Petition: Ohio Buries Radioactive Fracking Waste Underground. Marietta Says It Is Coming Back Up.

The deal with injection wells is that the waste stays down there. Fracking produces billions of gallons of water laced with heavy metals and radioactive material, chiefly radium-226, and states including Ohio permit companies to pump it into wells deep underground, far from homes, farms and drinking water. Residents around Marietta say it is not staying put. Susan Vessels, president of Marietta City Council, put the stakes in one sentence: if anything nuclear gets into the water, they are done. Please sign the petition calling for a moratorium on fracking wastewater injection wells in Ohio.

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The underlying science is not in dispute, whatever anyone thinks of the campaign’s wider ask. Duke University researchers publishing in Environmental Science and Technology found sediments downstream of a fracking wastewater treatment plant on Blacklick Creek in western Pennsylvania carried roughly 200 times more radium than mud upstream of it, at concentrations exceeding the federal threshold used to classify a site as a radioactive dump. Separate state records found radium-226 in Allegheny riverbed sediments at levels roughly ten times what the EPA requires of cleaned-up uranium mining sites. The mechanism is well established: treatment removes much of the radium from the water, and the radium then accumulates in the sediment instead.

Ohio’s own arrangements are the part worth arguing about. Radiation researchers have pointed out that highly radioactive drilling solids, contaminated muds and sands go into ordinary municipal landfills in the state regardless of their actual radioactivity, at roughly one hundredth the cost of disposing of comparable low-level radioactive waste through the three federal facilities built for that purpose. That cost gap is not an accident, and it explains the disposal pattern better than any argument about safety does. Campaigners in Marietta say four injection wells were approved within two miles of the local aquifer and are now reporting radioactive readings far above EPA safety levels; those specific figures come from the campaign rather than from a regulator, and the petition’s ask is that officials verify them independently. One Green Planet has covered the thousands of toxic waste sites at risk from rising seas, and the research on wastewater radioactivity is reported by NBC News. Wildlife and watersheds carry this too, since river sediment is where the radium settles and where the food chain starts.

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