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Exposing the Jewish National Fund and Radioactive Fracking

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The Jewish National Fund sounds nice enough, especially with their quaint tree-planting campaigns, but as our guest, Palestinian organizer Abdullah Elagha points out, this greenwashed front hides a myriad of atrocities, from ecocide to ethnic cleansing. Elagha outlines the history and present of the organization, a recent fundraising for Israel conference in Colorado, the growing movement for Palestine, and more.

Next up, you might know that fracking stinks – but did you also know that it’s highly radioactive? Investigative journalist and author Justin Nobel joins the show to talk about his nearly decade-long research project quite literally digging to the dark and toxic depths of radioactive fracking waste, what this means for communities and workers, and the vital collaboration between investigative journalists and frontline activists.

Please consider becoming a patron of our work at Patreon.com/ProjectCensored

Eleanor Goldfield: Thank you so much for joining us at the Project Censored Radio Show. We’re very glad right now to be joined by Abdullah Elagha, a Palestinian organizer with the CPC, Colorado Palestine Coalition.

The CPC is a group of organizations local to Colorado that work together to educate the public on the issue of Palestine and to advocate for the liberation of Palestinians.

Abdullah, thanks so much for joining us.

Abdullah Elagha: Yeah. Thanks Eleanor for having me, appreciate it.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, absolutely. So I’d like to start off with the Jewish National Fund, the organization who hosted this global conference for Israel in Colorado this past weekend. For folks listening, we’re recording this on Thursday, December 7th.

As it notes on the CPC Instagram page, “the Jewish National Fund is a Zionist organization with 120 year plus history of dispossession and theft of Palestinian lands, ethnic cleansing and entrenching Israeli apartheid.”

So I was wondering if you could extrapolate more on that and walk us through some more context regarding the JNF, and what that global conference this past weekend was all about.

Abdullah Elagha: Sure. Yeah, I’d love to. So yeah, as you mentioned, the JNF is almost 50 years older than the state of Israel. So the JNF has been around for quite some time and it’s really taken on a lot of different shapes over that time.

I know that a lot of the responses from folks who were attending the conference and folks who are setting up the conference were saying that, you know, the JNF is just a nonprofit. Well, maybe the US branch of the JNF is just a non nonprofit, and the Canadian branch, and the British branch, as they have branches in many different countries. But the JNF at its core has really existed to displace Palestinians and acquire Palestinian land through any means necessary for the 120 years that it’s existed.

Now it’s attempted different strategies to achieve that goal over the past 120 years, but really the goal has always been the same. I think their latest strategy or the latest shape that they have taken is that they’re an environmental organization. As a matter of fact, they tout that they are the world’s oldest environmental organization, which is really hilarious because even their environmental initiatives are not only detrimental to the Palestinian people, but detrimental to Palestinian land as well. And even land that is now considered to be Israeli land, it’s detrimental to that too.

A phrase that’s used here very often is greenwashing and really what greenwashing is, is using things like environmental initiatives to sort of hide more nefarious goals behind it. In this case, they use, for example, the fact that they plant forests, which seems like a great thing, in Israel to hide the fact that they’re planting these forests atop the ruins of ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages.

I don’t know if folks are familiar with the blue Tzedakah boxes that seem to be quite common among a lot of Jewish households. It was the kind of thing that like little kids kind of went from door to door with these blue boxes saying, Oh, hey, donate some money to help plant a tree in Israel.

Oftentimes those trees were planted in these forests that were used to hide these Palestinian villages and prevent Palestinians from ever returning to them. You know, I heard a lot of interesting stories from a lot of my Jewish friends who grew up with these boxes just sitting in their homes and they really had had no idea what the idea behind them was other than, Oh, we’re just planting trees. And as they grew up and came to learn more about the JNF, came to realize what the idea behind them actually was and how horrible it was.

So, I know I jumped around a lot there, but that’s kind of the idea behind our whole campaign against the JNF is just to educate people on what it is.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, absolutely. And I want to get into the greenwashing a bit more in a minute, but I also want to focus on the power of the JNF because I grew up Jewish and I remember seeing those little boxes, particularly at the Jewish Community Center. We didn’t have one in our home, thankfully. But, they are ubiquitous and in terms of the JNF being ubiquitous outside of just the greenwashing campaign, y’all also note that it’s the largest private landowner in the state of Israel, owning 13 percent and effectively controlling 80 percent of what is considered Israeli land.

