the radiation risks to workers and the general public from oil and gas development, determined that brine contained “biologically significant quantities of Radium 226 and Radon 222,” and concluded that the totality of radionuclides brought to the surface in oil and gas production “represent significant sources of internal exposure, primarily in the occupational environment.”

The report continued, “Radium 226 is a potent source of radiation exposure, both internal and external. Radon 222 and its short-lived progeny deliver significant population and occupational exposures to the upper tracheobronchial tree, while Lead 210 and its decay product contaminate much process equipment and can represent significant exposure to the bone in some occupational subgroups. Radon 222 and its daughters cause the most severe impact to public health.”

And then there was the 1990 report in the Oil & Gas Journal, one of the industry’s most prominent and well-respected publications, which stated that NORM contamination was “a potential health hazard to personnel” and “a possible public relations problem for the industry.” The report suggested that “NORM-contaminated sludges and other waste materials including contaminated vessels and equipment may have to be handled as low-level radioactive wastes and disposed of accordingly.”

Another article on oil and gas radioactivity, published in the Society of Petroleum Engineer’s well-respected Journal of Petroleum Technology in 1993, reiterated those concerns. In fact, the article begins with the following: “Contamination of oil and gas facilities with naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORM) is widespread. Some contamination may be sufficiently severe that maintenance and other personnel may be exposed to hazardous concentrations.“

Then, just a few years ago, the prominent International Association of Oil and Gas Producers lobby put out a 67-page document on “Managing Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material (NORM)  in the oil and gas industry” which acknowledges that radioactivity risks to oil and gas industry workers are quite real.

“There are two ways in which personnel can be exposed to radiation,” the report states, “irradiation from external sources and contamination from inhaled and ingested sources.” An accompanying diagram features an illustrated oil and gas worker standing above an open pipe spewing radioactivity, and another worker standing alongside breathing it all in. Tiny alpha and beta particles are shown accumulating in their lungs and guts. It’s a scenario not so different than our brine hauler Tom described, eating his lunch while connecting his truck to a brine tank and waiting for it to load, or Brandon who had to peek his head into a frack tank with accumulated sludges at the bottom to check levels.

The International Association of Oil and Gas Producers report has even more worrisome news for oil and gas workers like Tom and Brandon. “Exposure to ionizing radiation, even at low doses, can cause damage to the nuclear (genetic) material in cells that can result in the development of radiation induced cancer many years later (somatic effects), heritable disease in future generations and some developmental effects under certain conditions,” the report states. In fact, the report repeatedly alerts that, “A reading greater than twice background levels is a positive indication of contamination, and should be handled as such.” Recall, now, what  Brandon had told us: “Double background is almost nothing still in my mind.”

Regulators Refuse Comment on Reports About Radioactive Problems & Fracking

This examination of workers’ exposure on the job is not to call ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater – it’s an expedition through a theater crowded with sheaves of documents and heaps of experts saying that the whole city block has been slowly smoldering for 100 years.

Plenty of information exists saying that these oil and gas jobs have legitimate radioactivity exposure risks. The American Petroleum Institute knows it, the Oil & Gas Journal knows it, the Society of Petroleum Engineers knows it, the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers knows it. Somehow, the tens of thousands of workers on the ground in booming oil and gas fields like the Marcellus, workers like Tom and Brandon, somehow they don’t know it. And somehow our health physicists don’t know it either.

And it should be noted that their words matter more than perhaps they even know.

After the “America’s Radioactive Secret” broke, concerned residents in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania took the article to their state regulators worried about radioactivity risks from oil and gas development to workers and the public, and they received the Health Physics Society rebuttal in response. When Public Herald,cornered Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection chief media spokesperson, Neil Shader, at the Rachel Carson State Office Building in downtown Harrisburg and asked him about the article, he had this to say:

Joshua Pribanic: You know the new Rolling Stone story that came out?

Neil Shader: Mmm, yeah I looked over it.

Joshua Pribanic: Did anything in there…?

Neil Shader: I know that there are a number of inaccuracies and, I’m probably going to butcher their name, but the Society of Health Physics, recently published a multipage letter detailing those inaccuracies. So I know it’s a story out there, a lot of people have found inaccuracies with it. 

Why are our influential health physicists so confident there are no harms? Where are they getting their data from? From the agency Neil Shader represents, the police-force charged with overseeing the oil and gas industry in the most radioactive shale basin in the United States – Pennsylvania  Department of Environmental Protection (PA DEP). If radioactivity got away from the ‘handlers’ of public perception in the Marcellus, fracking might lose its social license the world over. The Health Physicists we spoke with knew PA DEP’s report on radioactivity from 2016 quite well, and it appears they rely upon it heavily.

