Fracking kills babies ...fracking causes earthquakes ...fracking allowed 500 feet from nuclear reactors
Busby, Chris (find following article, here (scroll down to Busby)
- Fracking kills babies here
- Low Level Radiation Campaign here ...babies born in fracking areas of Pennsylvania 66% more likely to die before 28 days old
- Press release - heart, neurological, kidney defects from radium & uranium in drinking water here
- Ecologist - Fracking kills newborn babies here
- Environmental Research here
07:25 PM Nov 14, 2012 | 20 --4763- U.S. tried fracking for gas using nuclear bombs - Engineer: I think it’s awesome - Drilling to now be allowed within half-mile of blast site? (VIDEO)
12:59 PM Oct 22, 2012 -4576- Fracking OK 500 feet from nuclear plants (VIDEO)
04:12 PM Oct 21, 2012 | 15 -4569- Fracking permit given just 1 mile from U.S. nuclear plant - Whether that is cause for alarm, experts can’t say
06:32 PM Mar 6, 2014 | 112 Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) - NM -8068- WIPP nuclear dump - 100 operating oil and gas wells within mile of site - reserves directly underneath buried waste - did fracking take place? (VIDEO)
11:20 PM Mar 26, 2013 | 14 index: fracking -5662- Powerful M5.7 quake blamed on oil industry - felt across 14 states - largest anywhere in central U.S. for years - could be seen on Doppler radar-[1]-[i] (PHOTO)
07:54 PM Dec 4, 2012 | 32 --4904- USGS: Large M5 quakes linked to fracking waste - May have caused every quake since 2001 in area studied - Scientist warns of ‘worse outcomes’
12:53 PM Feb 15, 2013 | 12 -5353- Prison for CEO charged with dumping fracking waste? Full tanker trucks of toxic fluid released directly into storm drain - (VIDEO)
12:15 AM Feb 5, 2013 | 34 5280- Fracking for Uranium to start in U.S. - We’re doing the environment a favor
04:02 PM Jan 26, 2013 | 13 -5215- Worker with fiery rash on half of body - Blamed on radiation exposure, fracking chemicals (VIDEO)
[1]
In the midst of the domestic energy boom, livestock on farms near oil- and gas-drilling operations nationwide have been quietly falling sick and dying
Earlier this year, Michelle Bamberger, an Ithaca veterinarian, and Robert Oswald, a professor of molecular medicine at Cornell’s College of Veterinary Medicine, published the first (and, so far, only) peer-reviewed report to suggest a link between fracking and illness in food animals. The authors compiled case studies of twenty-four farmers in six shale-gas states whose livestock experienced neurological, reproductive and acute gastrointestinal problems. Exposed either accidentally or incidentally to fracking chemicals in the water or air, scores of animals have died. The death toll is insignificant when measured against the nation’s livestock population (some 97 million beef cattle go to market each year), but environmental advocates believe these animals constitute an early warning.
In Louisiana, seventeen cows died after an hour’s exposure to spilled fracking fluid. (Most likely cause of death: respiratory failure.) In north central Pennsylvania, 140 cattle were exposed to fracking wastewater when an impoundment was breached. Approximately seventy cows died; the remainder produced eleven calves, of which only three survived. In western Pennsylvania, an overflowing waste pit sent fracking chemicals into a pond and a pasture where pregnant cows grazed: half their calves were born dead.
Ever since a heater-treater unit, which separates oil, gas and brine, blew out on a drill pad a half-mile upwind of Jacki Schilke's North Dakota ranch, her own creek has been clogged with scummy growth, and it regularly burps up methane. No one can tell me what’s going on, she says. But since the blowout, her creek has failed to freeze, despite temperatures of forty below. (Testing found sulfate levels of 4,000 parts per million: the EPA’s health goal for sulfate is 250 parts per million.)
Schilke’s troubles began in the summer of 2010, when a crew working at this site continued to force drilling fluid down a well that had sprung a leak. Soon, Schilke’s cattle were limping, with swollen legs and infections. Cows quit producing milk for their calves; they lost from sixty to eighty pounds in a week; and their tails mysteriously dropped off.
