The Oil and Gas Industry’s 800-Pound Gorilla: RADIATION

Full article at: The Oil and Gas Industry’s 800-Pound Gorilla: RADIATION

March 1, 2011 8:08 am

An odd sort of perfect storm – involving a high-profile New York Times energy series, a quirky documentary that just missed the Oscar and federal BP-spill recovery plans – may finally address the 800-pound gorilla of our nation’s energy policy: RADIATION.

The NYT series launched Sunday (Feb. 27) with detailed accounts of radioactive wastewater, created by a Halliburton-developed extraction process called “fracking,” being dumped with impunity across the country. The article even included a “smoking gun” document, a “confidential industry study” from 1990 by none other than the American Petroleum Institute. The API’s secret study concluded that even with conservative assumptions, the radium in drilling wastewater dumped off the Louisiana coast posed “potentially significant risks” of cancer for anyone eating fish from those areas. I’m working on my own series of posts about this hazard in the Gulf of Mexico.

Full article at: The Oil and Gas Industry’s 800-Pound Gorilla: RADIATION