It was a report put out in 2016 by the PA DEP called the, “TECHNOLOGICALLY ENHANCED NATURALLY OCCURRING RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS (TENORM) STUDY REPORT.” This was intended to be the authoritative examination of Marcellus oil and gas radioactivity risks. PA DEP looked at the wellhead, they looked at the brine, they looked at the landfills, they considered workers and the public. And the report’s conclusion has been repeated time and again by the DEP, regulators in other states such as North Dakota, by the EPA in a 2018 report that examined Marcellus oil and gas waste streams, and even by FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, in making critical calculations enabling the approval of fracked gas pipeline projects. The parroted conclusion is, “There is little or limited potential for radiation exposure to workers and the public from the development, completion, production, transmission, processing, storage, and end use of natural gas.”

Justin Nobel: So you regard the Pennsylvania TENORM Report as a good standard and as something with appropriate and accurate information?

Emily Caffery: Yes.

Jan Johnson: Absolutely.

But if you take the time to read the full TENORM report, you will see on the very first page that it was prepared, not by the Department of Environmental Protection, but by Perma-Fix Environmental Services, which is a radioactive waste management and cleanup company profiting from the industry’s waste.

The TENORM study pointed out that leachate from municipal landfills accepting oil and gas waste was accumulating radioactivity. Discharges to the environment were found at levels higher 100 times greater than what’s considered safe for drinking water (5 pCi/l). It also found that some privately owned treatment plants had radioactivity in soil at levels more than 100 times what would be acceptable for federal regulations at uranium mill tailings (5 pCi/g). Furthermore, the report states that some members of the public and workers are indeed at risk:

From the 2016 TENORM report:

“There is potential for internal radiation exposure to workers and members of the public from alpha and beta surface radioactivity at [centralized wastewater facilities] that treat O&G wastewater.”

“There is potential for internal alpha and beta surface radioactivity exposure to workers and members of the public at [zero liquid discharge facilities] that treat O&G wastewater.”

“There is potential for exceeding public dose limits from external gamma radiation for workers at the natural gas processing plant.”

After speaking with Marcellus oil and gas workers, it is abundantly clear that the DEP TENORM report does an incredibly superficial job of calculating radioactivity exposures, calculations to which these workers have attached their lives.

When it came to calculating doses, the DEP TENORM report makes no mention of measuring the dose received when workers had to stick hands or whole heads into tanks of sludge, or when workers  climb inside tanks with shovels and squeegees to scoop sludge for up to an hour. Tom described one worker whose only job was tank cleaning, partly because he was a gung-ho young guy at the low end of the stick, and partly because he was so good at it.

When it came to calculating doses, the DEP TENORM report also makes no mention of workers eating their lunch in a dusty, sludgy workplace environment with unwashed hands, as Tom described to us.  There’s no mention of having to clean up brine spills with inappropriate gear, as Brandon described to us, and no mention of brine splashing on their faces and into their mouths during flowback operations, as Tom described.

And yet, workers and the public hear the rhetoric about this report on repeat  ‘All is fine, no risks here,’ from industry experts and state officials when faced with concerns.

Here is Neil Shader again, the spokesman for PA DEP:

Neil Shader: We take environmental health and public safety very seriously. 

And here is Scott Perry, the Deputy Secretary of the Oil and Gas Division of PA DEP:

Scott Perry: I think that Pennsylvania is very progressive when it comes to managing TENORM.

This is what Marcellus oil and gas workers hear when they express concerns and what journalists have regularly been told about the  topic. Perhaps most significantly, this is what state representatives who draft the laws that claim to protect its workers and the public, have regurgitated ad nauseam.

When we asked Pennsylvania state senator Camera Bartolotta, who represents a district in the booming heart of the Marcellus in Washington County, Pennsylvania, about oil and gas radiation, her office replied:

“Senator Bartolotta took the initiative of reaching out directly to industry to understand better how they are managing risks from TENORM…

“DEP comprehensively studied this issue in cooperation with other public and private organizations and determined that NORM and TENORM materials associated with the oil and gas Industry were well managed and did not present a risk to the public. It found that while the majority of waste streams generated by the oil and gas industry did not pose a risk to workers or the general public, industry professionals were able to make proper adjustments to handling, processing, and disposal protocols based on screening, monitoring, and analytical data.”

