In an article on Rolling Stone, Justin Nobel writes that oil workers are actually radioactivity workers after spending more than a year and a half researching and reporting radioactive waste after fracking in the shale industry.

When a well is drilled, it produces tons of residual fluid, a saline substance that comes out of the ground. Shale wells can produce up to ten times more of this fluid than conventional oil and gas wells. Although hydrocarbons prove to be useful, this fluid must be exported somewhere and dumped. Often it is re-injected into wells or in some cases sent to water treatment plants.

The problem is that this fluid can be radioactive. As Justin Nobel writes about Rolling Stone, contacting the fluid can dramatically increase the risk of cancer. Waste workers are obviously at high risk. But there are many others besides them. The fluid is used to defrost roads, so municipalities are essentially spreading radioactivity on all roads in different parts of the country.

Old oilfield equipment has also been rearranged.

The oil and gas industry rejects the risk to human health of a radioactive fluid that occurs in the natural environment and is not something that anyone should worry about. However, some of the experts interviewed by Nobel say otherwise.

First of all, the fact that just because something exists naturally in the world does not mean that it cannot do harm.

“Arsenic is completely natural, but you probably wouldn’t let me put arsenic in your lunch”, one expert said.

Second, the industry is poorly regulated when it comes to radioactive substances. Officials from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have indicated to Nobel that they have no responsibility for regulating radioactivity in the oil and gas industry.

This is not just an environmental or public health story. This is also a financial story.

It deals with the poor regulation of the oil and gas industry. And there is potentially a huge problem for this industry if the local, state or federal government ever decides to take the issue seriously.

If companies in this area are forced to pay for the treatment of this waste in some way, it could end in financial collapse if EPA begins treating the waste fluid as radioactive material.

But as Rolling Stone points out, public awareness of the problem itself can be a big enough problem for the industry.

While the problems of the climate change industry are far too extended in time and space, the extraction of radioactive materials from the earth and their spread on the roads, for example, seems much more threatening at present.

It seems that the unconventional oil and gas industry has been around forever and has so much to live on. But, realistically, its history is only ten years old, and every year there are more and more horrifying truths about the risks to human health.

Against this background, some US presidential candidates are already pushing for an end to fracking.