So what does that translate to in terms of the political power of the JNF as that Zionist organization?

Abdullah Elagha: Yeah, sure. I mean, in terms specifically of the political power, the Israeli Land Management Bureau, I think about 50 percent of their members are also members of the Jewish National Fund.

So they have a direct hand in managing this land, all of which was stolen from Palestinians. So let’s just be very, very clear on that. You know, today it’s considered Israeli land, but before 1947, this was all Palestinian land.

For them to call themselves an environmental organization or a nonprofit is really just an absolute farce.

When you look at their practices on the ground, when you look at their plans for the future, you know, such as a Blueprint Negev where they’re trying to basically terraform, the Naqab, well, they call it the Negev, the Naqab desert in the south of what is now Israel, which has led to the displacement of dozens of Palestinian Bedouin villages who have lived in that desert for hundreds, hundreds, thousands of years.

That desert is, it’s a difficult environment to survive in. If you look at population maps in the area, you will see that the desert is almost completely deserted, save for these Bedouin villages.

Actually, I think it was just a couple of weeks before October 7th, Ben Gvir, who’s the security minister of Israel, he shared a photo where he was at, I don’t know what you would call it, but it was the process of the Israeli military literally ethnically cleansing a Bedouin village, which is part of this Blueprint Negev the JNF is carrying out.

And he posted a photo and he was very excited about it. He was very excited about the fact that these people who lived there for hundreds of years, they’re probably the only people who actually know how to survive in that desert without destroying the environment, which really is what… you know, you can call it terraforming, you’re destroying a native environment, you know, they’re the only people who can live there and he was just sharing his glee in the fact that they had been permanently removed from their homes. And, this just lines up with exactly what the JNF is trying to do.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah. And as you’re speaking, it reminds me of, you said that they consider themselves, or they say that they’re the oldest environmental organization, which is that colonial language too, because of course Indigenous peoples across the planet have been in what one might consider an environmental organization if you consider just living with, in concert with the environment. But then colonialism comes in, destroys a place and says that they’re being environmentalists about it.

And just picking from some of the things that y’all have shared, just the language that was used, y’all shared a poster from the JNF from the 50s that said that what they were doing was a “conquest of the desert.” I mean, and just thinking about that language, how could that possibly keep be conflated with something environmental or constructive for that area?

And as you also noted in that post, this also is part of that colonialist mentality that like, oh, this land was uninhabited or at the very least uncared for and needs these Zionists to tend to it.

So I’m, I’m curious if you can share any more, you mentioned this Negev or Naqab project, are there others, particularly like the tree planting, with regards to ignoring native growth and trying to literally put in European, plantations of trees and other such ecocidal practices?

Abdullah Elagha: I think their favorite line is a land without a people for a people without a land. And then their other favorite line is that they made the desert bloom as if the land of Palestine hasn’t been fertile and blossoming for thousands of years.

Their environmental practices are – to call them environmental practices is almost hilarious, you know, the trees that they plant, you kind of mentioned it, are very often European fir trees, which are not native to the environment, which I think is a great parallel.

But, you know, these trees, they plant them, often on top of ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages, but other times they plant them on top of pre existing forests that were covered with native flora. And so when they plant these invasive species, very often wildfires will break out in these areas.

And I’ve seen some incredibly devastating photos that show a wildfire that broke out in one of these forests that were made up of these European fir trees. And then once the fire had cleared out, underneath it you can see the remains of Palestinian villages. You can see the remains of Palestinian farms that had been there, you know, for hundreds, probably thousands of years that were replaced by these invasive trees.

So it sounds surprising, but it’s very much in line with their practices, which their practice is just displace and erase. That’s really the goal of the Jewish National Fund.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, absolutely. And I want to get to the events of this past weekend in particular, because it was the so called Global Conference for Israel. And y’all took part in an action #shutdownJNF.

And I’m curious if you could talk about what the goals of the conference were, and about some of the actions that y’all took to either disrupt or raise awareness about this.

Abdullah Elagha: Yeah, so the global conference is a yearly event that happens in a different city every year. Last year, it was in Boston. The year before, and the year before that, I think it was canceled due to covid.

But really, what it is is it’s an international gathering of Zionists to discuss the Israeli project and to discuss furthering the Israeli project.

Last year in Boston, it was just one day. We had the mispleasure of them doing it here for four days. But, you know, since they did that, we were able to kind of get creative with our counteractions. And, you know, we did have a couple of direct actions and protest because obviously, we would protest the Global Conference for Israel coming to Denver in the best of times.