[1] HTTP://WWW.PSR.ORG/ASSETS/PDFS/EPA-RADIOACTIVITY-IN-WATER.PDF
For Immediate Release
Contacts:
Diane D’Arrigo, Nuclear Information and Resource Service, 202-841-8588
Dr. Catherine Thomasson, Physicians for Social Responsibility, 202-587-5240
Kate Fried, Food & Water Watch, 202-683-4905
EPA PROPOSES SHOCKING THOUSAND-FOLD INCREASE IN RADIOACTIVITY ALLOWED IN DRINKING WATER
(Editor: emphasis and clarification added in yellow)
Proposal Would Permit INTERNAL Radiation Exposures NOT Equivalent to 250 EXTERNAL Chest X-Rays a Year
Washington, D.C. - Yesterday, the U.S. EPA quietly issued proposals to allow radioactive contamination in drinking water at concentrations vastly greater than allowed under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The new Protective Action Guidance would permit radiation exposures equivalent to 250 chest X-rays a year. Today, environmental groups called the proposal shocking and egregious.
The EPA proposed Protective Action Guides (PAGs) would allow the general population to drink water hundreds to thousands of times more radioactive than is now legal. For example, radioactive iodine-131 has a current limit of 3 pico-curies per liter (pCi/L), in water but the new guidance would allow 10,350 (pCi/L), 3,450 times higher. For strontium-90, which causes leukemia, the current limit is 8 pCi/L; the new proposed value is 7,400 pCi/L, a 925-fold increase.
Clean Water is essential for health. Just like lead, radiation when ingested in small amounts is very hazardous to our health. It is inconceivable that EPA could now quietly propose allowing enormous increases in radioactive contamination with no action to protect the public, even if concentrations are a thousand times higher than under the Safe Drinking Water Act, said Dr. Catherine Thomasson, Executive Director of Physicians for Social Responsibility.
The Bush Administration in its last days unsuccessfully tried to put forward similar proposals, which the incoming Obama Administration pulled back. Now, in the waning months of the Obama Administration, EPA’s radiation office is trying again.
These levels are even higher than those proposed by the Bush Administration-really unprecedented and shocking, said Diane D’Arrigo, Nuclear Information and Resource Service.
The Bush Administration proposal for strontium 90 was 6,650 pCi/L; the new proposal is 7,400 pCi/L. For cesium-137, the Bush proposal was for 13,600 pCi/L; Obama beats Bush with a value of 16,570 pCi/L.
All radionuclides can cause cancer and other health and reproductive problems; there is no completely safe level. Strontium causes bone cancer and leukemia. Babies, children, and females are at even greater risk than adult males.
PAGs apply not just to emergencies such as dirty bombs, and Fukushima-type nuclear power meltdowns but also to any radiological release for which a protective action may be considered - even a radiopharmaceutical transport spill. The proposed drinking water PAG would apply not to the immediate phase after a release, but rather to the intermediate phase, after the release has been stabilized, and lasting up to several years thereafter.
Radiation doses (in rems) cannot be measured but are calculated based on some measurements and many assumptions. The current Safe Drinking Water Act limits are based on 4 millirems per year. The PAGs would allow 500 millirems per year for the general population. A single chest X-ray gives about 2 millirems. Because of the way EPA is changing the definition of dose, for many radionuclides, the allowable concentration would be thousands, tens of thousands, and even millions of times higher than set under the Safe Drinking Water Act.
Internal EPA documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act [links below] show that the EPA itself concluded that the proposed concentrations would exceed MCLs [Maximum Contaminant Limits of the Safe Drinking Water Act] by a factor of 100, 1000, and in two instances, 7 million. The EPA internal analysis showed that for one radionuclide, drinking a very small glass of water of approximately 4 ounces ... would result in an exposure that corresponds to a lifetime of drinking ... water ... at the MCL level.
All of this is extraordinary, since EPA has recently accepted the National Academy of Sciences’ most current risk estimates for radiation, indicating radiation is considerably more dangerous per unit dose than previously believed, said D’Arrigo. Pushing allowable concentrations of radioactivity in drinking water up orders of magnitude above the longstanding Safe Drinking Water Act levels goes in exactly the opposite direction than the official radiation risk estimates go.
Under these proposals, people would be forced to get the radiation equivalent of a chest X-ray 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year, for up to several years, with no medical benefit or informed consent, just from drinking water. This is immoral, said D’Arrigo.
The public has 45 days from when it is published in the Federal Register to comment to the EPA on the PAG-Protective Action Guides.
These proposed changes are a particularly egregious gift to the energy industry, which would essentially be given a free pass whenever nuclear or fracking waste enters our water supply, said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch and author of the new book, Frackopoly. The EPA under President Obama has also whitewashed the impact of fracking on drinking water. This is more of the same when it comes to his EPA’s pro-industry, hands-off regulation of toxic practices that can harm public health.
