Gas drillers are now going after the "unconventional" sources of gas made available by fracking. Because they're drilling into uranium resources, this new gas is contaminated with many times the radiation held by conventional sources. Shales in the US that hold all this suddenly available gas also harbor radiation at a concentration 5,000 times higher--between 16 and 20 parts per million uranium--than what is scattered in the crust.
The vast quantities of gas in US shales that will make us "energy independent", in addition to leaking greenhouse-potent methane, are also liberally dosed with radioactivity. [5]
Uranium's Issue
All natural gas carries a certain amount of radon. As the uranium in any rock decays, radon is constantly produced. When that natural gas is removed from a uranium deposit, it bears more radon than would natural gas taken from non-uranium-laced rocks. Because radon decays rapidly, it is highly radioactive. Yet it remains viable long enough to reach its point of consumption, such as your home. As it emits with natural gas on your stovetop, the flames do not affect it. An inert gas that does not react with other elements, it enters the room unscathed where it is available for breathing.
We are told that the amount of radon in natural gas is relatively scanty. Cooking and heating with gas exposes residents to only 15 times more radioactivity than what you'd receive living next door to a nuclear reactor and using nuclear electricity for cooking and heating rather than gas. Although that amount may not sound so minuscule, reactors emit so little radiation that 15 times as much still isn't much. But that information is about the safety of nuclear reactors; it is not about natural gas.
According to the Department of Energy, the ratio of radon to uranium in a formation remains relatively constant even as the uranium content varies, and so if we know how much uranium resides in a formation from which gas is being extracted, we can have a pretty good idea how much radon we're getting as well. Although it is not in the interest of the gas industry to advertise it, some of the richest reserves of natural gas reside in Devonian shale, which is rich in marine black shale. Such shale has a generous organic component, which attracts and concentrates radioactive uranium before it bakes into the hydrocarbons we seek. So the best sources of unconventional hydraulically fractured natural gas are by their nature radioactive.
As we've seen, shale that is the most radioactive contains the most gas. According to David Lewis: "The shale formations they want to find gas in can have as much as 250 ppm U238. If they have that much they are 80 times as radioactive as 'normal average', good old red-blooded American conventional gas.
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