But right now in the midst of Israel committing genocide in Gaza, where over 20,000 have been killed, over 6,000 of them children. Personally, I’ve lost over 80 family members over the past two months. I’m from Gaza.

So, given the fact that they’re coming here now to network and fundraise in our city, while Israel is committing these atrocities is just absolutely unacceptable.

So, the plan was always to have our counteractions, but you know as I mentioned one of the goals of the CPC is to educate people on Palestine. So we actually had a number of educational events. We had folks fly in from all over the country. We had folks from the Palestinian Youth Movement fly out from the Bay Area and from the D.C. area to give a talk. We had folks from PSL National fly out from New York to give talks. We had someone from the Palestine Solidarity Working Group fly out from New Orleans to give a talk.

So really, we really focused on education here. And they gave just incredible talks, which we called the Global Conference for Palestine, sort of a parallel to that. You know, they love to steal our verbiage, so we figured we’d take some of theirs for the weekend.

But it was a very successful weekend, I think. We saw some photos of the inside of the conference. It seemed to be very sparsely attended, to say the least. The opening night was supposed to be the big night. That was the night where entry was free, open to the public, as long as you just registered, and videos from inside of the lecture hall where the UN ambassador, Gilad Erdan, and our governor, Jared Polis, gave the opening remarks for the conference. There were a lot of empty seats in there.

I think that our march on Saturday easily had more attendees than their conference. So I would call their conference a fail. I don’t think we were able to shut it down. But, I think it made them look very bad. I think it made our governor look very bad.

On Sunday during our car rally, somebody spotted that there was somebody who had been attending the conference wearing an extremely racist T-shirt that called for the murder of Arabs.

I’m happy to send you that photo. It’s kind of been making the rounds online. But he was standing right next to someone wearing a Global Conference for Israel lanyard. So it seems like these are the people who our governor decided to align himself with and spend the weekend with, which is very shameful.

But yeah, we would consider our actions a huge success for this weekend. And we also plan to follow them wherever they might go, whatever city they end up in next year. We definitely plan to connect with the organizers there and make sure that the JNF knows that they’re not welcome anywhere they go here.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, again, like you said, I think so much of it is just raising that awareness with people in the community to know that the JNF is not some benign organization.

And I’m curious, too, because we’ve talked about on this show in the past, in particular, projects like Operation Butterfly which, the whole goal was, you know, Netanyahu working with Americans like Adelson to ensure that there was a crackdown on any kind of critique of Israel, both in thought and an action.

And we see this happening across the country. Also, we see it happening in Europe. Waving a Palestinian flag in Germany is basically illegal. So I’m curious, with this collective effort by Israel and the United States and indeed many parts of Europe to make anti Zionism illegal and solidarity with Palestine illegal, especially on college campuses, what is the status now of y’all’s organization and how are you looking ahead and organizing, understanding that it’s getting to the point where it’s not even safe to be in support of Palestinian liberation?

Abdullah Elagha: Eleanor, well, that’s one way to look at it. The way I look at it is that there has never been this much energy around the liberation of Palestine ever before. There has never been this big of a collective shift of how the world sees Palestine, ever.

Sure, you can look at dying institutions like the mainstream media and the programs that they peddle, and it might look like we’re getting buried or we’re losing. But the framing has shifted big time. And, and I think that we are starting to win the information war, despite the fact that there is a huge machine working against us.

Sure, it’s scary to be a student on a college campus and have your future threatened for speaking out about Palestine. I’m not a student, I’m a professional, but I had a complaint filed against me at work because of my activism and because of how outspoken I am. But we’re not deterred.

You know, if the people of Gaza can survive this genocide for two months, we won’t be deterred. If the people of Palestine can survive ethnic cleansing for 75 years, we won’t be deterred. So, we see these as the dying breaths of a colonial empire, and just their last attempts to save themselves.

It’s funny that you mentioned Netanyahu and his efforts to silence dissent here in the United States. I’m not sure if you or your listeners know this, but I think 31 states have laws on the books that make it in some way, shape or form illegal to boycott Israel.

They’re anti BDS laws. BDS is boycott divest sanction. So there are anti BDS laws in 31 states that essentially prevent you from boycotting Israel, which this is the most peaceful type of protest that one can have. There are zero laws that prevent you from boycotting American products.

So, it’s really interesting to see this. I know just here in the Colorado legislature, so many of our representatives have Israeli flags sitting on their desks in the House of Representatives. Many people have pulled up with Israeli flag pins.