The EPA Proposal:
HTTPS://WWW.EPA.GOV/RADIATION/PROTECTIVE-ACTION-GUIDES-PAGS
FOIA DOCUMENTS:
HTTP://WWW.PEER.ORG/ASSETS/DOCS/EPA/4_5_10_EPA_OFFICE_GEN_COUNSEL_EMAIL.PDF
HTTP://WWW.PEER.ORG/ASSETS/DOCS/EPA/4_5_10_OSRTI_COMMENTS.PDF
HTTP://WWW.PEER.ORG/ASSETS/DOCS/EPA/4_5_10_RADIONUCLIDE_TABLES.PDF
ANALYSIS OF PROPOSAL WHEN BUSH ADMINISTRATION TRIED IT:
HTTP://WWW.COMMITTEETOBRIDGETHEGAP.ORG/PDF/PAGREPORT102208.PDF
LETTER TO OMB OPPOSING EPA PROPOSAL
[1] RE: Environmental Protection Agency - Radioactive Protective Action Guides (PAGs) and Water PAGs - Docket Number (EPA-HQ-OAR-2007-0268; FRL-9947-55-OW)
Dear Janet McCabe - EPA Acting Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation and the EPA Docket:
Fairewinds Energy Education has prepared this brief report in response to the EPA’s suggested changes to its Radiation Protective Action Guidelines (PAGs). Specifically, the EPA is suddenly recommending a huge increase to allowable public exposure levels from radiation releases caused by a mishap or disaster at an atomic reactor, waste storage site, fuel production site, etc. What does this mean? It means that the EPA is arbitrarily choosing to increase human exposure levels to atomic radiation releases without conducting an adequate scientific review and without quantifying the significant health consequences to people.
Fairewinds Energy Education’s scientific review of the data has found no evidence or basis in science to allow such a health compromising transfer of risk to everyone living in the United States. Therefore, Fairewinds Energy Education strongly objects to the implementation of these proposed rule changes that will compromise public health and safety and benefit atomic corporations by allowing a significant reduction in each corporation’s mandated cleanup of costly radiation catastrophes.
The EPA is proposing that levels of 500 millirem per year are acceptable in radioactively contaminated water for general public consumption and an increase to 100 millirem per year of exposure levels to pregnant women and young children. These levels far exceed EPA’s acceptable risk range for cancer causing radiation exposure levels.
Let me simplify this for you and for readers of Fairewinds’ comments. If implemented, this proposed change in radiation guidelines greatly increase radiation exposure to people to a totally unacceptable radiation risk level. At the same time, the changes will reduce radiation disaster cleanup costs to corporations and transfer that horrific risk and cost of cleanup to states, cities, towns, and villages that will already be suffering astronomical losses.
Since the triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi and its decimation of much of the Fukushima Prefecture (state) due to extensive ongoing radiation releases, Fairewinds’ Chief Engineer Arnie Gundersen has traveled to Japan three times on public speaking and scientific fact finding research and analysis. Most recently, Mr. Gundersen spent one month in Japan in February of 2016 measuring the ongoing radioactive releases from the atomic disaster, and interviewing numerous survivors, who have been exposed to radioactive releases from the meltdowns and are continuing to be exposed to the ongoing buildup and movement of significant amounts of radioactivity. Mr. Gundersen has two degrees in Nuclear Engineering and more than 44-years of atomic energy operations and risk analysis experience.
A thorough review by Fairewinds of the evidence collected and the available published literature proves that the proposed changes to the PAGs are a convoluted attempt to shift excessive radiation risks to a population of innocent bystanders at the same time the EPA is transferring excessive profits to the corporate owners of atomic power reactors, waste storage facilities, atomic fuel producers, etc.
Beginning in February of 2012, when Mr. Gundersen spoke at the Foreign Correspondents Press Club in Tokyo, he went on record stating that the economic cost of the Fukushima Daiichi cleanup would exceed a quarter of a trillion dollars ($250 Billion), and this figure does not include the mammoth health costs the government of Japan will have to cover for victims of this ongoing radioactive debacle.
Instead of meeting the humanitarian needs of its people, the response by the pro-nuke Japanese government, Tokyo Electric and the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency - chartered by the United Nations (UN) to promote atomic power worldwide) to this ongoing radioactive tragedy has been to significantly increase allowable radiation exposures to Japanese citizens by 20x more radiation exposure than previously allowed.
The PAGs are designed to protect real people from health damaging radiation exposure, and the PAGs were serving this function as well as the regulations allowed. This change proposed by the EPA is a complete financial boondoggle that will benefit corporate profiteers while damaging the health, water, and food supplies of all Americans.
