Editor's Note from March 2024 Networker
Our work at SEHN involves a remarkable degree of concentric circles and overlapping spheres of people and topics. Some of our collaborations are intentional and some arise organically as we continue with ongoing commitments as well as engage new areas of work. In this edition of The Networker we’re featuring an introduction to radioactive exposures as they are created by the oil and gas industry. The impetus for this focus right now is the forthcoming book by our colleague, science journalist and author Justin Nobel: Petroleum-238: Big Oil's Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It. As Justin’s work focuses uniquely on a current, ongoing threat to worker health, Dr. Sandra Steingraber’s column this month takes us back to the horrors endured by the “Radium Girls” in the early 1900s.
Justin often speaks of the influence that our fracking science Compendium had on his now years-long commitment to researching this particular health and safety crisis linked to oil and gas extraction. When we helped bring together Justin and Compendium co-author Dr. Larysa Dryszka in a webinar last month, it was a wonderful continuation of their now frequent collaboration. Sandra Steingraber and I have worked with Dr. Dryszka since the founding of Concerned Health Professionals of New York. We can’t imagine not having access to the deep expertise and warm collegiality of either.
Justin writes,
We live on a radioactive planet, and oil and gas happens to bring up some of Earth’s most interesting, and notorious, radioactive elements. They can be concentrated in the formation below, and further concentrated by the industry’s processes at the surface. From day one, which in the United States was 1859, the US oil and gas industry has had no good idea what to do with this waste.
“…no good idea what to do with the waste.” Many of us have emphasized this staggering fact as it relates to the oil and gas industry: we’ve seen unlined waste pits, dumping at inappropriate sites (both legally and illegally), the out-of-control seismic effects of waste injection wells, and more. We also know this fact holds true for other industries that create toxic and radioactive contamination and waste. My last piece on the Santa Susana Field Lab touched on the faltering start to a cleanup of an infamous “burn pit” on the site, 15,408 cubic yards of heavily contaminated soil—including with radioactive components—since the 1960s. This waste will start out traversing suburban streets on a long journey to a waste facility that will accept it in some other western state. No good idea what to do with the waste, that’s for certain.
As I read through author Justin’s Author’s Note for the book, which we’re honored to print here, I came across the name of Dr. Marco Kaltofen, with whom Justin consulted. Dr. Kaltofen said, “With fossil fuels, essentially what you are doing is taking an underground radioactive reservoir and bringing it up to the surface where it can interact with people and the environment.” As it happens, he is also the lead author on a crucial paper that documented that kind of interaction, but in this case between radioactivity generated by human activity (nuclear experiments) and a fire (which could also be said to be fueled by human activity). The paper addresses the extent to which the 2018 Woolsey Fire, which began at the Santa Susana Field Lab, spread radioactive microparticles into the surrounding community.
We’re concerned with both ongoing, unmitigated radioactive contamination and revealing that Justin is exposing as no one else has, as well as the implications of historic radioactive legacies. March 28, 2024 is the 45th anniversary of the partial nuclear meltdown of the Unit 2 reactor of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station on the Susquehanna River near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. We’re pleased to co-sponsor a special webinar on that day, centered on Dr. Heidi Hutner’s new film “RADIOACTIVE: The Women of Three Mile Island.” The webinar will focus on “Gender, Environmental Justice, and the Future of Nuclear Power.” In addition to Dr. Hutner and her team, the panel will include Stanford University Professor Mark Jacobson, whose work on the transition away from oil and gas and to renewable energy—not including nuclear—has been invaluable to us. Register here.
We’re honored to partner with all those I mention here as well as others to—as Justin writes— know these realities and so be able to change them.
Carmi Orenstein, MPH, Editor