You know, what would be the consensus if these were Russian flags, if these were Chinese flags? I think people would be losing their heads. You know, we have this foreign flag that’s flying in almost every single one of our legislative halls. It’s illegal to speak out against this foreign country.

Their lobby is probably the most powerful lobby here in America. And yet we just accept that as normal. I find that very disturbing to say the least. And I think that people are kind of waking up and starting to realize that all these pieces fit together.

And the picture that is becoming clearer and clearer by the day is one of apartheid, is one of ethnic cleansing, and is one of genocide.

And I do think that millions of people have been woken up to these truths, and millions more continue to wake up to them every day.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, that’s incredibly well put. And, we’ve just recently had on the show, Abby Martin, who was able to shoot down one of those such laws when she was asked to sign that before speaking. I mean, she was literally asked to sign something that said that she was not going to speak ill of Israel.

This is absurd. If you again, like you said, if you replace that with any other country, China, Russia, even like a random one, like Venezuela, it’d be so arbitrary and absurd. And yet we we are expected as Americans to have this kind of loyalty to a country that we supposedly have no ties to.

But as you’ve mentioned, with colonialism, basically, Israel cannot support itself without the support of the United States. And of course, that’s why it’s so important that we as Americans, whether we’re citizens or residents, it’s so important for us to fight the state of Israel because we as these children of Empire have a role and an opportunity to topple apartheid.

Abdullah Elagha: And just yesterday Netanyahu put out a statement where he said, I have three requests for President Joe Biden: munitions, munitions, munitions. If it was not for the material support of the United States, this genocide would have been over within the first week. Israel does not have the capacity to carry out like this.

This is hysterical bombing. This is absurd. Bombing, it literally does not stop. Talking to my family in Gaza they say that it literally does not stop. There is not a moment of peace, and they simply cannot keep this up without the support of the United States.

So when people see us in the streets, very often, they say, you know, why are you out here protesting? How does this affect us? Even UN ambassador for Israel, Gilad Erdan, while he was here, he gave an interview and he said, he basically was addressing us. He basically was addressing protesters and saying, why are you protesting? Do you not enjoy freedom? Well, I would say we’re protesting because we very much love freedom.

And people in Palestine are not free and their struggle is completely intertwined with ours. So that’s why it’s imperative for us to continue using our voices and continue being out in the streets, and trying to change what is something that is very changeable for us.

Joe Biden can pick up the phone tomorrow and say that this is over and it would be over. Ronald Reagan did it in the eighties. When Israel was bombing south of Lebanon, he literally picked up the phone and he said, stop and they stopped. Joe Biden has the power to do this. He chooses instead to enable it. So that’s why we do what we do.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for that context as well.

And so, Abdullah, wrapping up here, I’m curious, how do you feel that people can best get engaged, even folks that are not in Colorado, of course, get engaged with this, and what is the best way to follow what y’all are doing and, keep in touch with regards to perhaps next year’s, conference and things like that?

Abdullah Elagha: Yeah. So for folks in Colorado, I would say to follow our Instagram page at coPalestineco that’s coPalestineco, all one word. That’s our instagram page. That’s our twitter. All of our constituent organizations are also linked there. I think we’re up to 25 constituent organizations, which is amazing.

We’ve grown so much over the past few months, and we definitely will have a lot more things planned. We don’t plan on stopping anytime soon.

For folks outside of Colorado, you know, the beautiful thing about what has otherwise been an absolute horror and tragedy is that the Palestinian movement really has grown in the United States.

There are organizations popping up everywhere. So I guarantee you wherever you are, there’s an organization nearby. And I would really just implore people to get involved and get organized, join a local organization, even if it’s not strictly a Palestinian organization. Lots of human rights organizations and more left leaning organizations are very much in support of all liberation.

So I would recommend that people just get organized and get more connected with their community. Our division is their strength. So we really need to be as united as ever, as connected as ever this struggle.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, absolutely. And, for my fellow Jews out there, I know that I’ve mentioned this on the show before, but Jewish Voice for Peace does great work, and they have chapters all over the place, so check that out. And, Abdullah, thank you so much for taking the time, for putting all this in context, and for sitting down with us. I really, really appreciate it.

Abdullah Elagha: Thank you so much, Eleanor. And I am going to shout out Jewish Voice for Peace Denver Boulder chapter. They are absolutely incredible people. They held an amazing action this past weekend. It was actually at the exact same time that the JNF was holding a press conference here in Denver at the convention center, where they were calling us anti Semites and saying that we were attacking Jews.

