Geological Disposal of Radioactive Waste: National Screening Exercise - 1 Day Meeting

Geological Disposal of Radioactive Waste:

National Screening Exercise

Most of the radioactive waste produced as a result of nuclear power generation in the UK since the 1950s is currently stored at the surface. A recent White Paper on implementing Geological Disposalconfirms government’s policy objective of disposing of higher level wastes in a Geological Disposal Facility (GDF), minimising the need for management by future generations by isolating waste within a suitable rock formation, at a sufficient depth that harmful quantities of radiation do not reach the surface. The White Paper recognises that a GDF must be sited in an area in which the local community has volunteered to host the facility, and which is geologically suitable. The Geological Society issued a statement on the White Paper.

The process outlined in the White Paper identifies geological evaluation as a priority from the outset. The developer, Radioactive Waste Management Limited (RWM), will undertake a national Geological Screening Exercise over the next two years, and effective communication of the results of this exercise and of supporting geological information will be vital in informing the deliberations of potential host communities. An independent review panel will be established by the Geological Society to review the robustness and suitability of the screening guidance and its subsequent application.

The screening exercise will be discussed at a one-day technical meeting at Burlington House on 30 September. The meeting is aimed at geoscientists and other professional specialists involved in the process, but is open to all. It will be followed by other events giving the public and interested stakeholders the opportunity to express their views. Attendance is free but advance registration is required.

Jenny Huggett (2/9/2014)

International comparison of various national health systems (including the NHS)

It seems at times that it is taken for granted that our NHS performs poorly and is in urgent need of reform. The tactics of the NHS's enemies are pretty transparent: find some lapse (exaggerate this if necessary – regrettably not always needed!), and give it wide publicity. Often the intention is to imply such lapses are typical of the NHS and indicate the need for radical reform. And under the current government (and often, sadly, the last Labour government) the assumption is that movement to an American-style privatised system is required.

The remarkable thing is how infrequently detailed comparisons between the NHS and the proposed alternatives are cited. The cynic in me suspects that that's because comparisons fail to show the performance of the NHS in a poor light.

As it happens a recent survey by the The Commonwealth Fund, an American private foundation, ranks the UK's NHS FIRST in the 11 nations surveyed! And the US comes last!

The NHS comes first for efficiency (perhaps not surprisingly to some of us) and first for “patient-centered care”. So much for the argument that our dirigist, top down, statist, monopolistic, clunky, socialistic system can't deliver!

The one factor in which the UK does poorly (“healthy lives”) reflects the ability of the society in general to support and promote public health. On this factor the US does even worse. Readers may recall that Wilkinson and Pickett's The Spirit Level showed that high income inequality is related to unhealthy populations, and, of course, the US and the UK have much higher income inequality than other developed nations.

So the next time someone makes an argument that assumes the NHS is rubbish, you can quote this study. 

The URL for the complete report is http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2014/jun/mirror-mirror.

Roger Oliver (26/7/2014)

fracking - news from abroad

From the Petroleum Exploration Society of GB’s magazine, and article on exploration in Lithuania:

Chevron has pulled out of the recently awarded Silute-Taurage shale gas block following proposed changes in the law that would have increased taxes and imposed additional protection provisions. While the central government is eager to reduce its dependency on Russia for natural gas imports, anti-cracking sentiment took the form of both local protests and political proposals for a moratorium on the practice (sic), ultimately creating too much risk and uncertainty for the US company.

This shows that the protests ARE worthwhile.
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And the government of Jordan has told Shell that “if a single goat dies" as a result of their planned oil shale extraction in their country they will be kicked out. (I have that from someone very close to the source).

Jenny

Anti-fracking Meeting in Heathfield

Sorry to be telling you about this after the event, it was very badly advertised and I only found out about it at the last minute. Last week I went to a presentation by Ian Crane, the anti-shale gas campaigner. Ian is an interesting man, he worked in the drilling industry for 20 years, becoming a vice-president of Schlumberger and head of their HR for the Middle East. He resigned after attending the 4^th funeral of a member of staff. Four separate crews, four different places, all of them members of fracking crews, all of them died of very aggressive cancers. I can’t easily summarise an hours presentation and an equally long film, but I can give you a few choice snippet. Please not very little of this can I substantiate myself, I am simply passing it on, if you want more evidence go look for it on the web.

Did you know that John Browne, the Governments chief advisor on petroleum matters, with a cabinet post to boot, is also a senior executive of Cuadrilla? And that he is not the only government advisor involved in Cuadrilla at a senior level? These people were probably responsible for the government decision that the tax payer will pay to clean up any environmental pollution resulting from shale gas extraction, not the companies responsible for the accident. Isn’t this a carte blanche to do what they like to get the reserves out? In the USA the industry is now effectively deregulated, and the scale of surface and near-surface pollution in parts of Colorado is shocking. Dick Cheyne introduced what is known as the Haliburton Loop hole; which removes all responsibility from the oil industry to report, let alone clean up, and contamination of water as a result of fracking. Apparently waste water from test-drilling in Lancashire has been pumped into the Manchester ship canal, so they are pollution right from the very start of the industry in this country.

