Thursday, March 3, 2011

Gas Hydrofracking Billion Gallons Toxic Radioactive Untreatable Water Wastes

Tags: Cheney Gas Deal Halliburton Making Pennsylvania Radioactive Dirty Water Wasteland

Kawakami: We are paying dearly for Americans not rioting for the fraud by the Supreme Court that put the Cheney-Bush crooks into office. Governor Jeb Bush also removed 100,000 Democrats from the voting registration rolls in Florida by using the criminal Republican computer company to remove people who had similar names and birth dates to known convicted criminals in the United States.

The exit polls showed Gore winning by 5 percent in Florida, 2000! By midnight it was too close to call, but Bush's cousin at FOX Cable called the election for Bush and Welch, CEO of GE forced NBC to also call it, and the other networks followed suit. All the news people were saying something was wrong with the exit polls. But in Wisconsin, the exit polls were within a few tenths of a percent of the final vote as is the case for all states except Florida.

For example, if you had the common last name of Johnson and born in the same year, you were removed. When the computer company asked Jed whether he was willing to pay for verify the connection, Jeb refused!

The computer company admitted all this during a hearing at the Civil Rights Commission. No one in the Bush administration bothered to investigate.

Many Americans have become so corrupt including our political, court, and academic institutions because they have developed the robotic corporate mindset of doing anything to increase profits that their lawyers can fix with relatively small fines and no jail time.

The movie, Inside Job, starring Matt Damon, the Academy Award winner for Best Documentary recently, gives all of us a clear look at the massive fraud that took place during the Greenspan and Bush years.

The Impeachment of Clinton by the Republicans for the same think many prominent Republicans were doing at the same time was a ploy to weaken Clinton so he would not have time to think through the two bills he signed at the behest of Sommer and Rubin successive Secretary of Treasury. The Republicans made up the deregulation bills. Half of Americans still are not sure that President Obama is not an American citizen according to recent polls shows the role of repetitious propaganda influencing the way we think.

Unlike the French who get perks from government that makes their family lives a more productive, Americans spend close to zero time reading more neutral or contrary opinion about what they get from television. Very few Americans go to the news websites. They spend their time on Facebook or celebrity gossip.

Judgement does not come intuition without knowledge or facts. The more good information we have, the better our gut instincts work. Because the Chinese learn a lot more as recent tests so, it is rarely mentioned that they are more creative. Educated immigrants are the ones making the technical breakthroughs in science and engineering now and becoming entrepreneurs.

Polls indicate as shown on many MSNBC shows first shown on
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com The reason Democrats don’t win elections all the time is that corporate donations make them become more like Republicans. Neutral polls show that Americans understand what is happening to America and support common sense populist programs and want to tax the rich and corporations more so they can have a better life.

If we develop a system where Americans on average, can donate $3 depending on their income or more on their tax forms, then politicians don’t have to spend so much time daily asking for money. If politicians did not have to rely on corporate money, they would do a much better job for us and fewer crooks will run for office. Now there is a shuttle bus being corporations and congress.

Jim Kawakami, March 03, 2011, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

Halliburton Cheney Secret Oil/Gas Deal Regulation Nightmare, Ian Urbina, NY Times, Feb 27, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/us/27gas.html?ref=us&pagewanted=all The American landscape is dotted with hundreds of thousands of new wells and drilling rigs, as the country scrambles to tap into this century’s gold rush — for natural gas. ...

With hydrofracking, a well can produce over a million gallons of wastewater that is often laced with highly corrosive salts, carcinogens like benzene and radioactive elements like radium, all of which can occur naturally thousands of feet underground. Other carcinogenic materials can be added to the wastewater by the chemicals used in the hydrofracking itself.

While the existence of the toxic wastes has been reported, thousands of internal documents obtained by The New York Times from the Environmental Protection Agency, state regulators and drillers show that the dangers to the environment and health are greater than previously understood.

The documents reveal that the wastewater, which is sometimes hauled to sewage plants not designed to treat it and then discharged into rivers that supply drinking water, contains radioactivity at levels higher than previously known, and far higher than the level that federal regulators say is safe for these treatment plants to handle.

Other documents and interviews show that many E.P.A. scientists are alarmed, warning that the drilling waste is a threat to drinking water in Pennsylvania. Their concern is based partly on a 2009 study, never made public, written by an E.P.A. consultant who concluded that some sewage treatment plants were incapable of removing certain drilling waste contaminants and were probably violating the law.

The Times also found never-reported studies by the E.P.A. and a confidential study by the drilling industry that all concluded that radioactivity in drilling waste cannot be fully diluted in rivers and other waterways. ...

Photo Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times: Looks like brown crud, not water!

Carl Orso, a truck driver, filled a beaker with wastewater from a natural gas drilling site for testing before unloading at Eureka Resources, a waste water treatment facility, in Williamsport, Penn.

By IAN URBINA


As drilling for natural gas started to climb sharply about 10 years ago, energy companies faced mounting criticism over an extraction process that involves pumping millions of gallons of water into the ground for each well and can leave significant amounts of hazardous contaminants in the water that comes back to the surface.

Drilling Down

… “State and company records show that in the year and a half that ended in December 2010, well operators reported recycling at least 320 million gallons. But at least 260 million gallons of wastewater were sent to plants that discharge their treated waste into rivers, out of a total of more than 680 million gallons of wastewater produced, according to state data posted Tuesday. Those 260 million gallons would fill more than 28,800 tanker trucks, a line of which would stretch from about New York City to Richmond, Va.” …

In Pennsylvania, for example, natural-gas companies recycled less than half of the wastewater they produced during the 18 months that ended in December, according to state records.

Nor has recycling eliminated environmental and health risks. Some methods can leave behind salts or sludge highly concentrated with radioactive material and other contaminants that can be dangerous to people and aquatic life if they get into waterways. ...

Yet in Pennsylvania, where the number of drilling permits for gas wells has jumped markedly in the last several years, in part because the state sits on a large underground gas formation known as the Marcellus Shale, such waste remains exempt from federal and state oversight, even when turned into salts and spread on roads. ...

The risks are particularly severe in Pennsylvania, which has seen a sharp increase in drilling, with roughly 71,000 active gas wells, up from about 36,000 in 2000. The level of radioactivity in the wastewater has sometimes been hundreds or even thousands of times the maximum allowed by the federal standard for drinking water. While people clearly do not drink drilling wastewater, the reason to use the drinking-water standard for comparison is that there is no comprehensive federal standard for what constitutes safe levels of radioactivity in drilling wastewater. ...


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