Right outside of that, 16 Jews were arrested for protesting for Palestine. So, the writing is on the wall and I just really want to shout out my Jewish siblings. Y’all have been doing incredible work, especially in the arena of decoupling Zionism and Judaism. So thank you to all my Jewish siblings and thank you to you, Eleanor for taking the time today to chat with me. I really appreciate it.

If you enjoyed the show, please consider becoming a patron of our work at Patreon.com/ProjectCensored

Please consider becoming a patron of our work at Patreon.com/ProjectCensored

Eleanor Goldfield: Thanks everyone for joining us back at the Project Censored radio show. We’re very glad right now to be joined by Justin Nobel who writes on science and environment for U.S. magazines, literary journals, and investigative sites.

His seven year investigation into the radioactivity brought to the surface in oil and gas production and the various pathways of contamination posed to the industry’s workers, public, and communities and the environment is entitled Petroleum 238: Big Oil’s Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It, and will be published in April 2024.

Justin, thanks so much for joining us.

Justin Nobel: Thank you, Eleanor. I really appreciate it.

Eleanor Goldfield: So, at Project Censored, we’re all about uncovering secrets, as the name suggests. And as your forthcoming book points out, this could very well be the secret of the century. So, let’s start with this.

I mean, it’s no secret to those even partially in the know that fracking is incredibly destructive to people and planet: the fact that pipelines are essentially ticking time bobs that can cause miles wide explosions, methane gas emissions. Fracking causes earthquakes, et cetera, uses millions of gallons of precious fresh water. But what isn’t known, and therefore not discussed, even in smaller anti fracking circles, is the issue of radioactive waste linked to fracking.

So, let’s discuss that. How did you first find out about this issue?

Justin Nobel: Yeah, first let me say I really appreciate Project Censored. I appreciate all projects that really attempt to go at the media landscape in the world in a creative, investigative way. There’s really like two elements necessary here, an artistic kind of risk taking element and then the guts and grit of investigative journalism.

And I think the lack of that in the general media landscape is in part why this issue has remained below the surface for so long. A beat reporter at the big newspapers in the United States, like the New York Times or Washington Post, sometimes can get close to this topic, but really, they scratch the surface, and you need to just have the energy to just keep going and keep digging and keep digging.

So I, I had lived in Louisiana for some time and reported on the petrochemical industry and offshore oil and gas industry. And, in Louisiana, you really become aware quite quickly of how complicated oil and gas is, right? It’s not just like this stuff comes up and goes to a plant and then it’s in your car.

There’s all sorts of really complex, and when I say complex, I mean also massively polluting infrastructure that is involved with it. And it’s planted right there next to humans. And in Louisiana, that’s particularly evident.

And when I moved up to the Northeast and became aware of fracking I assessed oil and gas with those same eyes, and that was the big environmental issue in the Northeastern part of the US: unconventional oil and gas development, fracking in the Marcellus Utica.

And the early revelation is that there is a lot more that comes to the surface than just the oil and gas. And that has been the way since the industry first started, which in Pennsylvania, the first commercial oil well was 1859.

You have this really salty, toxic waste stream that comes up with oil and gas. The industry refers to that as oilfield brine. It’s a kind of innocent sounding name. But oilfield brine is filled with not just toxic levels of salt, but heavy metals, including radium, which is a naturally occurring heavy metal.

And in the early days of the industry, that waste stream was just literally discharged right into an unlined pit next to the well, into streams, onto farm fields.

In North Dakota, which is a state where like 90 percent of the land is farmland, there still is massive contamination from oilfield brine during the 1950s. I mean, this is biblical. You salt your neighbor’s land, you destroy your neighbor’s land. And this is what the industry has done with conventional, before we even get to fracking.

The problem now is that there’s a lot more waste. There’s a lot more drilling, and there’s also a lot more drilling happening closer to human beings. And so this waste which the industry never had a handle on, even before the fracking boom, the industry is now trying to grapple with something they didn’t know how to do well before, that is coming in greater and greater amounts, and also more and more toxic.

Because we’re dealing with oil fields that are more radioactive, and also fracking uses a lot of toxic chemicals, and that can also come back up with this waste stream.

