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The NY Times has an extensive story out today highlighting what little we know about the dangers of "hydrofracking," the process by which stores of underground pools of natural gas are forced to the surface using high pressure water and other chemicals:

The gas has always been there, of course, trapped deep underground in countless tiny bubbles, like frozen spills of seltzer water between thin layers of shale rock. But drilling companies have only in recent years developed techniques to unlock the enormous reserves, thought to be enough to supply the country with gas for heating buildings, generating electricity and powering vehicles for up to a hundred years.

So energy companies are clamoring to drill. And they are getting rare support from their usual sparring partners. Environmentalists say using natural gas will help slow climate change because it burns more cleanly than coal and oil. Lawmakers hail the gas as a source of jobs. They also see it as a way to wean the United States from its dependency on other countries for oil.

But the relatively new drilling method -- known as high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking -- carries significant environmental risks. It involves injecting huge amounts of water, mixed with sand and chemicals, at high pressures to break up rock formations and release the gas.

With hydrofracking, a well can produce over a million gallons of wastewater that is often laced with highly corrosive salts, carcinogens like benzene and radioactive elements like radium, all of which can occur naturally thousands of feet underground. Other carcinogenic materials can be added to the wastewater by the chemicals used in the hydrofracking itself.

Using thousands of previously unreleased documents and studies from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and a confidential study by the industry, this extensive investigative report details that a sizable portion of these wells are already spewing forth radioactive material that is getting into our water supplies:

The risks are particularly severe in Pennsylvania, which has seen a sharp increase in drilling, with roughly 71,000 active gas wells, up from about 36,000 in 2000. The level of radioactivity in the wastewater has sometimes been hundreds or even thousands of times the maximum allowed by the federal standard for drinking water. While people clearly do not drink drilling wastewater, the reason to use the drinking-water standard for comparison is that there is no comprehensive federal standard for what constitutes safe levels of radioactivity in drilling wastewater.

Drillers trucked at least half of this waste to public sewage treatment plants in Pennsylvania in 2008 and 2009, according to state officials. Some of it has been sent to other states, including New York and West Virginia.

In Pennsylvania, these treatment plants discharged waste into some of the state’s major river basins. Greater amounts of the wastewater went to the Monongahela River, which provides drinking water to more than 800,000 people in the western part of the state, including Pittsburgh, and to the Susquehanna River, which feeds into Chesapeake Bay and provides drinking water to more than six million people, including some in Harrisburg and Baltimore.

Lower amounts have been discharged into the Delaware River, which provides drinking water for more than 15 million people in Philadelphia and eastern Pennsylvania.

In New York, the wastewater was sent to two plants that discharge into Southern Cayuga Lake, near Ithaca, and Owasco Outlet, near Auburn. In West Virginia, a plant in Wheeling discharged gas-drilling wastewater into the Ohio River.

But the problems extend beyond the East Coast:

"Hydrofracking impacts associated with health problems as well as widespread air and water contamination have been reported in at least a dozen states," said Walter Hang, president of Toxics Targeting, a business in Ithaca, N.Y., that compiles data on gas drilling.

There were more than 493,000 active natural-gas wells in the United States in 2009, almost double the number in 1990. Around 90 percent have used hydrofracking to get more gas flowing, according to the drilling industry.

Gas has seeped into underground drinking-water supplies in at least five states, including Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and West Virginia, and residents blamed natural-gas drilling.

The NY Times study found that more than half of the 200 wells surveyed in Pennsylvania (62.5%) had levels of "gross alpha" radioactivity (a type of radioactivity caused by emissions from uranium & radium) that exceeded federal drinking water standards. Twenty-one percent (21%) of surveyed wells had levels of radium that exceeded safe drinking water standards, two-percent (2%) had levels of uranium that exceeded safe levels, and 21% had levels of benzene that exceeded those safe levels.

A huge part of the problem is also caused by spillage in these overflow areas of contaminated water, as well as the lack of regulation enforcement:

Drilling contamination is entering the environment in Pennsylvania through spills, too. In the past three years, at least 16 wells whose records showed high levels of radioactivity in their wastewater also reported spills, leaks or failures of pits where hydrofracking fluid or waste is stored, according to state records.

Gas producers are generally left to police themselves when it comes to spills. In Pennsylvania, regulators do not perform unannounced inspections to check for signs of spills. Gas producers report their own spills, write their own spill response plans and lead their own cleanup efforts.

"There are business pressures" on companies to "cut corners," John Hanger, who stepped down as secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection in January, has said. "It's cheaper to dump wastewater than to treat it."

Records back up that assertion.

From October 2008 through October 2010, regulators were more than twice as likely to issue a written warning than to levy a fine for environmental and safety violations, according to state data. During this period, 15 companies were fined for drilling-related violations in 2008 and 2009, and the companies paid an average of about $44,000 each year, according to state data.

This average was less than half of what some of the companies earned in profits in a day and a tiny fraction of the more than $2 million that some of them paid annually to haul and treat the waste.

Needless to say, the landscape has been transformed in Pennsylvania:

Drilling derricks tower over barns, lining rural roads like feed silos. Drilling sites bustle around the clock with workers, some in yellow hazardous material suits, and 18-wheelers haul equipment, water and waste along back roads.

The rigs announce their presence with the occasional boom and quiver of underground explosions. Smelling like raw sewage mixed with gasoline, drilling-waste pits, some as large as a football field, sit close to homes.

Anywhere from 10 percent to 40 percent of the water sent down the well during hydrofracking returns to the surface, carrying drilling chemicals, very high levels of salts and, at times, naturally occurring radioactive material.

While most states require drillers to dispose of this water in underground storage wells below impermeable rock layers, Pennsylvania has few such wells. It is the only state that has allowed drillers to discharge much of their waste through sewage treatment plants into rivers.

There has obviously been rush to install these wells with little to no oversight, mostly because the allure of big money is just too great to turn down:

Drilling companies were issued roughly 3,300 Marcellus gas-well permits in Pennsylvania last year, up from just 117 in 2007.

This has brought thousands of jobs, five-figure windfalls for residents who lease their land to the drillers and revenue for a state that has struggled with budget deficits.

And now with a Republican Governor, elected by a bare majority last November, the problem stands to get worse:

In December, the Republican governor-elect, Tom Corbett, who during his campaign took more gas industry contributions than all his competitors combined, said he would reopen state land to new drilling, reversing a decision made by his predecessor, Edward G. Rendell. The change clears the way for as many as 10,000 wells on public land, up from about 25 active wells today.

In arguing against a proposed gas-extraction tax on the industry, Mr. Corbett said regulation of the industry had been too aggressive.

"I will direct the Department of Environmental Protection to serve as a partner with Pennsylvania businesses, communities and local governments," Mr. Corbett says on his Web site. "It should return to its core mission protecting the environment based on sound science."

It should be noted, though, that these wells were brought in by Ed Rendell's administration, the the Democratic Governor for the past eight years.

Yet again, money seems to have trumped most of the concern in his state. The Cancer of Capitalism strikes again...

You can read the documents collected by the NY Times over the past nine months at their website. Their reporters reviewed more than 30,000 pages obtained through open records requests of state and federal agencies and by visiting various regional offices that oversee drilling in Pennsylvania. Some of the documents were leaked by state or federal officials.

Click on the image to read the entire article:

The NYT article is misleading and the testing results confirm the article's biased claims.

http://johnhanger.blogspot.com/2011/03/dep-radioactive-material-test-results.html

Actually, Frank, the only thing misleading is that you and the Rendell administration looked the other way when handing out all of these permits. The facts are the facts, and the article does not lie.

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