“A Permanent Reactor” Fracking’s radioactive health threat to Ohio will last 1,600 years with no action taken

Cagginao is suspicious of the money and power of industry to buy “experts” and politicians. When it comes to influencing public opinion, he thinks the industry is nearly impossible to compete with.

“If you bring a guy with you who tries to tell you that the radium in the brine tanks is no worse than the radioactive potassium in bananas, people believe it because some guy who got paid and has a PhD. said it, ”said Caggiano.

Previous Public Herald reports have shown that there are indeed health risks associated with exposure to fracking waste – it’s not bananas. However, the industry, with government support, has chosen to downplay or ignore risks for both workers in the fracking industry and locals who live near oil and gas sites, sewage treatment plants, and sewer systems.

When a radioactive element “disintegrates”, it hurls off a tiny explosive piece of matter or energy – what we know as “ionizing radiation”. Radioactive elements such as radium-226 emit alpha particles that can be airborne as dust, drifting through the air, or being blown about by the wind to be inhaled or ingested. Once inside the human body, the explosive charge of an alpha particle can tear DNA into pieces, creating mutations in genetic material that can potentially affect future generations and wipe out cell structures, creating the possibility of tumors developing that lead to fatal cancers be able.

Radium-226 is commonly found in oil and gas wastes and equipment, particularly in the Marcellus and Utica Shale regions, and is known to cause cancer in humans. Research has shown that exposure to high levels of radium can cause malignant bone tumors such as childhood bone cancer.

Andrew Gross, who worked as a health physicist in the Navy and has studied the effects of TENORM for years, said the following about the practice of bringing TENORM and other radioactive materials to urban locations like landfills and sewage treatment plants, what happens in the Ohio practice:

“The disposal of this radioactive material in municipal landfills is a huge problem. That could be life-changing for a lot of people, people nearby, people downriver from creeks, all these things. “