The atomic power industry in Japan, the IAEA, and the Japanese government created these changes to radiation exposure guidelines in Japan in order to minimize the astronomical radiation cleanup costs from the ongoing radiation debacle caused by the three Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns. Instead of having Tokyo Electric and the Japanese government pay the costs as the regulations were originally designed, the Japanese government has transferred enormous additional radioactive risk to its own people, who are still being unwittingly exposed. Toxic illness causing radioactivity will be in Japan for centuries, and the alleged cleanup methods currently being applied are simply spreading toxic radioactivity to Japan’s once pristine agricultural community and its crucial rivers, streams, and aquifers as well as the Pacific Ocean from which it derives much of its food sources of fish and seaweed.
While Fairewinds has numerous technical concerns that we have detailed below, the fundamental question that the EPA must address is:
-Why is the EPA considering placing civilians at such a dramatically increased magnitude of risk?
-When these corporations first built their atomic reactors and other facilities, the licenses to do so were granted under the obligation that these corporations are ultimately responsible for all maintenance and cleanup. Why are corporations gaining profits while the financial risk will be borne by people in and near those reactors for hundreds and thousands of years (in the case of plutonium releases, like what happened in Japan)?
The radiation measurements taken in Fukushima by Mr. Gundersen and other scientific colleagues coupled with their field interviews, shows that the proposed PAGs place American civilians at greater risk while saving American corporations hundreds of billions of dollars in cleanup costs.
Conclusions:
It is Fairewinds Energy Education’s expert opinion and conclusion that the proposed Protective Action Guidelines are not PROTECTIVE as required by federal statute and therefore should be rejected entirely.
Conclusion 1. It’s clear then that if the new PAGs are implemented, the atomic production industries will benefit financially at the expense of human health. This change in radiation standards is in direct contradiction to the public health role set in legal statute that created the EPA. May we remind you that your statutory authority is for: establishing generally applicable environmental standards for protection of the general environment from radioactive material.
According the National Academy of Science Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR VII) report, the EPA is bound by the linear non-threshold (LNT) radiation theory. BEIR VII is clear that there is no safe limit for radiation exposure and that radiation damage to civilians increases in a direct proportion to the amount of radiation they receive.
-A comprehensive review of available bio-logical and biophysical data supports a linear-no-threshold (LNT) risk model-that the risk of cancer proceeds in a linear fashion at lower doses without a threshold and that the smallest dose has the potential to cause a small increase in risk to humans.
The EPA proposal to increase the PAG limits 100-fold is a direct violation of BEIR VII and the governing federal statute authorizing the EPA. According to BEIR VII, Americans will receive the corresponding 100-fold increase in radiation damage if the EPA is allowed to violate federal law and implement the guideline changes it is promoting.
Conclusion 2. If the EPA violates federal statute and implements the new PAG limits, radiation risk to the exposed civilian population will increase 100-fold. Circumventing the Safe Drinking Water Act, Superfund cleanup levels, and EPA’s history of limiting the allowable risk of cancer to 1 in a million people exposed, is a clear breach of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969 (Public Law 91-190, approved Jan. 1, 1970, 83 Stat. 855), that pertains to ecological systems.
It appears that the EPA proposed changes to the PAGs are based on the erroneous assumption, also held by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), that the meltdown at Three Mile Island (TMI) did not increase cancers in the surrounding area or in those who were victims of the disaster. The peer reviewed analysis by epidemiologist Dr. Steve Wing showed that people exposed to radiation from TMI meltdown suffered meaningful increases in cancers.
-Exposure to high doses of radiation shortly after the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island may have increased cancer among Pennsylvanians downwind of the plant, scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill say. Dr. Steven Wing, associate professor of epidemiology at the UNC-CH School of Public Health, led a study of cancer cases within 10 miles of the facility from 1975 to 1985. He and colleagues conclude that following the March 28, 1979 accident, lung cancer and leukemia rates were two to 10 times higher downwind of the Three Mile Island reactor than upwind.
Conclusion 3. Peer reviewed scientific evidence indicates that nuclear disasters and toxic radioactive releases, such as the Three Mile Island meltdown, cause cancer. It is a complete mischaracterization of federal radiation dose standards for the EPA to suggest that increasing the PAGs 100-fold will have no deleterious impact on public health when toxic radioactive releases happen.
The proposed changes to the PAGs appear to be based upon the erroneous assumption, also misstated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), that there was no increase in cancer as a result of the tragic Chernobyl meltdown. According to the peer reviewed analysis of Dr. Alexey Yablokov and others, the people exposed to radiation discharges by the Chernobyl catastrophe experienced a statistical increase in cancer.
