OIL & GAS WELLS ARE RADIOACTIVE (2)

Will sanctions on Russian gas trigger another attempt to frack UK?

I have spoken and written about radioactivity in the fossil fuel industry since 2013, when my ex-husband died of cancer. I set up Anti Fracking International, a successful Facebook group and I contacted Oil and Gas veterans in the USA to see if there were similar stories from the oil patches there. It has been very hard to gather this information but, fortunately, a New York reporter, Justin Noble, who writes for Rolling Stone and DeSmog, got in touch with me and came over to the UK for an interview. He had heard me in discussion with Richie Allen and had read my article written in support of my claims. You can hear the radio conversation and read my article here:

OIL & GAS WELLS ARE RADIOACTIVE

Justin Noble published a terrific, well researched article in Rolling Stone in 2019 which has been uncovered and serialised by Rhoda Wilson of The Exposé recently.

Uncovering the Oil Industry’s Radioactive Secret (Part 4): Personal Tragedy

She quotes:

“Frances Leader, a Corfe Mullen resident who lost her husband Tony, a former North Sea oilman, to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2013 remains convinced radioactivity exposure during his time on rigs in the 1970s and early 1980s was the cause. The contamination, she believes, came from the drilling fluids and produced water that spilt all over men like Tony every time piping was pulled up on deck. Additional exposure, she suspects, came from sludge in tanks located in the base of the rig that she says Tony regularly had to clean. “They wore no breathing apparatus, no protection, no dosimeter, and there was never ever any mention of radioactivity—none,” says Leader.

How many UK oil and gas workers share a similar fate is unknown because no one has ever tried to search for and tally the cases. How many workers around the world have been harmed by radioactivity is an even greater mystery.”

When I was de-platformed from all social media I lost touch with Keith MacDonald whose story is the main feature in the Rolling Stone article. When I last communicated with him, he was despairing that he would never succeed in getting compensation for his well documented and very slow decline in health since working for Shell in Syria.

Stories like ours have fallen through the cracks since cancel culture has taken its axe to our social media accounts. I am very grateful to Rhoda Wilson for dusting off this old issue and giving it a fresh airing.

Justin Nobel continues to write on issues of science and the environment for Rolling Stone and DeSmog. He has a book on oil and gas radioactivity forthcoming with Simon & Schuster entitled “PETROLEUM-238: Big Oil’s Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It.”

“Radioactivity is present in a number of different types of oil and gas waste, from brine, to sludges and scales generated at the wellhead and in downstream industry equipment such as pipelines, compression stations, natural gas processing plants, and ethane cracker plants. The disposal of this waste presents dangers at every step — from being trucked along America’s highways in unmarked vehicles; handled by workers who are misinformed and left unprotected by its dangers; leaked into waterways; stored in municipal dumps that are not equipped to contain the toxicity; and even used in household commercial products that had been sold at hardware stores and are still being spread on local roads.”

In the UK most of our oil and gas toxic waste is jettisoned, untreated, straight into the North Sea and from there it reaches the beaches of Britain and Europe. What it is doing to the marine life is anyone’s guess because NOBODY is looking at that while our politicians are distracted by a myriad of other issues.

Proposals to frack Britain are still lurking in the back of some minds. I saw a GB News item highlighting that the sanctions on Russian gas puts pressure on UK oil and gas licence holders to “get back to fracking”.

OBVIOUS SHILL PROMOTES UK FRACKING

We fought for 5 years to stop fracking in the UK and, in the end, it was the fractured and faulted geology of Britain which prevented further progress. It was just not financially viable to place rigs every few hundred yards across the north of England.

I will be keeping an eye on this, as you might expect.

ONWARDS!