A Vast, Untapped Source of Lithium Has Just Been Found in The US
"#Pennsylvania sits on a vein of sedimentary rock known as the Marcellus Shale, which is rich in natural gas. The geological foundation was deposited almost 400 million years ago by volcanic activity, and it contains #lithium from volcanic ash.
Mackey and his colleagues have now found that when wastewater is dredged up from the deep by #fracking activities, it contains an astonishing amount of lithium."
“Oil and gas companies across the U.S. are producing billions of gallons of radioactive waste each day, and it’s ending up in municipal landfills, local drinking water supplies, and the bloodstreams of industry workers and their families.
Shockingly, he found, radiation levels at some oil and gas facilities within small American towns are higher than those at the exclusion zone around the site of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. “
"Spraying roads with “produced water,” highly saline wastewater containing proprietary drilling chemicals as well as benzene, arsenic and radium 226 and 228, both radioactive isotopes, has been outlawed in #Pennsylvania since 2016."
“The reality is, even though dumping on roads is illegal, it is happening all the time, every day,” said Hess.
Right?
That's why the state has banned it. But unless they enforce the ban, it will keep happening: so much cheaper than paying to put it into a reservoir in, say, Texas.
#germanAmericanSurname of the day is FRACK, derived from Middle Low German vrak ‘greedy, stingy’ or from its homonym meaning ‘damaged, useless’. Frackville, PA is named after DANIEL FRACK. #fracking
It's absolutely wild that this article on the frightening rise in early onset colorectal cancer doesn't mention the precipitous increase in microplastics and nanoplastics in our bodies as a potential carcinogen. Lifestyle, diet, medications, heavy metals, and PFAS are mentioned, but not microplastics (or pesticides!!).
The utterly unregulated rise in environmental plastic particulate pollution in the air we breathe, water we drink, and food we breathe in the past few decades is so large as to be nearly beyond comprehension. It is hard to swallow that we consume a credit card's worth of plastic every week.