Everywhere we turned, PA DEP’s report was referenced to dispel concern, a report produced by a company connected to the industry, branded as official by the state’s department of environmental protection, and treated as the gold standard. And yet, all the while, the workers whose well-being everyone claims to be so concerned about, are left out in the cold, woefully misinformed, tragically and unnecessarily exposed.

Landfills and Wastewater Treatment Facilities: The “Asshole” of the Industry

I am back with Brandon at the foot of Arden Landfill in Washington County, Pennsylvania, otherwise known as Mount Trashmore. From 2011 to 2018, 1,297,000 tons of solid waste generated from Pennsylvania oil and gas wells were disposed of at Arden Landfill, and 99 percent of that came from fracked wells in the Marcellus shale, which, according to the best U.S. Geologic Survey reports and data, appears to have a radioactive signature higher than any other oil and gas play in the country – the agency, by the way, has known the Marcellus was highly radioactive for at least 60 years.

According to Public Herald’s investigations Pennsylvania has 30 landfills accepting oil and gas waste who send their leachate to sewage plants, subjecting millions of people who live downstream to exposure to radionuclides. So you see, this is affecting a lot more than just the workers. The public is at risk too. Landfills and the sewage treatment plants that are supposed to treat their leachate are, as Guy Kruppa, a sewage treatment plant operator in Belle Vernon Pennsylvania and one of of our first whistle-blowers on this topic revealed to us, like “the assholes of the fracking industry.” Because after being upchucked to the surface during the production process, and shuffled around the various intestinal tubes and organs of the industry’s storage and hauling and treatment processes, this is where so much of the solid waste ends up. Our experts did not take lightly to this unfolding disaster:

Andrew Gross: Putting this radioactive material into municipal waste sites is a giant concern. That could be life-altering for a lot of people, people in the vicinity, people downwater of streams, all those things. 

Julie Weatherington-Rice: This is a permanent reactor. Near your house. And it will always be a reactor. Because the waste got pooled together. And it will make as much radon and radium today as it will tomorrow and the next day and the next day and 30 years from now and 100 years from now and 500 years from now. Because the half life of this stuff is like, forever. The half life of uranium 238 which is in the cuttings in 4.47 billion with a b years old. And the thorium is 14 billion. That’s like back to the big bang. So while it’s a naturally occurring material, when you concentrate it, you create a reactor.

Marco Kaltofen: Well we’re going to go to that dark place again. If you think about what a landfill is think of it as the world’s worst tea bag. You have waste sitting in the landfill and the rain water percolates through, and the leachate is that rain water coming out after it’s been through the tea bag, after it’s been through the landfill. And it has all this yucky stuff in it. And you try and get rid of it by sending it to the local sewage treatment plant – which treats waste in a really old fashioned, simple, fairly effective way, they throw all the stuff in a great big vat, like acres and acres of vat, and they just let the bacteria eat it. And the bacteria get really fat and sink to the bottom and that’s our sewage sludge – all that dead bacteria. Hey our bodies do that too – 25% of our solid waste is bacteria. So, the sewage plant is basically us you know on a giant scale. And then you cart that sludge back to the where else? The landfill. Where the rain water percolates through and the cycle continues. But if you do it enough times you know that tea bag that’s really gross, the leachate gets worse, and the treatment plant can’t take it anymore because the stuff would actually kill the bacteria that do all the work. And so not only is your waste from the landfill not treated. But none of the waste from the entire community is treated. It’s like an amplifier. You shut off treatment for everybody. So you can’t take the leachate anymore. So what happens to the leachate? Ah! There’s a trick! You take the leachate and throw it back on top of the landfill, and let it percolate through again and it’s like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice if you ever saw the Mickey Mouse cartoon, where you’re collecting more leachate, so you throw it on top of the landfill so more leachate comes out the bottom, and this goes faster and faster and faster. And you’d think it’s entirely stupid but what you’re forgetting it’s while that’s happening – everybody is getting paid. So the system continues. Really we’re not making treatment systems for radioactive waste, we’re making transit systems. You know, we’re moving them from one place or one medium to another without actually dealing with the problem at hand.

And yet the DEP continues to tell us there is no problem.

Back to when Public Herald tried to speak to DEP Spokesman Neil Shader in Harrisburg about this radioactivity issue. Speaking is Joshua Pribanic, the co-founder of Public Herald.

Joshua Pribanic: I hate to be this way with you, but we’re telling you you’re informed about the radioactive leachate story, we’re telling you you’re informed about those other places. Get out there, get somebody out there, and test it. And start issuing the enforcement, start issuing the violations. You know, it’s not a difficult thing to do, we did it in less than a month’s time. With very little money. 

