“A powerful industry has spread harms across the land, its people, and more so than anyone, their very own workers, and did what they could to make sure no one ever put all the pieces together. And no one ever has — until now. Oilfield waste has been spilled, spread, injected, dumped, and freely emitted across this nation. And contamination has been discharged—sometimes illegally, often legally—into the same rivers America’s towns and cities draw their drinking water from.”
Justin Nobel, an award winning investigative science journalist, is coming to New Mexico (Taos, Santa Fe and Albq.) to talk about his research and resulting book, Petroleum-238, which details how oil and gas companies across the U.S. are producing billions of gallons of radioactive waste each day, and it is ending up in municipal landfills, local drinking water supplies, and the bloodstreams of industry workers and their families. During his research Justin 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.Here in New Mexico the oil and gas industry is engaged in a full court press to change state regulations to allow their overflowing radioactive oilfield waste, aka produced water, to be reused in demonstration and industrial projects across the state, with the eventual goal of using it for “agriculture, irrigation, potable water supplies, aquifer recharge, industrial processes or environmental restoration.”Justin Nobel, who has offered expert testimony in the New Mexico reuse rulemaking case at the Water Quality Control Commission describes his book this way:
“This is a story about worker justice. This is a story about environmental justice. This is an astonishing scientific story. We live on a radioactive planet, and oil and gas happens to bring up some of Earth’s most interesting, and notorious, radioactive elements. They can be concentrated in the formation below, and further concentrated by the industry’s processes at the surface. From day one, which in the United States was 1859, the U.S. oil and gas industry has had no good idea what to do with this waste. And so began an extraordinary campaign to get rid of it all. Modern fracking has only worsened the problem, by tapping into even more radioactive formations, bringing drilling closer to communities, and vastly increasing the amount of waste.”
Come hear his riveting first hand accounts about attempts to "treat" fracking waste and the harm it has caused and is causing to people, water, biodiversity and the workers in treatment plants in those states where oil and gas has already gotten away with similar reuse schemes, and why Justin is on the front line in the fight to expose the environmental injustice at the heart of the oil and gas waste disposal crisis.
Nobel writes on science and environment for US magazines, investigative sites, and literary journals. He has been published in Best American Science and Nature Writing and Best American Travel Writing. A book he co-wrote with a death row exoneree, The Story of Dan Bright, was published in 2016 by University of New Orleans Press. His 2020 Rolling Stone magazine story, "America's Radioactive Secret," won an award from the National Association of Science Writers and inspired this book. Justin's writing has helped lead to lawsuits, public dialogue, academic research and been taught at Harvard's School of Public Health.
JUSTIN WILL BE SPEAKING JULY 11TH, 12TH AND 13TH IN TAOS, SANTA FE AND ALBUQUERQUE
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