'Treated' Fracking Wastewater Still Contaminates the Watershed

Fracking has been exposed as causing harm before, and it's being exposed again. I've talked about the problems with fracking in the past [1, 2], and yet some people still want to put their little denial and hyper-skeptical caps on to defend this environmentally deleterious practice.

The economic appeal is strong for fracking. There are billions of dollars to make extracting the natural gas, but there are also billions of gallons of wastewater to deal with. Attempts have been made at treating this wastewater and then releasing it to the surface. But not enough testing was done before it was done, and now new research shows the Pennsylvania watershed is contaminated with things like radioactive material, metals and carcinogens.

Despite the evidence on this issue or previous research on the increase in earthquakes, there are powerful forces that will use all the disinformation tactic to keep their money machine going. Fracking accounts for 1/2 of the oil production and 2/3 of the natural gas production in the USA. That's a lot of dough coming on to the businesses involved. Even retailers pay less as opposed to importing energy from elsewhere.

Many praise fracking, not just for the domestic economic boost, but because it's a cleaner energy source compared to coal, and helps to take the USA away from coal energy production. Coal energy production is one of the dirtiest ways of getting energy from materials of the earth. China is big on coal energy, and they have the air pollution to show for it.

The recent research went into a study for the Environmental Science & Technology journal, which reports on the 1.7 billion gallons of wastewater produced from 10,000 unconventional oil and gas (O&G) wells. This water can pose a risk to the health of the environment as well as our own, with radioactive material, salts, metals, endocrine-disrupting chemicals and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons all found within it. The treatment against these substances in the wastewater is limited. So even when there aren't fracking spills, the treated water is still a danger.

Analysis of sediment and porewater samples taken in the lake downstream from treatment facilities in Pennsylvania show "peak concentrations" of radium, alkaline earth metals, salts and organic chemicals all in the same sedimentary layer, which includes carcinogens. They even trace when wastewater was disposed-of through the sedimentary layer, and the higher concentrations are found 5-10 years ago. What risk these elevated levels of contaminants pose is unknown at this point according to the researchers.

I don't know about you, but having endocrine disruptor and carcinogens in a water table in not a good thing for me. I don't really care what specific health risk levels are associated with this problem. Just knowing the water in the area is contaminated would be enough for me to know it's unsafe to use.

Short-term drives and motivations to make money with new tech and chemicals leads us to not properly evaluate or even consider the long-term consequence to our actions. This type of behavior has been rampant for a long time in human history. We slowly seem to evolve beyond some failed and false ways of living, but then we develop new failures and keep doing them because we get money for doing it...

How much does money influence our lives?
Have you ever met someone who would pretty much kill their grandmother for enough money?
What about figuring out if what we're doing for money is actually right or wrong to do?
How aware are we of how our appeal for money is sending us down false paths that harm others, or even ourselves?

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Thank you for your time and attention! Take care. Peace.