The cement casing used to line boreholes, most importantly to line them through aquifers is not as a reliable preventer of leakage of fracking fluids into our aquifers as the oil industry would like us to believe. 50% of cement casings fail over a period of 30 years, 6% fail immediately. The oil industry would probably argue that shale gas wells have a working life rather less than 30 years, but that 6% value is worrying enough. Cement casing failure resulted in both the Piper Alpha accident and BP’s Gulf of Mexico disaster. The statistics for cement failure in fracked wells are probably worse than for conventional drilling because the fracking can trigger cement failure. Even if the oil companies doing the drilling were not using any chemicals dangerous to health, cement failure could permit gas to enter near surface aquifers. Whilst the setting fire to the tap water incident in the film “Gaslands” has been discredited as the gas has been tested and is not from shales being fracked, this does mean that shale gas (“thermogenic” gas) can enter drinking water. There are reports in the USA of people receiving skin burns from their tap water.

Our privatised water companies are very keen to get into bed with the shale gas explorers as they see them as their big new market, because they are going to need so much water. Where is that water going to come from? We don’t have the enormous aquifers or lakes that occur in the USA, and if we did it would be highly damaging to the environment to do so, as has been found in the USA.

The presentation included the film “Dash for Gas” which is a well put together film with some good solid science. If we could get a screening of that locally and give it some real publicity it would be well worth doing. “Gaslands” is not a film I would want to show, as the participants have all been paid off to keep mum. Why? Too much exaggeration in order to get the environmental point across? Attempts by US scientists to reproduce results of events filmed have been stone walled. This is all a great shame, there was no need for such manipulation.

Fracking Leaks - the following I have gleaned from recent scientific articles.

Professor Peter Styles states, in a recent edition of the newsletter of the Geological Society, that contrary to claims by the Shale Gas industry, leakage of methane (the principal gas in shale gas) from extraction, transportation and elivery infrastructure, means that shale gas cannot be considered to have a low carbon footprint. In addition there is now incontrovertible evidence from Duke University (North Carolina) that fracking wells leak. Which leads me onto one reason why shale gas in Western Europe is such a poor prospect. The gas-bearing shales of Western Europe have a higher proportion of natural fractures than do those of N America. It’s not difficult to imagine what happens if a well is fracked and the man-made fractures join up with the natural ones. However this is not deterring the companies such as Cuadrilla, IGas and 3^rd Energy, who will take note of this problem only if they loose large amounts of propant fluid and sand. As it is they loose 50% of the fracking fluid into the surrounding rock, and this is considered an acceptable loss, though they are working to reduce it, if only to save money. The other big headache for the Shale Gas industry is people, legislation, high population density in many of the areas with shale gas resources and the environmental movement. We should not underestimate the results of our resistance. I have it straight from the mouth of a geologist working for a major oil company that the anti-shale gas movement will drive the industry offshore, at the moment it is prohibitively expensive, but then so was onshore shale gas extraction 20 years ago….

Jenny Huggett

George Monbiot on nuclear power

George Monbiot has written about nuclear power and Hinkley C today in the Guardian (22/10/2013). He restates his view that electricity generation by nuclear power is a necessary evil given the threat of man-made climate change. One the issue of its safety he points out the relatively few deaths caused by this method of power generation compared with, for example, those caused by the pollutants resulting from coal-fired power generation.

However, he ridicules the decision over the proposed Hinkley C on cost grounds, with an electricity purchase price tied to the rate of inflation for 40 years.

He also criticises the decision on the grounds that it is “outdated” technology, and that integral fast reactors and thorium reactors would have been more sensible choices. Such reactor systems have the property of running on nuclear waste and so reducing not increasing the burden caused by these materials.

Roger Oliver (22/10/2013)

fracking (water use and chemical contaminants)

Yesterday I learnt from an environmentally minded geologist something rather shocking, but not entirely surprising: a New Zealand journalist decided to carry out an investigation into the integrity of the making of the Gaslands film (about fracking). The idea was that he would interview everyone who participated in the film. Every single one of them refused to be interviewed, and it turns out they had all received payment in return for refusing to comment on the film or the accuracy of what was portrayed. I find this quite shocking; Gaslands should have been a truthful film, there was lots that could have been portrayed that would have been honest and convincing of the necessity to fight those who want to extract oil and gas from our shale. I am deeply saddened to learn that the film was even more of a sham than I thought it was.

Today I attended a session on shale gas and fracking and gleaned a couple of snippets.

I can verify the figure I quoted of around 350,000 gallons of water per frack, BUT I gather that the average well is fracked 10 times. Hence the confusion in the values quoted by various sources. What is deeply shocking is that only 10-50% of the water is recovered, and this is a figure that the oil industry is working hard to increase.

