THE CASE AGAINST HYDROFRACKING - Hydrofracking: What Everyone Needs to Know - page 62

plants. This raises the chance of spills, traffic accidents, and wear and tear on roads,
a major bone of contention for many rural communities. If the Marcellus and Utica
Shales are opened to widespread hydrofracking, states like New York could pro-
duce hundreds of millions of gallons of flowback every day. That wastewater will
likely be trucked to treatment plants. In Pennsylvania, that is already the case.
Yet most sewage treatment plants are not equipped to remove the chemicals,
salts, Total Dissolved Solids (TDS), and radioactive elements in the drillers'
wastewater. These contaminants can greatly increase the salinity of rivers and
streams, which can harm aquatic life; affect the taste, smell, and color of tap water;
interfere with the biological treatment process at sewage plants; and damage in-
dustrial and household equipment. Without a process to identify and test for these
chemicals, it is impossible to know whether they are in drinking supplies. 62
Pennsylvania promotes itself as hydrofracking-friendly, and former state DEP
secretary John Hanger has said that “there are business pressures” on drillers to
“cut corners.… It's cheaper to dump wastewater than to treat it.” 63 Yet Hanger in-
sists that fears of water contamination from flowback are overblown. “Every single
drop that is coming out of the tap in Pennsylvania today meets the safe drinking
water standard,” he maintains. But Hanger acknowledges that state water treatment
plants are not equipped to treat flowback. 64
In 2013, the federal EPA fined three Pennsylvania treatment plants for accepting
hundreds of thousands of gallons of Marcellus Shale flowback that contained “mul-
tiple toxins and more than 7 million pounds of salt every month.” 65 The plants
discharged the water into the Allegheny River watershed, which provides drinking
water to Pittsburgh and dozens of other communities. While the EPA penalty was
only $83,000, the company that runs the treatment plants is temporarily banned
from accepting further flowback and must invest $30 million to upgrade its facilit-
ies in order to comply with newly stringent state regulations.
Can Flowback Be Radioactive?
The simple answer is yes. The explosives and powerful pumps used by hydraulic
fracturers exert enormous pressures, and sometimes loosen naturally occurring ra-
dioactive material called “radionuclides”—including radon, radium, thorium, and
uranium—from subterranean rock. The flowback dislodges these elements from
shale and sucks them up to the surface. Their radioactivity is low but measurable.
Another source of radiation is man-made radionuclides, which are sometimes used