PA Environment Digest Blog: Guest Essay: Oil & Gas Industry Waste And Radioactive Drinking Water In Pennsylvania

By Justin Nobel, Author of Petroleum-238: Big Oil's Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It

Since the fracking boom began in the early 2000s, oilfield waste has been spilled, spread, injected, dumped, and freely emitted across America, with particularly worrisome problems in Pennsylvania.

In 2019, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published an explosive story revealing a seemingly unusual number of Ewing sarcoma cases among youths in the heart of Southwest Pennsylvania’s oil and gas country.

While the Pennsylvania Department of Health has determined there is no “cancer cluster,” and no researcher has formally linked cases to the oil and gas industry, my reporting suggests the radioactivity brought to the surface by Pennsylvania’s oil and gas industry could potentially have played a role.

At the very least, radioactivity should be carefully assessed and tracked by epidemiologists to determine just how it may have influenced oil and gas country cancers like Ewing sarcoma, and industry and government officials should be investigated to determine if they had important knowledge or covered it up.

The radioactive element radium is brought to the surface in copious amounts in the oil and gas industry’s produced water. Radium is regarded as a “bone-seeker” because it has a chemical makeup similar to calcium and if accidentally inhaled or ingested tends to accumulate in bones.

Yet lax regulations, industry exemptions, and sloppy operating practices have enabled this radium to be discharged — sometimes illegally, often legally — into the same rivers Pennsylvanians draw their drinking water from. Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection data indicates radium levels in the state’s Marcellus formation can average 9,330 picocuries per liter (pCi/L) and be as high as 28,500.

For context, EPA’s safe drinking water limit for radium is 5 pCi/L, and at 60 pCi/L EPA formally defines a liquid waste stream as “radioactive.”

Some researchers have compared the concentration of Ewing sarcoma cases in southwestern Pennsylvania to hundreds of pennies being tossed in the air and some randomly landing together.

But the fact that according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s reporting six cases of Ewing sarcoma have been diagnosed within the same school district (Canon-McMillan in Washington County), including the pitcher and catcher from the same high school baseball team, should not inspire crass statements that duck a more rigorous scientific analysis, but legitimate on-the-ground research into contaminants introduced by the unconventional oil and gas industry, which has newly planted itself across the region.

The general scientific consensus is Ewing sarcoma has no known environmental causes, but important research from the 1990s links even minor increases in radium in drinking water to an increase in bone cancers, including Ewing sarcoma.

There is a “statistically significant” relationship between levels of radium in drinking water and Ewing sarcoma, wrote Dr. Murray Finkelstein, a Canadian epidemiologist, in his 1994 article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

I spoke to Finkelstein about Pennsylvania’s Ewing sarcoma cases for my book, Petroleum-238: Big Oil’s Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It, and he said to check radium levels in the area’s drinking water.

Pennsylvania American Water is the drinking water provider across parts of Washington County where Ewing sarcoma cases occurred, and spokesperson Gary Lobaugh told me: “All radium sampling results were non-detect between 2005 – 2019.”

But this is a deceptive statement, as EPA typically requires radium in drinking water be tested only once every nine years — in other words, a drinking water plant will sample for radium during a single moment of a single day once every 3,285 days, and significant public health decisions will stem from this value.

It turns out, drinking water treatment plants can concentrate considerable amounts of radioactivity as they filter water for drinking. This material builds up as a sludge called residuals.

An EPA report from 2005 says in areas with elevated natural radioactivity, or industries that may elevate levels, drinking water treatment residuals can be so radioactive they must be taken to special radioactive waste disposal facilities.

In Colorado, radioactive drinking water treatment plant residuals have been alleged to have caused cancer among plant workers.

However, I learned that in November 1996, Pennsylvania American Water was granted an exemption by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection to allow residuals from two of their southwestern Pennsylvania drinking water treatment plants (16,000 tons a year) to “no longer” be classified as “waste” and instead be reclassified “as soil,” to “be used as topsoil and in topsoil blends” in residential lawns, ball fields, highway projects, and landscaping activities.

My book reveals these never-before-published documents, and files I reviewed convey that nearly three decades later, this extraordinary exemption still stands.

While Gary Lobaugh, Government and External Affairs Director with Pennsylvania American Water, told me their residuals are “typically used for brownfield applications and soil amendments, and none has been used for ballfields,” neither his company or the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection have been able to provide me with a list of the contractors who have handled and applied this material, or tests detailing its radium levels.

I grant credit to Pennsylvania’s academic community, who through cleverly designed research projects have found the oilfield’s radium accumulating in Pennsylvania creeks, reservoirs, and even the shells of freshwater mussels.

U.S. Geological Survey researchers in North Dakota tracked the oilfield’s radium 4.5 miles downstream from a spill site, where it built up in the floodplain at levels “significantly above the U.S. EPA action level.”

This research confirms that radium brought to the surface in oil and gas production can enter and become concentrated in the environment and food chains.

The Pennsylvania Attorney General must conduct an on-the-ground investigation, together with a thorough probe of Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and industry files, to determine if the unconventional oil and gas industry’s radioactivity has also been enabled to accumulate in the bones of children.

Pennsylvanians deserve this.

Until it comes, myself — and many others trying to advocate for public health — will continue to feel like we are living in the Twilight Zone, where industry and government have aligned to make dangerous waste suddenly disappear, by magically transforming it into a consumer product.

Justin Nobel, Author of Petroleum-238: Big Oil's Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It.

Related Articles - Oil & Gas Waste Radioactivity:

-- New Penn State Study Shows Continuous Radioactive Radium Exposure From Oil & Gas Wastewater Poses A Threat To Aquatic, Human Health As It Accumulates In Aquatic Species [PaEN]

Resource Links:

-- Penn State: Fracking Wastewater Accumulation Found In Freshwater Mussel Shells [PaEN]

-- DEP: Potential For Environmental Impacts From Spills Or Leaks Of Radioactive Oil & Gas Waste Materials Is Real; Health Dept. Not Aware Of All Chemicals In Oil & Gas Wastewater Making Risk Assessment Difficult [PaEN]

-- Shale Gas & Public Health Conference: We've Got Enough Compelling Evidence To Enact Health Protective Policies For Families Now [PaEN]

-- PA Oil & Gas Weekly Compliance Dashboard - June 24 to 30 - Radiation Levels Prompt Shale Gas Wastewater Tank Decontamination; Replugging Conventional, Shale Gas Wells [PaEN]

-- DEP Reports Shale Gas Operations Sent Over 138,000 Cubic Feet Of Radioactive TENORM Waste To Low-Level Radioactive Waste Facilities For Disposal In 2022 - Over 911,000 Cubic Feet Since 2017 [PaEN]

-- Republican Rep. Krupa Introduces HB 1656 To Ban Oil, Gas Wastewater Injection Wells To Protect The Public From Radioactive, Toxic Materials [PaEN]

-- DEP Issued Air Quality Permit For Leachate Evaporation System At Westmoreland Landfill With Special Radiation Monitoring Due To The Disposal Of Shale Gas Drilling Waste [PaEN]

-- DEP Releases Final Guidance On Handling Radioactive Waste From Unconventional Shale Gas Drilling Operations [PaEN]