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What Bikini Atoll Looks Like Today
What Bikini Atoll Looks Like Today
Sixty years after the nuclear tests, the groundwater is contaminated and the coconuts are radioactive. But are the coral reefs thriving?
Nearly 60 years after the last of 23 nuclear explosions in its land, air and water, Bikini Atoll again looks like the idyllic Pacific paradise it was in 1946 — a bracelet of sandy, palm-covered islets encircling an azure lagoon. But it doesn’t take long to pick up on Bikini’s enduring eeriness, says Stanford biology professor Stephen Palumbi, who visited the remote atoll for a 10-day research trip featured in Big Pacific, a documentary that aired this summer on PBS.
At one point, Palumbi was boating around Bravo Crater, a mile-wide scar blasted into the lagoon by the most potent U.S. bomb ever detonated, when the navigation system began screaming a warning. The device thought they had run aground. The boat, Palumbi says, was in 160 feet of water.
It took a moment to realize the alarm wasn’t malfunctioning. The navigation system was simply relying on maps that haven’t been redrawn since before 1954, when a bomb 1,000 times more powerful than the one that dropped on Hiroshima vaporized three islands in the lagoon, including the one where the expedition crew was.
Using the navigation device, they then boated around the perimeter of the missing coral to estimate how much mass had been hurled heavenward. “It’s equivalent to 216 Empire State Buildings being blown into the sky,” Palumbi says. “These tests are the most violent thing we’ve ever done to the ocean.”
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Groundwater Contamination from Fracking Changes over Time: Study
Groundwater Contamination from Fracking Changes over Time: Study
Texas study finds quality fluctuates as nearby industry evolves.
A new Texas study is the first to measure groundwater quality from private water wells before, during, and after the expansion of fracking. Water photo via Shutterstock.
In the last decade, North America’s $40-billion fracking industry has punctured uneconomic or ”unconventional” rock formations from British Columbia to Texas with long lateral wells that extend for miles underground.
Then they blast open the surrounding formation with injections of water, chemicals, sand, fluids, or hydrocarbons. But industry can’t always control the direction of the fractures.
”In our most recent study, we found that as more unconventional wells were drilled and stimulated, more drilling-related contaminants were found in the groundwater,” study author Zacariah L. Hildenbrand told The Tyee.
Dichloromethane, an industry chemical and potential human carcinogen, was found in quantities above safe drinking water levels in water wells on highly fracked landscapes. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says the chemical ”poses health risks to anyone who breathes the air when this compound is present.”
Hildenbrand, a native of the Okanagan Valley, is a scientist (and cancer biologist by training) with the Collaborative Laboratories for Environmental Analysis and Remediation at the University of Texas in Arlington.
The study, published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, is the first to measure groundwater quality from private water wells before, during, and after the expansion of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracking.
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Fracking Contaminates Groundwater: Stanford Study
Fracking Contaminates Groundwater: Stanford Study
Another scientific report finds evidence of industry’s impact on public resource.
Drilling photo via Shutterstock.
“We have, for the first time, demonstrated impact to Underground Sources of Drinking Water (USDW) as a result of hydraulic fracturing,” says the study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.
Researchers from Stanford University published their findings after combing through publicly available data on the drilling, fracking and cementing of scores of tight gas wells in Pavillion, Wyoming.
“Given the high frequency of injection of stimulation fluids into USDWs to support [coalbed methane] extraction and unknown frequency in tight gas formations, it is unlikely that impact to USDWs is limited to the Pavillion Field, requiring investigation elsewhere.”
The scientists matched chemical compounds used in fracking to chemicals found in two groundwater monitoring wells drilled by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2008.
No jurisdiction in Canada has yet set up long-term groundwater monitoring wells to track the movement of contaminants from oil and gas drilling into groundwater.
The industry routinely contends that fracking is safe because it is occurring miles underground.
But shallow fracking of coal seams and other formations in Colorado, Wyoming, Alabama and Alberta from the 1980s onward has resulted in lawsuits, public protests and evidence of extensive groundwater contamination.
The new study also found that different companies in Pavillion, Wyoming used acid and hydraulic fracturing treatments at the same depths as water wells in the area. Waste disposal pits contaminated groundwater, too.
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North Carolina Settles With Duke Energy Over Coal Ash Groundwater Contamination, Ratepayers May Shoulder Costs
This is a guest post by Rhiannon Fionn, an independent investigative journalist and filmmaker in post-production on the documentary film “Coal Ash Chronicles.”
North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality today announced a settlement agreement with Duke Energy, ending a lawsuit over the department’s $25.1 million fine for groundwater contamination resulting from coal ash stored at the company’s Sutton plant near Wilmington, N.C. Although the settlement covers groundwater contamination at 14 of Duke’s coal ash facilities and requires accelerated cleanup of groundwater contamination at four sites, activists and residents I spoke with today were not impressed by the announcement.
Since a judge approved the settlement, there will be no opportunity for public comment.
“I am again disappointed with the department, but not terribly surprised,” said Catawba Riverkeeper Sam Perkins. “This is an impressive new low,” he added. “They put a proposed fine out there, but they’ve not only reduced it, they diluted it to 14 sites.”