That’s just the beginning, but part of why I think it’s remained below the surface for journalists as well.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, and I want to get into several points that you touched on, but starting with just what kind of levels are we talking about here? In one of your articles, you remark on West Virginia’s “Chernobyl,” which is an abandoned fracking site that now hosts teenage raves and parties.

Realistically, what are the radioactivity levels that we’re talking about here and how large then are those areas?

Justin Nobel: Yeah, it’s a really great point. So radioactivity is really interesting. We live on a mildly radioactive planet. We don’t necessarily realize it, but embedded in the rocks of earth are uranium and thorium. These are very long lived radioactive elements, which means it takes them a long time to decay and blast out their radiation.

Other radioactive elements in the earth like radon, a naturally occurring radioactive gas, have much shorter half lives, which just means, think of a radioactive element.

It’s unstable, so at some point it will shoot off a little piece of itself, that’s called radiation, you don’t want to be near it when that happens, and having literally lost a piece of itself, It then becomes a different element. And that element may also be radioactive.

Oil and gas just happens to bring some very worrisome radioactive elements to the surface. So mixed in with that brine is radium. Unlike the uranium and thorium, radium is moderately soluble with water. And high salt content in brine actually helps kick radium out from deep in the earth, pull it into the brine. And when oil and gas is drawn to the surface, you get this potentially radium rich brine coming to the surface as well.

So what are the levels? EPA is so concerned about radium, they have limited the level of radium in drinking water to 5 picocuries per liter. Picocuries per liter, named for Marie Curie. And that’s one of the big units for measuring radioactivity. So you just remember the number five. EPA is really worried about radium. You don’t want it higher than five in drinking water. The average radium levels in Marcellus brine are around 9 to 10,000 picocuries per liter and can be as high as 28,500.

So you think, well, that’s clearly really bad, but you’re not going to drink brine. But again, we can look at other definitions. EPA has defined radioactive waste, the word, what is radioactive waste. And according to each specific isotope of each radioactive element; radium has two, and to get that, those figures I just gave you, you add those two together.

But for each separate one, radium 226 and radium 228, EPA’s limit for radioactive waste is 60, and if we look at the specific isotopes, again, in the Marcellus, the levels are typically in the thousands to even tens of thousands.

So we’re dealing with what clearly has a danger because you don’t even want to drink a drop of that or something much less concentrated than the brine is, and workers, by the way, are constantly getting splashed all over their face with this stuff. But it’s legitimately, it is radioactive waste, according to EPA’s own definition.

Now, what happens is there’s another really, from their perspective, a genius thing the industry did in the late 1970s. The US was dealing with this big industrial waste problem. There was dumping in the oceans, dumping in the rivers, and government wanted to deal with that, so they came up with an act called the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and this is really important for everything now with oil and gas.

The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act was going to decide what industrial waste streams were hazardous and what were non hazardous. So if you’re an industry producing a lot of waste, you have a tremendous incentive to make sure your waste is defined as non hazardous. It’s going to keep your costs down immeasurably. And that’s exactly what the oil and gas industry did.

So it doesn’t matter how radioactive the brine is, and some of the even more radioactive waste streams, which I’ll get to in a moment, does not matter how radioactive they are. By U.S. law, they are non hazardous.

So the brine is bad. What happened at that plant in West Virginia is they’re trying to treat the brine, right? And again, an Achilles heel for the industry for decades: brine, how do you deal with it? Right now, what mostly happens is it’s taken via truck or pipeline to injection wells.

Injection wells are highly problematic facilities. In my book, I spent a lot of time completely dismantling them. I mean, there is no grounded science to say you can inject toxic radioactive waste mixed with unknown fracking chemicals deep into the earth at extraordinary high levels and have it not leak all over the place.

And that is what’s happening now in Oklahoma, in Texas, in Ohio, and really anywhere where there are injection wells. That’s a problem. So the industry recognizes that’s a problem. And injection wells are actually one of the few things where if you go to oil and gas country, people will say, you know, I’m for the drilling, that’s good jobs.

But I don’t like the injection wells. I don’t like the waste. And the asterix to me is like, well, that’s inevitable with the oil and gas, but people don’t like them. And the industry has recognized that.

And so they try to quote, treat the waste, which means you’re going to take it to a facility where you’re going to process it in some way. And you’re going to try to remove the contaminants, remove the bad stuff. And, you know, then you have quote, distilled water, which can be maybe reused to frack new wells, or can be discharged after some tests are taken to get a certain EPA permit, discharged right back into rivers, the same rivers we rely on for drinking water.