-It concludes that based on records now available, some 985,000 people died, mainly of cancer, as a result of the Chernobyl accident [catastrophe]. That is between when the accident [meltdown] occurred in 1986 and 2004. More deaths, it projects, will follow.
The book explodes the claim of the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA]- still on its website that the expected death toll from the Chernobyl accident will be 4,000. The IAEA, the new book shows, is under-estimating, to the extreme, the casualties of Chernobyl.
Conclusion 4. Peer reviewed scientific evidence clearly indicates that nuclear disasters like Chernobyl cause cancer. The EPA suggestion that increasing the PAGs 100-fold will have no deleterious effects on public health is a complete mischaracterization of federal radiation dose standards.
Fairewinds own evidence-based scientific research in Fukushima Prefecture indicates that there will be between 100,000 and 1,000,000 additional cancers in Japan as a result of the world’s most recent atomic reactor meltdowns. As delineated earlier in this submission, the Japanese government has unilaterally increased its allegedly allowable radiation exposures to humans by 20 times, putting its entire population, and especially women and children at significant risk for developing additional cancers from these intense radiation exposures.
The analysis conducted by Fairewinds Energy Education and its scientific colleagues indicates the contribution from small but highly radioactive particles (hot particles) absorbed by the internal organs of exposed individuals is being totally ignored by regulatory bodies worldwide, such as the IAEA and WHO (World Health Organization). Human exposure to these small particles within internal organs exposes people to high-energy radiation for decades. The proven impact of hot particle exposure is being completely ignored by federal regulators and all international health agencies. By not considering non-uniformly distributed radioactive particles in its dose calculations, the EPA is introducing a systematic bias to its dose calculations that will create radiation-induced casualties and a humanitarian calamity.
Conclusion 5. Peer reviewed scientific evidence indicates that small but highly radioactive particles are released in large quantities post-accident. The radioactive concentration in releases is not uniformly distributed. Therefore, a thorough analysis of the dose consequences from these hot particles
must be ascertained before making any changes to PAG regulations.
The EPA proposed changes to the PAGs absolutely underestimate the radiation induced cancers that those changes will cause to people throughout the United States while offering an enormous financial bonus to the corporation creating the risk and producing these highly radioactive liquid and gaseous discharges. Changing the PAGs decimates public health by putting the public at greater risk of radiation induced cancers while benefiting corporate profits.
[1] Excerpts from the Indigenous Elders and Medicine Peoples Council Statement on Fukushima, October 31, 2013:
Not heeding warnings from both Nature and the People of the Earth keeps us on the path of self-destruction. This self-destructive path has led to the Fukushima nuclear crisis, Gulf oil spill, tar sands devastation, pipeline failures, impacts of carbon dioxide emissions and the destruction of ground water through hydraulic fracking, just to name a few.
The Fukushima nuclear crisis alone is a threat to the future of humanity. Yet, our concern goes far beyond this single threat. Our concern is with the cumulative and compounding devastation that is being wrought by the actions of human beings around the world.
Spiritual Leaders and those that carry great responsibility for their people from both North and South America came together with the sacred fire for four days at the end of September 2013 to fulfill their sacred responsibilities. During this time it was revealed that the spirit of destruction gained its’ strength by our spiritually disconnected actions.
The People of the Earth understand that the Fukushima nuclear crisis continues to threaten the future of all life. We understand the full implications of this crisis even with the suppression of information and the filtering of truth by the corporate owned media and Nation States. We strongly urge the media, corporations and Nation States to acknowledge and convey the true facts that threaten us, so that the international community may work together to resolve this crisis, based on the foundation of Truth. We urge the international community, government of Japan and TEPCO to unify efforts to stabilize and re-mediate the nuclear threat posed at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. To ensure that the Japanese government and TEPCO are supported with qualified personnel and information, we urge the inclusion of today’s nuclear experts from around the world to collaborate, advise and provide technical assistance
We urge all Nations and human beings around the world to work with us, the Original Caretakers of Mother Earth, to restore the Original Instructions and uphold the Creator’s Natural Law as a foundation for all decision making, from this point forward. Our collective future as human beings is in our hands, we must address the Fukushima nuclear crisis and all actions that may violate the Creator’s Natural Law. We have reached the crossroads of life and the end of our existence. We will avert this potentially catastrophic nuclear disaster by coming together with good minds and prayer as a global community of all faiths. View the statement in full here