The state reports the settlement is for an estimated $20 million, though the company doesn’t agree. Paige Sheehan, a Duke representative, estimates the cost to remediate groundwater at its Sutton plant alone will run $3-$5 million, and less at smaller coal ash sites.
According to Sheehan, $7 million of the settlement http://www.duke-energy.com/news/releases/2015092901.asp will be paid by shareholders, but she left open the possibility that the company will seek a rate increase from the N.C. Utilities Commission to cover groundwater remediation costs.
In Nov. 2014, WRAL.com reported that Duke set aside $3.4 billion for coal ash cleanups in N.C., which includes the removal of much of the waste to lined landfills in multiple states.
Crystal Feldman, director of communications for DEQ, told me settlement negotiations began in March after Duke Energy sued the agency for levying the state-record $25 million fine against the company. Duke called the fine “unprecedented” and balked at the requirement to run municipal water lines when it was already doing so.
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Dimock, PA Lawsuit Trial-Bound as Study Links Fracking to Water Contamination in Neighboring County
Dimock, PA Lawsuit Trial-Bound as Study Links Fracking to Water Contamination in Neighboring County
A recent peer-reviewed study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has confirmed what many fracking critics have argued for years: hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas can contaminate groundwater.
The study’s release comes as a major class action lawsuit filed in the District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania in 2009 winds its way to a jury trial later this year. The lawsuit over fracking groundwater contamination pits plaintiffs based in Dimock, PA against Cabot Oil and Gas Corporation.
For the study, researchers examined groundwater contamination incidents at three homes in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale basin in Bradford County. As The New York Times explained, the water samples showed “traces of a compound commonly found in Marcellus Shale drilling fluids.”
It’s not the first time fracking has been linked to groundwater contamination in northeastern Pennsylvania. And that brings us back to Dimock, , located in neighboring Susquehanna County.
As DeSmogBlog revealed in August 2013, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had in its possession an unpublished PowerPoint presentation summarizing an Agency-contracted study that linked fracking to groundwater contamination in Dimock, a study the Agency later abandoned and censored.
That presentation was subsequently leaked and published here for the first time.
Image Credit: DeSmogBlog
In its official July 2012 Dimock desk statement, EPA said “there are not levels of contaminants present that would require additional action by the Agency.” As Greenpeace USA researcher Jesse Coleman recently pointed out, EPA has done thebidding of the oil and gas industry on multiple instances during high profile fracking studies.
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Landmark Fracking Case Gets a Supreme Court Hearing
Landmark Fracking Case Gets a Supreme Court Hearing
Oil patch consultant Jessica Ernst alleges Alberta has intimidated landowners.
The Supreme Court of Canada said today that it will hear thelandmark case of Jessica Ernst, which squarely challenges how the Alberta government has treated landowners and regulated hydraulic fracturing.
The decision both stunned and exhilarated the 57-year-old Ernst.
“I’ve always known my case was important for water and all Canadians, that’s why I am taking this legal stand,” said Ernst who lives in Rosebud, Alberta.
“The court will now hear my appeal that provincial energy regulators not be legally immune from violating the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms when trying to intimidate citizens harmed by fracking,” added Ernst. Her stand against the industry and the Alberta government has made her a folk hero throughout North America and parts of Europe.
However, a win at the Supreme Court does not mean that she will win her lawsuit, explained Ernst to the Tyee. “It means I would be sent back to the lower court in Alberta to begin my lawsuit against the Alberta Energy Regulator. It means still a very long, hard, expensive journey.”
The Supreme Court only hears about four per cent of all civil Charter claims brought to its doorstep.
Eight years ago, oil patch consultant Ernst sued Alberta Environment, the Energy Resources Conservation Board (ERCB) and Encana, one of Canada’s largest unconventional gas drillers, over the contamination of her well water with hydrocarbons and the failure of government authorities to properly investigate the fouling of groundwater.
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More California Oil Industry Wastewater Injection Wells Shut Down Over Fears Of Groundwater Contamination
More California Oil Industry Wastewater Injection Wells Shut Down Over Fears Of Groundwater Contamination
The latest in the ongoing investigation into California regulators’ failure to protect residents from toxic oil industry waste streams has led to the closure of 12 more underground injection wells. The 12 wells that were shut downthis week are all in the Central Valley region, ground zero for oil production in the state.
California has roughly 50,000 underground injection wells. State officials are investigating just over 2,500 of them to determine whether or not they are injecting toxic chemical-laden oil industry wastewater into aquifers containing usable water (or at least potentially usable water) that should have been protected under the Safe Drinking Water Act.
A coalition of environmental, health and public advocacy groups filed a legal petition with Governor Jerry Brown last week in an attempt to force an emergency moratorium on fracking after it was discovered that flowback, a fluid that rises to the top of a fracked well, contains alarmingly high levels of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals.
Fracking flowback is an increasingly prevalent component of the oil industry wastewater that is being injected into the state’s aquifers, as fracking is now used in up to half of all new wells drilled in California.
Prompted by an inquiry by the federal Environmental Protection Agency in 2011, state officials shut down 11 wastewater injection wells last year over similar concerns that they were polluting badly needed sources of water in a time of prolonged drought. It was later confirmed that 9 of those wells were in fact pumping wastewater into protected aquifers—some 3 billion gallons of wastewater, by one estimate.
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