Neil Shader: Our staff are out there. We take compliance very seriously. That’s our overarching goal.

Joshua Pribanic: What do you think I wanna do? Write about radioactive leachate for two years? You know that’s the situation you guys are putting us in. You guys are not going out there and handling these stories. I should’ve ended that story after we published it. But now we have to continue it for another year because there’s no enforcement, no action. I gotta go out and do the testing for you? I mean, that’s what we’re dealing with. As a news organization. So it’s frustrating for us to be in this position, where we’re learning all this information. The same information you have. In most cases we’re just publishing your documents. We’re publishing your TENORM study that says the POTWs are hot. There’s a TENORM study that you have, from PERMAFIX, and it says right in there, you have a long term problem, a chronic problem, of radioactivity building up, in picocuries per gram, in the soil and in the stream bed that is outside of the sewage plants. And here we are, three years later after that study, nothing done about it. 

Neil Shader: Alright, well, good talking with you guys.

The Path Forward

Well, we found one of those honorable people left in this world. Danielle Friel Otten is not your typical career politician. She was originally in hospitality and when the Mariner East Pipeline was being built near her quiet home in suburban Philadelphia, she quickly realized that if anyone was going to be looking out for the health and wellbeing of her children and neighbors, it had to be her. She is extremely intelligent, kind hearted, and not afraid to fearlessly confront the many Pennsylvania legislators deeply tied to the oil and gas industry. She serves Chester County which is on the outskirts of Philadelphia.

Danielle Friel Otten: Before I ran for office, before I was involved in electoral politics, I always just said – oh well there’s somebody who takes care of that. Like there are people who would never let that get approved. This is the United States of America we have people who make sure that these things don’t happen except – we don’t.

We keep talking about jobs and going back to work and people having a way to put food on their table but for so many of these people going back to work means putting themselves and their family at risk. 

Has this always just been the culture of Pennsylvania that you sacrifice your life for your livelihood? Is that where we are? In the United States of America? The country that took someone to the moon and has done so many wonderful, great things in this world, is that the country we really are when you pull back the layers. A country that encourages people or teaches people that you have to be willing to give up your life for your livelihood. 

My driving question, and you can listen to many committee meetings and many floor speeches where I’ve asked the question – what is the statistical value of life? Like I’m always asking them to reveal that number because every industry has it, every industry knows it, and we know that they know it.

We should always know. We know that the airline industry, the automobile industry, knows and understands what the value of taking steps to improve the prevention of a fatality and to me it’s like – What are they hiding? Why don’t they want that information out there? Obviously it’s gotta be something that would disturb people if they knew. And so I ask it over and over and over again and it makes people upset and it makes them mad. But I keep asking it because I think that it reveals a lot, the reaction to the question reveals a lot about the motives of the people who know that information and don’t want to share it.

Another state legislator, which Public Herald previously reported on in our story ‘Government Failed You’, is Representative Sara Innamorato who represents part of Allegheny County in the Pittsburgh area. She is currently drafting a bill to increase regulation on TENORM waste from the oil and gas industry and will keep tirelessly defending the health and safety of Pennsylvania residents. And while it will take an army of legislators like Danielle Friel Otten and Sara Innamorato to start to turn the tide in Pennsylvania and beyond – concern is building.

This is not just a story about two workers in the oil and gas industry in the early 2010s. This is a story that crosses borders and over 100 years of history.

Just as Ida Tarbell tirelessly uncovered the corruption of the Standard Oil Company in 1904, just as coal workers in Harlan County Kentucky bravely stood against the corporate interests that were endangering their health and wellbeing in 1973, just as Stuart Smith took on BP after they were trying to cover up their egregious harms caused to the Gulf and local workers in 2010 – we will keep working tirelessly to bring you the facts and uncover the truth.

Bringing justice to this issue will take all of these characters we introduced in this story, and more – the badass scientists wading through the creeks testing the radioactive muck, the ballsy trial lawyers taking on some of the biggest corporations in the world, the scrappy journalists, the honorable legislators, the few federal and state regulators standing up for what is right, the tireless local activists, and people like you, listening to this piece right now.

Much of the solid oil and gas waste is out of Tom and Brandon’s hands and is now sitting in municipal landfills and being sent to sewage treatment plants who are then discharging radionuclides into our public waterways. The question remains – what are the harms for people who live, play, and drink from these waterways? And why is nothing being done about it?