Unearthed articles from the 1960s detail how nuclear waste was buried
beneath the Earth’s surface by Halliburton & Co. for decades as a
means of disposing the by-products of post-World War II atomic energy
production.
Fracking is already a controversial practice on its face; allowing
U.S. industries to inject slurries of toxic, potentially carcinogenic
compounds deep beneath the planet’s surface — as a means of “see no
evil” waste disposal — already sounds ridiculous, dangerous, and stupid
anyway without even going into further detail.
Alleged fracking links to the contamination of the public water
supply and critical aquifers, as well as ties to earthquake upticks near
drilling locations that are otherwise not prone to seismic activity
have created uproar in the years since the 2005 “
Cheney loophole,”
which allowed the industry to circumvent the Safe Drinking Water Act by
exempting fracking fluids, thus fast tracking shale fracking as a
source of cheap natural gas.
Now, it is apparent that the fracking industry is also privvy to many
secrets of the nuclear energy industry, and specifically, where the
bodies are buried, err… dangerous nuclear waste is buried, rather —
waste that atomic researchers have otherwise found so difficult to
eliminate.
Truthstream uncovered several published newspaper accounts from the
Spring of 1964 concerning a then-newly disclosed plan to dump nuclear
waste produced by the atomic energy industry into hydraulic fracturing
(fracking) wells using a cement slurry technique developed by
Halliburton & Co. The top two fracking companies in the nation at
the time were Halliburton and Dowell, a subsidiary of Dow Chemical.
And here we thought fracking was a relatively new industrial
phenomenon growing in popularity over just the last couple of decades.
Boy were we wrong. Revealed within these articles is Halliburton’s
long-standing relationship with the secret government and deep ties
between the oil and nuclear industries.
Teaming up with the U.S. Government and Union Carbide Corp., who
operate nuclear materials divisions at the Oak Ridge National
Laboratories in Tennessee, Halliburton was then credited with “solving”
the radioactive waste problem faced by America’s secretive nuclear
industry. Dumping waste via fracking had apparently been going on since
1960, according to the reports, but was only made public here in 1964.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind
Each of the articles Truthstream found carry the same account under
different headlines, with four of them using identical copy, and the
fifth, published in the San Antonio Express, slightly rewritten based
upon the same source information. The photo captions of each story also
add some useful tidbits:
These ran in the:
April 19, 1964 edition of the Great Bend Tribune,
the April 22, 1964 edition of the Warren Times-Mirror,
the April 26, 1964 edition of the Lubbock Avalanche Journal,
the May 3, 1964 edition of the San Antonio Express News (original)
and the June 15, 1964 edition of the Denton Record Chronicle.
The story read, in part:
“Two techniques originated by the
petroleum industry for its own uses are expected to solve a major
problem in the development of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. The
problem is the disposal of dangerous, sometimes deadly, radioactive
waste by-products.”
“Researchers at Halliburton Co’s.
Technical Center here working with Oak Ridge National Laboratory
scientists, have combined the oil well cementing technique with the
hydraulic fracturing production stimulation technique to entomb
radioactive wastes in an impermeable shale formation a thousand feet
underground.”
“The method used at Oak Ridge begins by
mixing the waste with a cement slurry, pumping the mixture down a hole
drilled into the Conasuaga shale and then fracturing the shale to create
a horizontal crack. The crack fills with the mixture to form a thin,
horizontal sheet several hundred feet across. The mix sets to
permanently hold the radioactive waste in the formation.”
“Union Carbide Corp., which operates
facilities at Oak Ridge for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, and
Halliburton, which provides specialized oil field services such as
cementing fracturing worldwide, have collaborated on the project since
1960.”
The mix remained liquid for 48 hours before it was supposed to permanently set and remain there, entombed, forever.
The articles make clear that the Atomic Energy Commission was
preparing to use fracking as a means of disposing of nuclear wastes at
additional facilities, with Oak Ridge being simply one of the largest,
and the first to publicly disclose these out-of-sight disposal
procedures:
“Oak Ridge has a radioactive waste
disposal problem typical of the nation’s nuclear sites. Each year about
four million gallons of waste, including such fission products as
strontium 90, cesium 137 and ruthenium 103, are generated at Oak Ridge.”
“Among the disposal methods already tried
have been dumping concrete-encased barrels of waste in the ocean or
burying the waste in lead-lined containers. These are considered either
too dangerous or too expensive or both.”
Unfortunately, the ocean has been used as a giant trashcan not only
by the nuclear industry, but municipal garbage and landfill companies
and many other entities as well, without any real concern about its
significant effects on the food supply and larger ecosystem of the
planet.
“If this process is successful for
disposal of Oak Ridge National Laboratory intermediate-level wastes, it
has potential application at other atomic energy sites where suitable
geological conditions exist,” the Atomic Energy Commission says.”
The slightly different version in the San Antonio Express News added these details:
“A couple of techniques used by oilmen
when they have hopes of production may soon be used by the Atomic Energy
Commission for – of all things – radioactive garbage disposal.”