Most of the environmental concerns are about leakage into aquifers and leakage from surface holding tanks for the 10-50% water that is returned. These are factors that can be controlled, and hence the likelihood of pollution of drinking water, soil etc is, in a well run operation, very low. The most worrying source of water contamination should be the escape of tracking fluids from the fractured shale. Whilst modelling suggests that it does penetrate into the shale very successfully, after all this is what it is intended to do, the chemical additives are largely absorbed by the clays in the shale. In shale being fracked for hydrocarbons the clay content is typically 40%, and because of the small size of clay particles (<4 micrometers) the surface area for absorption is vast. For the same reason clays are used for cleaning up contaminated land. So, it may be that although the water moves into the shale to a distance of several meters, the chemical additives don't get that far. The average shale being tracked, is 10s to 100s of meters thick. 

Jenny Huggett (12/10/2013)

fracking

Fracking

It may shock you to know that the anti-fracking campaign is as guilty as the pro-fracking oil and gas industry of being inaccurate. Rather than look at all aspects of fracking I am therefore going to concentrate on some misconceptions. There are plenty of other aspects I could write about, so this maybe just the first of a series.

Can fracking lead to contamination of drinking water?

In theory it can, but there are no proven instances. The oil and gas industry is less regulated in America than it is here, though even there liners are placed all the way from the surface to the shale being fracked. After all it is in no ones interest to loose oil and gas on the way up. I would like to think that drill-hole liners would be heavily regulated in this country, to ensure that under normal circumstances contamination of aquifers could not happen. Fortunately we don’t have earthquakes big enough to damage liners in this country. Much of the opposition to shale gas exploration has been generated by Josh Fox’s film Gasland which is marketed as a “documentary”. This contains the astonishing film of one Mike Markham, of Weld County, Colorado, setting fire to water emerging from a his bathroom tap. This has nothing whatsoever to do with adjacent shale gas production. The phenomenon was investigated by the Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission in 2008 who concluded that the gas was biogenic methane. This conclusion was not as exciting as the film clip, and so has passed the media by. In Texas in 2010 year there were reports of groundwater contamination by shale gas. The Environmental Protection Agency slapped an emergency protection order on Range Resources’ production of gas from the Barnett Shale in Parker County. Subsequent investigation revealed, however, that the contamination predated the shale-gas fracking. The contaminating gas consists of a mix of methane and nitrogen, and nitrogen does not occur in the Barnett Shale gas. It is, however, characteristic of gas from sands in much shallower sediments.

What is used in the fracking?

Between 50,000 ad 350,000 gallons of fluid are used during a fracking treatment, plus 75,000 to 320,000 lbs of sand to hold the fractures open. There are also the nasty additives being used in fracking. This website gives a list: http://fracfocus.org/chemical-use/what-chemicals-are-used

It sounds worse than it is because most of them are inert, and most of the liquid is water. BUT every company uses a different mix and some are much worse than others. Shell insist that they use very little apart from water, sand and gypsum, though this doesn’t let them off the hook, where is all the water going to come from? And all the sand? More holes in the ground to put our rubbish in?!

How leaky are the fractures?

Real data collected on many thousands of hydraulic fractures indicate that the fractures are almost unviersally contained within the shale being fractured, and do not extend into adjacent aquifers if present. This however doesn’t mean that fractures can’t and don’t extend into aquifers. There is also the question of natural faults, ie natural fractures along which movement has occurred in the past, causing a displacement of the rocks either side, they can either seal against or enhance lateral and vertical fluid movement depending upon the type of fault. This is one I have not heard anyone mention apart from a retired colleague, and if it had occurred to both of us it must have occurred to others. In the geological basins being fracked in the USA the natural fault density is low, in the UK it is high, not least in the Kimmeridge Clay (actually a shale) being investigated at Balcombe. What will happen if a faulted shale is fracked? We believe that the faults, or at least some of them, will be reactiviated, and may allow fracking fluids to extend much further than is suggested by the theoretical and experimental work. We also suspect that it was a fault reactivation that caused the (very minor) earthquake in Lancashire that has been linked to testing for shale gas.

The cost of gas and the value of Campaigning

While Quadrilla were being worried into reducing the scale of their operations around Balcombe I was discussing shale gas and shale oil with oil company geologists, and I thought you would find what they see in their crystal balls rather interesting.

In the 19^th century Oil Shale (when it is called oil shale rather than shale oil it means the hydrocarbons have not matured sufficiently to become oil or gas and therefore be able to flow) was quarried and burnt, causing horrendous pollution: no one wanted to repeat that. Twenty years ago getting hydrocarbons out of shale was dismissed as fantasy, utterly uneconomic. Then the price of oil rose steeply, and at the same time, country’s with highly developed oil technology such as the USA and the UK found themselves running out of hydrocarbons. Suddenly, even though vastly more expensive than conventional hydrocarbon extraction, shale began to look attractive, BUT, only onshore. Offshore shale gas/oil extraction is still considered too expensive. With enough campaigning and the continuing rise in the price of oil we will drive shale gas/oil extraction offshore. In an ideal world we would not be burning our precious oil and gas reserves, but using them in other ways (eg plastics), unfortunately that is simply not going to happen, at least not for a long time, but if we can drive the oil industry back off shore, we can at least protect our landscape and aquifers.

Jenny Huggett (updated 17/8/2013)