Aaron Dykes and Melissa
Melton
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 privy 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.
TruthstreamMedia.com 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 carries 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:
May 3, 1964 edition of the San Antonio
Express News
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 millennia.
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 millennia 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.
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.