“Final tests are now under way at Oak
Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, in trying a combination of oil
well cementing plus hydraulic fracturing to entomb radioactive wastes in
an impermeable shale formation a thousand feet underground.”
Meanwhile, the Great Bend Tribune added information about the
Halliburton executives involved in the plan in their caption for a photo
which shows businessmen looking at a diagram explaining how nuclear
waste like strontium 90 is mixed with cement and injected into shale
formations:
“Halliburton engineer Mack Stogner, left,
reviews the project with Harry P. Conroy, senior vice president and
general manager of the oil field service firm, and W.D. Owsley, senior
vice president.”
The process includes remote controlled operation of the hydraulic
fracturing drill in order to shield workers from the “medium level”
radioactive substances being dumped into the earth’s crust, as the
Warren Times Mirror in Pennsylvania notes in the caption:
“Disposing of Waste – Working behind
shielding and wearing film badges, Halliburton Company personnel use
demounted oil field service units to dispose of radioactive waste
generated at the Oak Ridge, Tenn. nuclear site.”
How often this procedure has been used at other facilities since then
is not entirely clear, though we know from reports discussed below that
the practice continued and there is no indication that it ever stopped.
Five years later, the October 22, 1969 edition of the San Bernardino
County Sun carried a report titled, “3 Ways to Manage Radioactive
Waste.”
It discussed the ongoing and growing problems with nuclear waste,
naming three principle strategies for managing the toxic stuff, summed
up as “(1) delay and decay, (2) concentrate and confine and (3) dilute
and disperse,” discussing how materials with lower half lives can
supposedly be safely sequestered and later dumped, while other materials
can be simply diluted and poured into existing groundwater supplies and
systems.
The UPI story originating out of Oak Ridge states, in part,
“Since the start of the atomic era in the
1940s, nuclear reactors around the nation have produced 75 million
gallons of hazardous high level radioactive waste materials.”
“And scientists here and elsewhere around
the nation still are wrestling with the problems of what to do with
this material, which promises to become even more plentiful as more and
more commercial nuclear reactors go into power production.”
Oak Ridge proclaims that it found a solution to dealing with high level nuclear wastes, which has thus far been to keep it,
“…buried a few feet underground in
storage tanks – tanks which must be periodically replaced because of the
natural deterioration of the steel and other materials of which they
are fabricated.”
“It is in this area of confining the high
level wastes, whose radioactive half life ranges up to 30 to 50 years,
that the Atomic Energy Commission is pushing dramatic new concepts.”
“One disposal system, involving materials
in the medium range of radioactivity, is the hydraulic fracturing
procedures. This system is now being used at Oak Ridge and involves
mixing the liquid radioactive waste with concrete to form a grout which
is pumped into shale formations 500 to 800 feet underground.”
Note, this article cites a shallower depth, at levels as shallow as
500 feet, after the 1964 articles claimed a further removed depth of
1,000 feet to 5,000. The even “higher level wastes” were disposed of in
abandoned salt mines, according to Oak Ridge.
Nuclear Waste ‘Safely Flushed Away’ into the Water Supply
The 1969 article states that “low level waste” is “material which can
safely be flushed away into rivers and lakes or released into the
atmosphere because the level of radioactivity is so low that is presents
no hazard when diluted and flushed into man’s natural environment. The
more difficult problem is involved in the high level, liquid and solid
wastes which are produced in the reprocessing of used fuel elements from
nuclear reactor cores.”
The idea that the waste dumped into water supplies was so “low level”
as to be completely harmless is likely dubious and hopeful at best.
Fluoride, a by-product of the nuclear power industry, was one of those
constituents, and was transformed from being known as a rat poison to
being known as a dental benefit by the original spin doctor and
propagandist, Edward Bernays.
In his book “
The Fluoride Deception
,”
author Christopher Bryson revealed how the nuclear industry also used
fluoridation of the public water supply as a means of secretly dumping
industrial waste after fluoride was a major by-product in the uranium
enrichment process for building the atomic bomb.
Bryson told Democracy Now:
The Manhattan Project needed fluoride to enrich uranium.
That’s how they did it. The biggest industrial building in the world,
for a time, was the fluoride gaseous diffusion plant in Tennessee the
Manhattan Project and Dr. Hodge as the senior toxicologist for the
Manhattan Project, were scared stiff less that workers would realize
that the fluoride they were going to be breathing inside these plants
was going to injury them and that the Manhattan Project, the key — the
key of U.S. Strategic power in the Cold War Era, would be jeopardized
because the Manhattan Project and the industrial contractors making the
atomic bomb would be facing all these lawsuits from workers, all these
lawsuits from farmers living around these industrial plants and so
Harold Hodge assures us that fluoride is safe and good for children.
More recently, an
Associated Press investigation
found in 2011 that 48 of 65 nuclear sites in the United States were
leaking tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen, into groundwater
supplies via corroded pipes and tunnels. AP found at least 37 locations
were in direct violation of federal drinking water standards for
tritium, in some cases hundreds of times over.
