Beyond Nuclear stands in solidarity with the anti-fracking movement against radiological risks to human health and the environment

Atomic reactors and radioactive waste aren't the only sources of artificial radioactivity risk we face from dirty, dangerous, and expensive energy industries. There is significant radioactivity risk, such as from radium, associated with "fracking," environmentally destructive hydraulic fracturing of shale formations to extract natural gas.

Josh Fox's newly released Gasland: Part II documentary film touches on the risks from uranium and its dangerous radioactive decay products embedded in fracking emissions. The film clearly shows, through the use of infrared imagery, that polluting airborne emissions -- such as of methane itself -- from fracking wells are large-scale, harmful, and on-going, despite being invisible to the naked eye. Among those emissions are radioactive isotopes. Radioactive contamination of the liquid wastes from fracking are also of great concern (see below).

Beyond Nuclear stands in solidarity with the anti-fracking movement. In April 2012, Beyond Nuclear's Kevin Kamps attended a Clean Energy Agenda summit, organized by Environmental Working Group and the Civil Society Institute. The summit brought together representatives from dozens of groups from the anti-nuclear, anti-fracking, anti-mountain top removal, anti-polluting forms of biomass, and climate protection movements. A Clean Energy Agenda statement was published, as the groups joined forces into a united environmental and human rights coalition to fight back against the juggernaut of dirty energy industry lobbyists.

More recently, Beyond Nuclear joined with this network to urge the Environmental Defense Fund to stop compromising on and greenwashing fracking.

Beyond Nuclear's attorney on interventions against the proposed new Fermi 3 reactor in MI and age-degraded, problem-plagued Davis-Besse reactor in OH, Toledo-based attorney Terry Lodge, is also deeply involved in the fight against fracking in the Buckeye State. Ohio is being targeted for the large-scale dumping of radioactive fracking waste water, as from Pennsylvania, in landfills, as well as abandoned mines which empty into the Ohio River. Terry has worked with Dr. Marvin Resnikoff of Radioactive Waste Management Associates to warn about the radioactive hazards of fracking waste water.

A stealth rider on Ohio's 4,500-page budget bill would do away with state protections against Technically Enhanced Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material, regarding it as simply "naturally occurring," and thus allowed to be dumped in landfills and mines. The radiological consequences to human health downstream would be dire.

The Committee for an American Clean Energy Agenda has just published a forceful statement in defense of protecting surface and groundwater against the ravages of dirty energy industries, including fracking and nuclear power, calling on the Obama White House to adopt an executive order.