We now carry DX-1 Radiation Monitors (Personal Geiger Counters) and DX-2 Radiation Monitors (Personal Geiger Counters) in our Water Test Kit Store and a day or so ago we received the following question from ‘NSaneSal’ who asked, “I see you have radiation detectors in your store. Why do you sell them? What use are they for water testing? There should BE no radiation in tap water!”
OK, so Sal’s inquiry resembled an angry statement more than it did a question, but he did raise a good point: Why DO we sell radiation detectors on a site that focuses mainly on water quality and water quality testing?
Rather than bore you with a long, drawn out explanation about how radioactive materials may naturally find their way into the water supply, we will instead provide you with a few pieces of information taken from an article we read recently:
- Hydraulic fracturing activity in Pennsylvania has generated waste that contains radioactive material.
- Data collected from water samples taken at and around the certain facilities in New York State that accepted Pennsylvania’s fracking leachate… has come under fire since a Syracuse laboratory very recently plead guilty to one felony count of mail fraud that quite possibly involved 3,300 falsified water tests and that laboratory performed a number of the tests at the facilities.
- Radioactive materials occur naturally in shale formations with concentrations varying from well to well and from formation to formation. Some experts believe the Marcellus Shale Formation could possibly contain the highest concentration of all the United States’ shale formations.
- Fracking waste includes brine, chunks of rock and ‘drilling mud’ which all could contain higher than desirable levels of radium isotopes in cluding one called Radium 226 which proves particularly worrisome since it dissolves in water — and could therefore travel quite far from the well site and/or dumping area during a good rainstorm.
- In this case Pennsylvania started looking into the matter of radioactivity and fracking waste in the beginning of 2013. New York State has started no such inquiry. Coincidentally, a certain company that manages fracking waste in Pennsylvania recently asked a landfill across the border to begin accepting fracking waste 49 percent faster than it had in the past.
The article goes into additional details about the situation in a community 80 miles south of Rochester and we suggest you read the full article so you can get the whole story.
Getting back to Sal’s question, though, tap water really ought not contain radioactive material. More than likely very few municipal water systems dispense drinking water that contains radioactive matter since things like that get monitored on a regular basis… BUT what about private water wells that NEVER get monitored for radioactive material?
Remember that part in the article about Radium 226, a naturally occurring radioactive material that dissolves in water? What if a person lives in an area where this material exists naturally under the ground in rock formations?
As ground water makes its way through rock formations containing Radium 226 and possibly to a well’s intake it likely picks up Radium 226 along the way… and carries it up to the surface where unsuspecting homeowners will use it for drinking, cooking, bathing, irrigation of foodstuffs, watering of livestock, etc.
Oh, and as you read in the article referenced above, companies responsible for disposing of potentially radioactive materials taken from hydraulic fracturing sites apparently have an interest in getting rid of those materials any way they can BEFORE the government catches them red-handed — or better yet, until the government catches them with glowing red hands.
