Brine to Bone: Oil and Gas’s Radioactive Waste Legacy Shapes Our Health
By Manushi Sharma, October 21, 2025
Oil and gas drilling brings radioactive waste to the surface, contaminating air, water, and soil, and posing invisible but lasting threats to human health. As corporations bury this toxic legacy under weak regulations, frontline communities and workers are exposing how our energy system trades public safety for profit.
Human civilization is, in many ways, a history of better energy. Sources of energy evolved as human curiosity sought new ways to channel efficiency, from taming the use of wood fires to cook food and warm homes, to coal, oil, and petroleum-powered industry and transport. Each transition reshaped not only economies and cultures, but also the conditions that define human health.
Both the World Health Organization and the American Public Health Association recognize the energy industry as a key determinant of public health, because it shapes the quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink. But in practice, the industry’s priorities tilt sharply toward profit over well-being. Regulations are cast as obstacles rather than safeguards, and health too often becomes collateral damage in the pursuit of efficiency and revenue.
It’s within this context that I turned to Justin Nobel’s book Petroleum-238: Big Oil's Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It. As I read and later spoke with the author, one image from his reporting remained lodged in my mind: radioactive ‘brine’, a by-product of hydraulic fracturing or fracking, being spread on rural roads as if it were harmless gravel.
The Author
Nobel began his career reporting on climate change in the Pacific and Arctic, and later in southern Louisiana. “Cancer Alley,” he told me, was his first real glimpse of how the machinery of oil and gas development reshapes communities, culturally, environmentally, and physically. He also uncovered abuses offshore, including Filipino workers exposed to unsafe conditions that ended in a fatal explosion. “This is an industry that really cuts corners,” he said. Some recurrent themes in his investigation were pollution,worker safety and community health. However, when he moved back to the Northeast, the Marcellus and Utica Shale boom was reshaping the region. He realized there was another chapter in the same story that has been conveniently obscured: the radioactive byproducts that rise to the surface with oil and gas.
Radioactivity In Natural Oil and Gas
As the EPA notes, oil and gas don’t exist in isolation underground; they are bound up with the rocks and minerals around them. To extract them, companies use a process called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which forces open those formations with high-pressure fluid. That violent process doesn’t just release oil and gas, it also brings up the materials trapped alongside them.
Nobel put it plainly: “A lot more comes to the surface at an oil and gas well than just oil and gas. What comes with it can include heavy metals and radioactive elements such as radium, radon, uranium, and thorium, that are all naturally occurring.”
Source: Fracking 101 (https://www.nrdc.org/stories/fracking-101). Fracking well pads can vary in size, but commonly range from 4 to 25 acres.
The wastewater is marketed with the innocuous name “brine;” the industry makes it sound harmless ‘a summer speciality pickle’, but brine is anything but. Historic spills in North Dakota, where farming dominates the landscape, have left acres barren. These spills predate modern fracking; even in the early days, operators sought the cheapest, easiest way to discard waste. “They dug a pit beside the well and filled it with this waste,” Nobel said. “Of course it leached into the groundwater. A kindergarten student could tell you that.” But brine’s dangers don’t stop at salt. “There’s also heavy metals in brine,” Nobel explained, “things like lead and arsenic, very dangerous contaminants.” This entire process and the industrial handling of this sludge is a “sloppy science experiment”. In its pursuit of disposing of this waste cheaply, this sludge is handled by workers daily, driven around in trucks, sometimes ending up being injected into our earth in ‘injection wells’, spilled, or even spread on the roads as a deicer or to prevent dust in summer months.
It is the scale of industrial operations that make this toxic sludge disposal an urgent issue. U.S. oil and gas wells bring up about three billion gallons of brine every day — often more brine than hydrocarbons, sometimes by a factor of four. “It can be said that these wells are actually producing brine, and the oil and gas is the byproduct,” Nobel said. Over the course of a year, that adds up to about a trillion gallons.
To make it vivid, he offered an image “put that wastewater into standard oil barrels, stack them to the sky, and the line would reach the moon and back 28 times.”
“The industry does not want this waste. It wants oil, gas, and natural gas liquids like propane and butane.” But the byproduct is vast. Since the first commercial well in Pennsylvania in 1859, the imperative has been to dispose of it as quickly and cheaply as possible. That impulse, Nobel argues, has carved a toxic legacy that shapes our livelihoods, water table, soil and ultimately our health.
Our Health and Well-being, Just a Collateral for Profit
The health stakes of this ‘sloppy science experiment’ sound as though we are in a sci-fi movie where an alien race is extracting our resources for its own flourishing, leaving humans to grapple with the toxic fallout. Workers handle brine daily, often without full knowledge of what’s in it. Spills seep into farmland and groundwater, leaving communities with contaminated drinking water. When brine dries, its salts, heavy metals, and radioactive particles can become dust that is carried by the wind and inhaled. This exposure to radioactive elements causes rashes, cancers, and chronic illnesses.
As per Tran et al. (2024) air pollution from oil and gas venting and flaring results in $7.4 billion in health damages, more than 700 premature deaths, and 73,000 asthma exacerbations among children annually. This data combined with the radioactivity dimension, underscores a far deeper problem that is difficult to ascertain. Unlike emissions that can be tracked with satellites and air monitors, radioactive materials move through soil, water, and even bones, often invisibly, and their health consequences may take years or decades to manifest.
