"No Risk to Human Health"? - Protect PT and Coalition Call Out DEP's Dismissal
- Noah Bedard
- 4 hours ago
- 4 min read
On March 13th, the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) released its long-anticipated report on radioactivity in landfill leachate. For residents living in the Shale Fields, it had the potential to be a breath of fresh air – an act of good faith that the DEP was standing by its purpose to protect Pennsylvania’s environment and the health of the residents and visitors living amongst it. Unfortunately, it turned out to be anything but.
As fracking has spread throughout the Shale Fields, municipal landfills have regularly accepted fracking waste. This waste, including drill cuttings that result from the process of drilling wells, contains toxic materials that reflect the geological composition of where drilling occurred. In the Marcellus Shale, these materials include radium: a radioactive element with a half-life of 1,600 years, in addition to other heavy metals.
The impact that fracking waste has had on municipal landfills has long been a focus of scientists, activists, and residents in Southwestern Pennsylvania, with radioactivity in landfill leachate being a particular cause for concern. As rainwater filters through waste contained in a landfill, it gradually picks up materials stored within it and becomes, as our Community Advocate Jim Cirilano has referred to it, “landfill tea”. In 2019, testing by Dr. John Stolz, an AAAS Fellow at Duquesne University, revealed that leachate originating from Westmoreland Sanitary Landfill (which accepts fracking waste) contained radium-226, radium-228, and bromide.
The implication of Stolz’s research was alarming. Although landfill leachate is often treated by sewage treatment facilities, these facilities often lack the capabilities to actually filter out radium and other radioactive materials – meaning that afterwards, when the “treated leachate” enters local waterways, that radium remains. In addition to its long half-life and established reputation as a source of bone cancer, radium-226 has been found to gradually accumulate in our environment and the animals that live in it. If Stolz’s results were observed on a large-scale, it would mean that watersheds and other critical sources of food and water would be, for over a millennia, sources for health complications.
It was this source of concern that, in 2021, drove then-Governor Wolf to initiate the study that we’ve finally seen results from 5 years later.
Per the DEP’s reporting, several landfills that accept oil and gas waste were found to have yearly mean concentrations of radium between 300 and 500 picocuries per liter in their leachate. When broken down to individual sample readings, leachate from landfills reached over 1,700 picocuries per liter. Despite this extreme radioactivity. DEP Secretary Jessica Shirley has insisted that “... there is no risk to human health from radiation in landfill leachate”.
In the absence of action by the DEP, Protect PT is standing in coalition with partners across the state – including Sierra Club PA, Three Rivers Waterkeeper, the Center for Coalfield Justice, FracTracker Alliance, Earthworks, Physicians for Social Responsibility PA, Mountain Watershed Association, and 52 environmental activists and scientists who signed onto our advocacy letter – to demand accountability. “Our tax dollars have been used to produce a report that was supposed to tell the truth of what the oil and gas industry has known for years and tried to cover up: their waste in landfills is creating a radioactive problem,” said Gillian Graber, Executive Director of Protect PT.
Together, the coalition gathered at the DEP’s Southwest Regional Office on May 14th to speak out against the flaws in the DEP’s reporting – and, more importantly, their unwillingness to take action and protect Pennsylvanians.
“The claim of no risk is inappropriate, in part because it’s based on the wrong standards,” said Tom Shuster, Director of the Sierra Club’s PA chapter. “The report compared results… of leachate to standards set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of 600 picocuries per liter. This is the standard for untreated discharges from nuclear power plants.”
He elaborated further, explaining that “... The treatment systems that this leachate is sent to are typically municipal sewage systems. They’re not designed to remove radium, nor are any of them required to monitor radium in their own discharge…”
Standing in front of a map of leachate readings designed by Katie Jones of FracTracker Alliance, Laura Dagley of PSR PA and Seth Sherman of CCJ made strong remarks regarding the potential for wide-scale harm to communities who rely on impacted watersheds.
“The communities around (these landfills) did not ask to be guinea pigs in an experiment of long-term radiation exposure,” said Laura Dagley, Registered Nurse and Representative of PSR PA, “There is no safe level of radium exposure, there are only legal levels, which should never be confused with safe.”
“... What DEP has done most fundamentally with this report is fail to keep the people and communities of those who live and recreate near these landfills safe. This report has failed to fairly inform the public about the dangers that radioactive leachate poses to them,” Seth Sherman, Staff Attorney for the Center for Coalfield Justice, added, “... this report does nothing to keep those people safe…”
“This is the bare minimum that our state government owes to the Pennsylvanians at risk of harm. Flawed and incomplete data, plus inaction, is just not good enough,” declared Gillian Graber as she prepared to hand off our letter to the DEP.
Having delivered our letter to the DEP, Protect PT is prepared to work alongside this coalition to push for meaningful action and accountability. Ultimately, it is the DEP’s function to guarantee protection to our environment and the life that relies upon it. Clean water is our most precious resource – to actively dismiss the threats our watersheds face is to further cement that Pennsylvanians will always foot the industry’s bill.
