90.5 WESA | By Jenna Post
Earlier this year, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection found no significant risk to human health from the radioactive leachate from landfills. But a group of environmental nonprofits are asking the agency to reconsider.
This week, the citizen group based in Westmoreland County, Protect PT, along with groups like Sierra Club Pennsylvania, Physicians for Social Responsibility Pennsylvania and Halt the Harm Network, hosted a webinar to share information about what they say is the report’s incomplete investigation of the potential harm to the Commonwealth.
The report, which was dated January of this year and released in March, was anticipated for years.
Gillian Graber, director of Protect PT, said that in 2021, then-Gov. Tom Wolf announced that all Pennsylvania landfills would be required to test for radiological materials in leachate, after landfills like Westmoreland County’s experienced issues tied to fracking waste.
After waiting four years without an update from the DEP on any test results, and even after right-to-know requests from her team, Graber was hopeful delays were indications the state was coming up with solutions.
“We thought, ‘Oh great, the government is giving the attention that it needs to this issue.’ So we waited and waited and waited,” Graber said. But when the results were published this year, she was disappointed.
“We were really, really stunned.”
At a webinar this week, they broke down the published results for more than 100 viewers.
Fracking produces waste, like salty liquid brine, drill cuttings, flowback fluid, sludge and other solids. In Pennsylvania, the naturally occurring radioactivity in this waste comes from the Marcellus Shale deep underground, which gets brought to the surface in the drilling and fracking process.
This waste is moved to landfills across the state. When it rains, water filters through the landfill and picks up contaminants, creating leachate. Rain water can run through everything in the landfill from dirty diapers and last week’s lasagna to drilling mud.
“I’ve heard it described as landfill tea,” said Graber.
The problem, she said, is that regular municipal landfills and treatment plants aren’t equipped to filter out radioactivity. So that tea, once captured, gets sent to standard waste water sewage plants and is eventually discharged into waterways.
The DEP tested the leachate, and in their report, concluded that radiation levels were low enough that there’s no risk to human health. The report calls the findings preliminary, noting that the two-year data set is limited, and recommends further testing to confirm results.
Environmentalists aren’t the only ones unsatisfied with the DEP’s report. Dan Bain is an associate professor in the Department of Geology and Environmental Science at the University of Pittsburgh.
After reviewing the DEP’s report, Bain said it looked at a limited snapshot of the leachate, but added that materials like radium build up over time, primarily in sediment. In a study Bain conducted at Pitt, his team compared sediments upstream and downstream of a treatment plant and found higher radium levels downstream, suggesting treated wastewater may still introduce radioactive material into the environment. He also questioned whether the standards used in the report fully capture the real-world risks.
“I would not have signed up on that report as a scientist,” said Bain. “I would have said, ‘I think we need to be a little bit more emphatic about the possibilities of what we’re seeing.’”
But Bain said it’s not time to panic. He said current levels may not be an immediate crisis, but monitoring is needed to see if this could become a larger problem over time. He added that he was not confident in the current monitoring methodologies.
In May, Protect PT and other organizations sent a letter to the DEP outlining their concerns.
The response they received from DEP Secretary Jessica Shirley was that the “DEP stands by the findings of the report and is committed to further sampling and analysis of radium in landfill leachate to confirm the results of the report.”
In response, along with the webinar, Protect PT sent another letter to the state, this time to Sean Gimbel, Executive Assistant for the Office of Waste, Air, Radiation, and Remediation, to whom Shirley asked all follow-up questions be sent. Protect PT has shared that letter on their website. In it, they ask the DEP to use different testing methods, to measure radium’s byproducts, not just radium itself, and for more transparency, like public meetings.
The DEP hasn’t yet responded to WESA’s requests for comment on citizens’ concerns.
Graber said she wants people to get involved and write letters, which can be done through their website.
“I don’t think people realize, if you have the privilege not to live near a well pad, you may enjoy a lot more quiet and less air emissions and less water contamination than those of us who live in the shale play,” she said, “but this issue will touch you, too. It will be in your backyard, too. So everyone should care about it.”