Now, the problem there is, brine, again, is really complex. It has a very complicated geochemical signature. It’s not like aking like taking a Brita and you pour water that maybe has a weird smell and then it kind of tastes better. Like it’s so complex that anytime you try and treat it, it’s going to really gunk up the treatment equipment. And that’s what I’ve seen time and again across the oil fields from Texas to Oklahoma.

But there’s this weird union with this entrepreneurial cowboy American spirit where you got these guys, and it often is guys, saying, I can treat brine. I know how to do that. You know, I know Buck and he knows engineering and like this could happen at a bar, and literally probably often does, and Joe as a company and we’re going to put together a company.

We’re going to get some funders and we’re going to process oil field waste. And these things come together in small ways, which is kind of like Fairmont Brine, it’s a local Pittsburgh engineering company that was involved.

And sometimes major ways. Another story I recently wrote about was a project of Veolia, which is a very savvy, multinational firm based in Paris. Their office has won design awards and has all these courtyards and probably free croissants everywhere.

And if you go to their website, they talk about we’re really trying to save the world on climate change, ocean pollution. They tried to set up a fracking waste treatment plant and theirs failed as well.

And so the reporting gem of Fairmont Brine is I started to realize in my reporting, I know these things are problematic, I know they’re probably creating major hazards for community, the communities where they are, and the workers, but you don’t really have access to them. Even if they’re failed, there’s security gates around it.

Fairmont Brine was just completely open, and so I was able to go in there with a really great local activist and organizer named Jill Hunkler. She has a group called Ohio Valley Allies and Dr. Uri Gorby, a scientist who used to work on radioactivity with the Department of Energy and is from Northern West Virginia.

So just a really good group. He has a Geiger counter. He knew what precautions to take and we could walk around this place and take samples. You never kind of, you never have that.

The scary thing is other locals, as you mentioned, they’re walking around too. And it really is one of the most outrageous sites I’ve ever seen in oil and gas country. I mean, I could see why kids go there. It’s this weird, rambly, broken down industrial facility. There’s like random pools of water. Someone, I don’t know how they did it, crashed a speedboat into this pit.

But as we test everything, everything is radioactive. And some of the things are wildly radioactive. And to give you an idea of levels, some of the levels found there, the radioactivity levels are so high that just hanging out there for like a couple days, and workers would be hanging out there for half a day, would put you above yearly Nuclear Regulatory Commission radiation limits.

And the workers also get smothered in it, so they bring it home to their families as well. This is a legitimate concern.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, of course. Wow, that’s…phew. I mean, there’s so much there and I’m curious too, so this is specifically the attempt to clean up brine, right?

And so what is the industry response to this then? Like, oh, well, screw it. We’re just not going to worry about it because they end up failing anyway. Like, what’s happening in the industry right now with regards to this?

Justin Nobel: It’s a great question. So right now, this idea of treatment is the new trend.

Again, injection wells are still where most of the oilfield brine is going. And just to give you a quick idea, like oilfield brine, how much? About three billion gallons a day across the U.S. That’s a trillion gallons a year.

If you put that waste water into the standard oil barrel, which is, you know, like waist high and stack those barrels on top of each other, you’d reach the moon and back almost 22 times. That’s one year’s worth of oil filled wastewater. So that’s a lot of stuff to get rid of.

And yes, treatment is the new game. Even though all these other projects have failed, you still have this gusto that we can treat it. I just talked to people in New Mexico with a really great advocacy group out there and I was telling them about the West Virginia story and they’re like, well, New Mexico people are gonna say well that’s West Virginia, we can do it better.

I’ve been to New Mexico. Waste treatment plants are disastrous. And there’s no doubt workers are getting contaminated there. I just haven’t been in that area long enough to build rapport and really dig into what’s happening.

But yes, this is concerning the industry, even if a plant fails, and this again is where you get this interesting psychology of the oil and gas industry, like they think they can fix anything, they think they can do anything.

And even if it’s broken, they’ll just say, well, that guy didn’t know it as well as me. But they don’t change it that much when they try the next iteration. It’s a massive problem.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah. And there’s a lot of psychology to dig in there for sure. But I’m also curious because I have done nowhere near as much research as you have, and that’s why I’m curious to hear your perspective on this.

So you mentioned radium specifically, and I know that the fracking industry likes to have their proprietary blends, right? Like, the contents of these proprietary blends of chemicals are kept tightly under wraps under the guise of them being “trade secrets.”

But ultimately this means that then the public, we have no idea what’s actually poisoning us.