“Radium is referred to by the medical community as a bone seeker,” said Nobel.
Once inside bone tissue, radium sheds energy. “At some point in time, they blast off a little piece of themselves with great energy, and that’s what we call radiation,” Nobel explained. Over years, this bombardment damages cells, weakens the skeleton, and can lead to cancer. To illustrate the risks, he pointed to history. In the early 20th century, women known as the Radium Girls painted watch and clock dials with radium-based paint. To keep their brushes fine-tipped, they would lick them, ingesting trace amounts of radium with each stroke. Over time, those small doses built up in their bones. Many suffered from devastating cancers and a condition called “radium jaw,” in which their jaws literally disintegrated. Medical examiner Harrison Martland, proved the link: the women’s bones emitted radiation, even after burial, because radium-226 has a half-life of 1,600 years.
The industry has an ‘out of sight is out of mind’ approach. When the Clean Water Act of 1972 made it illegal to dump waste into American rivers and streams, for oil and gas moguls that meant finding another place to dump billions of gallons of wastewater for cheap. The alternative became injection wells, deep holes drilled into the earth, Nobel told me “it sounds very bad, and it is bad. There are no underground storage lockers. We are just sweeping toxic radioactivity under the carpet, into our water table via injection wells.
Once waste is injected, fluids can travel along natural fractures or wellbores, re-emerging at the surface or seeping toward freshwater aquifers. In states like Ohio, Texas, and Oklahoma, communities have already seen waste bubbling up, and injection wells have been linked to clusters of induced earthquakes.
So if billions of gallons of radioactive waste are being shoved underground, how much of it is finding its way back into our water tables?
To protect drinking water, the EPA limit for radium is just 5 picocuries per liter (pCi/L). For context, EPA defines a liquid waste as “radioactive” if radium levels exceed 60 pCi/L. Yet brine from the Marcellus Shale has been measured at 9,300 pCi/L, with some samples as high as 28,500 pCi/L. That means a substance considered hazardous at 60 pCi/L is being hauled daily in trucks with concentrations hundreds of times higher, often by workers told it’s simply “salt water.”
This radionuclide laden water could be as “radioactive as the Chernobyl core” and it would still be considered ‘nonhazardous’ due to regulatory loopholes. The Bentsen and Bevill exemption of 1980 is a result of strategic industrial lobbying to maintain their profit margins. Nobel further explained that “They are saving billions and into the trillions on this exemption… In the late ’70s they calculated the cost would be $34 billion up front… and 10 or 12 billion each year going forward… If you just did that on inflation and brought that to the present… [it’s] hundreds of billions of dollars, and that was before fracking.”
Frontlines Driving Change
As I reflected on Nobel’s reporting, I thought back to my work in Thailand on regional health policy and sustainable development, where I first learned about a framework known as the Triangle that Moves the Mountain. Lasting change requires three forces working together. First, the community champions. Second, the creation of relevant knowledge. And third, the political will. Alone, each side can only do so much. Together, the triad becomes strong enough to move even the heaviest obstacles. This framework resonates in this case.
Change rarely begins in Washington. As Nobel reminded me, “there’s no politician carrying this issue… no bumper sticker for it.” It is the communities living with the fallout and workers in this industry that are pushing for change. Sometimes as small as a single mother and her daughters who don't want toxic waste polluting their land and water. From humble beginnings, local groups like the Center for Coalfield Justice, Mountain Watershed Association, and Protect PT in Pennsylvania, or the Buckeye Environmental Network in Ohio, have grown into vital grassroots coalitions. Workers inside the industry, too, are speaking out. “These workers know they are being contaminated… some of them call it a death job, but they have been very powerful voices for change.” Their testimony has begun to pierce statehouses in Pennsylvania and Ohio, where legislators are holding hearings and drafting bills. They are building the bottom side of the triangle, pushing knowledge creation and political action to follow.
At one such hearing in April 2024, Pennsylvania State Senator Katie Muth brought oilfield workers together with physicians from Physicians for Social Responsibility, bridging two groups the industry has long kept apart. “When you have health providers and healthcare advocacy groups actually working with the workers and all speaking out together, that’s very dangerous to them [the industry],” Nobel explained.
At the federal level, a few leaders are beginning to take notice. Representative Summer Lee, who represents Southwestern Pennsylvania, has spoken out on environmental and worker justice and raised concerns about oilfield waste.
Take Action!
These fights remind us that the issue transcends politics. Protecting health cannot remain a footnote to energy policy, but must instead become a measure of it. Whether in conservative rural counties or more progressive urban areas, communities are finding common ground in the need to protect their health and environment.
For each of us, change starts with awareness. Educating ourselves about the issue. Petroleum 238 is a toolkit for action, laying out stories of workers and communities while pointing toward the policy, science, and regulatory shifts that could make a difference.
Petroleum-238 Big Oil's Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It
From Cradle to Grave: Health consequences associated with fossil fuel use at every stage of their lifecycle.
CLIMATE AND HEALTH SERIES
This piece is part of our ongoing #OurClimateOurHealth Series, which explores how the climate and environment shape our health outcomes. We highlight both the risks and the solutions, showing that climate action is also a public health imperative. Our goal is to inform, inspire, and equip readers, practitioners, and policymakers to safeguard health in the face of environmental change. Explore other stories from the series HERE.
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