NYTimes: Fracking for gas pollutes streams and rivers – including radioactivity. Does it get dilute enough to drink?
AP photo
Sunday’s New York Times ran the first of what promises to be a revealing series on the risks of natural gas drilling, and the challenge local and federal agencies face in regulating the industry. The launch come via a long article by Ian Urbina on hydraulic fracturing, infamously known among doubters as fracking, that several news outlets have in recent years heavily documented for its tendency to foul drinking water in some wells.
Quite aside from a big caveat explained below, the story is dramatic, heavily illustrated, and well-modulated in tone. Not once does it flatly declare that people are drinking water that is demonstrably poisonous or carcinogenic because of natural gas drilling. It suggests that whatever the dangers are from natural gas extraction, coal is worse. It switches tone quickly – the lede suggesting a general story on pollutants of all sorts. Benzene and salts and other things one would rather not drink in quantity come up. But it focusses its concern on radioactive isotopes, chiefly of radium and uranium. The story reports that most water companies don’t even do a radiation check on water that, before treatment, included discharge from natural gas operations. Urbina also discovers, from public records he had to work hard to ferret out over several months of investigation, that the radioactivity of some well waste is substantially above what has been generally reported.
If nothing else, when the nation’s most influential newspaper puts a story like this page one, lawmakers should – even those allergic to such terms as “government regulators” - insist on diligent monitoring of water supplies for radioactivity.
On the other hand – how about dilution? Urbina packs his story with numbers of wells and associated stats. He singles out Pennsylvania as a state that is not only well-fracked top to bottom and side to side by drillers stunning the Marcellus Shale into yielding its gas, but that is sending much of the used, chemically laced (plus uranium and radium) water to standard treatment plants that are not very good at taking such stuff out before returning it to streams and rivers.
We learn that some of the well waste is hundreds to a few thousand times higher in radiation than federal drinking standards allow. Several times Urbina quotes water companies and gas industry officials as saying dilution is the solution.
Nowhere does Urbina take a hard look at the dilution assertion. Readers would at least understand the crude scale of the problem if he did so. Flow rates for Pennsylvania rivers are readily available. If dilution factors are hundreds of thousands to millions to one, then the question may become one of biological re-concentration in fish or shellfish, or of how well-mixed a discharge is by the time it reaches a community’s drinking water intake.
Never trust the Tracker with arithmetic. However, I have some numbers. I was pretty good at math but as a reporter, beyond converting miles to kilometers or such things as that, I tended to ask my scientists sources to check my figures. Now I’m doing mathematics without a net. But here we go.
The story says the highest factor it found, anywhere, by which gas well waste water exceeds safe radiation standards is 2,122 times. Most were considerably lower. One of those more typical levels one finds in the story is the 275-fold excess of radium and 780-times excess of all radiation in a 20,000 gallon per day waste stream delivered to a plant on Pennsylvania’s Clarion River. Let’s just say it’s 1000 times too hot for anybody’s tap.
The Clarion River, according to the USGS National Water Information System, which I found in a few strokes, has a mean flow rate for February 28 of 2120 cubic feet per second, and a 25th percentile of 786 cfs. I dunno what the year-round rates are. But today it’s running at 2370 cfs.
A cubic foot has 7.5 gallons in it. The day has 86,400 seconds in it. By my rough and rounded figgering, if one stirred 20,000 gallons of this crud (and this will be after the treatment plant takes out a bunch of stuff, but maybe not much that’s radioactive) into a river running at about 500 million gallons a day, it will have been diluted about 250,000 times. This is the rate on 25th percentile days. Today it’d be a lot more. The result, naively estimated perhaps, would be a discharge with radiation well under one percent of the federal standard.
That sort of result’s safety implications should be explored in a story this long and generally thorough. No doubt I’ve left something out. But the Times should have sifted such numbers with experts and told us whether and why there is still reason to worry.
And if I’m off by a lot on those calculations, please let me know.
For another barb aimed at the NYTimes – not for its reporting but for thin acknowledgment of the extensive reporting on hydrofracking by other outlets – blogger and journalist Keith Kloor has it.
- Charlie Petit