Fracking Nuclear Waste ‘Safe for Millions of Years’… Unless It Leaks
Some 30 trillion gallons of toxic waste has been kept out of sight,
out of mind by U.S. industries that have injected it hundreds and
thousands of feet underground into wells since the 1960s.
Scientists who work for these corporations have used computer
modeling to assure the Environmental Protection Agency that this waste
poses no threat to our aquifers and that layers of rock deep within the
Earth would safely store this stuff like Tupperware for millenia.
Already, several incidents have proven that scientific computer models are no match for reality.
It is clear from a December 21, 1973 article that disposal of nuclear
waste via fracking continued, along with promises that it would be safe
for millions of years to come.
The Dixon Evening Telegraph wrote in “Geologists look at energy crunch”:
“The U.S. Government is disposing of
approximately 250,000 gallons of intermediate-level wastes each year
using a technique called hydraulic fracturing. Liquids are pumped into
impervious shales 1,000 to 5,000 feet below the surface. High pressure
is applied causing the rocks to fracture and the liquid moves out
laterally. Because the rock and radioactive wastes it contains will not be exposed to the biosphere for millions of years, this method should be safe unless leakage into an overlying aquifer occurs.”
That is, as the article points out,
unless there are leaks.
As we found in research, leakage is exactly what has happened time
and again throughout the years, including at disposal sites for Oak
Ridge National Laboratories, according to reports in the following
cases.
Via
ProPublica:
In April, 1967 pesticide waste injected by a chemical plant at Denver’s Rocky Mountain Arsenal destabilized a seismic fault,
causing a magnitude 5.0 earthquake
— strong enough to shatter windows and close schools — and jolting
scientists with newfound risks of injection, according to the U.S.
Geological Survey.
A year later, a corroded hazardous waste
well for pulping liquor at the Hammermill Paper Co., in Erie, Pa.,
ruptured. Five miles away,
according to an EPA report, “a noxious black liquid seeped from an abandoned gas well” in Presque Isle State Park.
In 1975 in
Beaumont, Texas, dioxin and a highly acidic herbicide injected underground by the
Velsicol Chemical Corp.
burned a hole through its well casing, sending as much as five million
gallons of the waste into a nearby drinking water aquifer.
And these are hardly the only examples… in fact, it is just
scratching the surface of an issue that is almost as incomprehensible as
it is unfathomable.
Then in August 1984 in Oak Ridge, Tenn., radioactive waste was turned up by water monitoring near a deep injection well at a government nuclear facility.
Bingo…
There it is. The infallible, permanent, and “impermeable” deep
injection wells that Halliburton and the Atomic Energy Commission
considered as a solution to nuclear waste for eons to come were found
turning up radioactive nuclear waste at the very Oak Ridge site where
these 1960s disposal projects were taking place.
Subterranean Waste Disposal a ‘Cornerstone of the Nation’s Economy’
Those cemented wells, filled with injected disposal substances may be
safely secured for a few years or even decades, but that is no
guarantee for the years down the road and its certainly not the millenia
as promised by Halliburton and others in the industry. In fact, many of
the wells have been forgotten, abandoned, and are lost to the record
books.
As
ProPublica reports:
There are upwards of 2 million
abandoned and plugged oil and gas wells
in the U.S., more than 100,000 of which may not appear in regulators’
records. Sometimes they are just broken off tubes of steel, buried or
sticking out of the ground. Many are supposed to be sealed shut with
cement, but studies show that cement breaks down over time, allowing
seepage up the well structure.
And many of these are injection wells, where all kinds of unwanted,
toxic substances are dumped in order to be forgotten… though not
necessarily gone.
Not only are these practices taking place, they are widespread… and
widely defended, even with the known failures and safety issues.
Many scientists and regulators say the
alternatives to the injection process — burning waste, treating
wastewater, recycling, or disposing of waste on the surface — are far
more expensive or bring additional environmental risks.
Subterranean waste disposal, they
point out, is a cornerstone of the nation’s economy, relied on by the
pharmaceutical, agricultural and chemical industries. It’s also critical to a future less dependent on foreign oil: Hydraulic fracturing, “clean coal” technologies,
nuclear fuel production
and carbon storage (the keystone of the strategy to address climate
change) all count on pushing waste into rock formations below the
earth’s surface. (
source)
Sure, maybe it’s better than dumping it directly into the waterways,
but still. This isn’t just playing with fire, this is playing with the
lives of everyone in the nation for generations to come.
Please read ProPublica’s full series of reports on this,
starting here. Things have to change.
These people should not have started messing with something they did not know how to fully and safely manage.
How long can this madness continue until it winds up tainting every drinking glass in America?
Engineer Mario Salazar, who worked as a technical expert for 25 years
with the EPA’s underground injection program in Washington, told
ProPublica’s Abrahm Lustgarten something that should give us all pause
about how radioactive nuclear waste and industrial pollutants in general
are being handled, and where they may ultimately end up:
“In 10 to 100 years we are going
to find out that most of our groundwater is polluted. A lot of people
are going to get sick, and a lot of people may die.”
