Most of us are very familiar with the famed quote from the 20th Century philosopher George Santayana, that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” For me, I think of those words when I think about oil production and radioactive waste — an environmental problem that America did not fix in our very recent past, and one that we are now repeating in our new...
You might even say it glows: The fracking wastewater edition
You’re probably familiar with the old saying, “Water, water everywhere — and not a drop to drink.” But when it comes to the hundreds of millions of gallons of wastewater that have been produced in the explosion of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for natural gas from Pennsylvania to California, it’s much, much worse than that. Evidence is mounting that the...
La. needs to get to bottom of the sinkhole and radiation
It was just yesterday that I was sharing with you the new scientific data that even exposure to what has been considered low doses of radiation can be harmful. In particular, I mentioned the long-standing — but not always well-understood — issue of so-called Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material, or NORM. This is a radioactive by-product of the oil-production process; for years it...