So you mentioned radium. Is there any evidence or questions as to what might be involved in this that we don’t know because we’re not allowed to know what’s in these cocktails?

Justin Nobel: Yeah, and radioactivity is something I chose to focus on and do such a deep dive on because you can actually track it in really interesting ways and in ways that you cannot do with other oil filled contaminants like benzene, which is a known human carcinogen, and also in oil filled waste pulled up with oil and gas. It’s hurting oil field workers and people who live nearby.

It’s harder to put a fingerprint on benzene in the way you can do for radium. But what else is in there is a really important question. One of the oil field waste truck drivers I’m in touch with, and much of the best information always is going to come from workers who are like, well, I’m the guy who deals with this in my truck, let me tell you how it’s done.

And he is much more worried about the fracking chemicals because just like you said, they’re unknown and often they can have more immediate effects. Whereas the radium, and this again is this kind of macho culture, that will kill me in 20 years. Well, it actually might be five or 10, but the fracking chemicals can kill you sooner.

One of the first sources on this was an oil field waste hauler named Randy Moyer. So what he had to do, he had this horrible job. He would go into frack tanks, and this is actually his description of it. They would tie a rope around him and give him a squeegee and a shovel and he goes inside these tanks.

And if you picture a brine tank, there’s a lot of sediments in brine so the worst stuff is in the sediments. They settle out to the bottom as a sludge. Eventually that sludge has to be cleaned. That’s a job a human does. Randy goes in and the rope is so if he passes out or dies, his coworker can pull him out.

And Randy got this crazy burn coz at one point he was standing in this stuff, like up to his knees and he got this horrible chemical burn up to his knees. No doctor could tell him what that was. That I do not think was radioactivity. That was some chemical in the fracking waste, and he could not get a valid medical analysis.

And it almost was absurd that the opinions he got were like, maybe you ate some bad take out and you got a rash from that. Randy suffered tremendously. He was in and out of the ER and he passed away two years ago.

So what you mentioned, it’s really serious. I mean, it’s real and there’s no resolution. And a case like Randy should not be a medical mystery, and instead it’s just kind of written off and forgotten.

So that’s the importance of knowing what’s in fracking wastewater means that you can actually then identify in workers. And that’s what the industry doesn’t want. I mean, that’s why they just don’t want you to know anything, because once you know things, you can start to put together the pieces.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, absolutely.

And you also have mentioned in your writing, the supposed overseers of the fracking industry, PHMSA and FERC. And I myself have done quite a bit of protesting outside of FERC. But as you note as well, they’re totally captured agencies.

Has there been any hearings or any kind of movement on this specific issue?

I mean, I remember there have been a couple of times that I went to FERC and people were carrying water, you know, drinking water and showing that it was flammable or just showing that it looked like something you would pull out of a coal slurry. Have there been hearings about this specific issue or is it just dead silence?

Justin Nobel: Yeah, no, really great question there. What is exciting about this journalism is because not a lot of other journalists are so deep in this topic, it puts me in touch with scientists, with community organizers with really great grassroots groups. And then, after the article’s published, they asked me maybe to come back to the community and talk, and I love that. I love these in the real world moments, especially if it’s with a local group like that.

And these groups then carry it forward. So they have educated themselves and there’s, especially in the Marcellus Utica area in Northern Appalachia and Pennsylvania and Ohio, there are really good grassroots groups that are carrying this forward.

Center for Coalfield Justice is one, Mountain Watershed Association, both in Pennsylvania. In Ohio, Buckeye Environmental Network, a really great smaller group called Torch Can Do in rural Eastern Ohio. And these groups are trying to push legislation. They do have some allies, especially in Pennsylvania, in the state house. There is good movement on that.

And you bring up FERC and PHMSA. There is a group in New York several years back called Sane Energy that was really alert to the radioactivity issue. And there’s this kind of amazing forgotten story from their movement back in like 2012 that I tell in the book with major interesting ramifications for New York City. And they did stuff. I mean, they protested and covered themselves with green, radioactive looking paint. I mean, they were hip to it and they really put this topic center, front and center. But it takes the knowledge.

So that’s why I feel like I love this opportunity. I love any opportunity to help get it out there. I think once it is out there and people understand, they do move forward in really effective ways with this issue.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, and I think one of the things that I really appreciate as well is that you focus not just on what this does to communities and ecosystems, but to the workers as well.

Because I think a lot of times that can get lost, and I know that having been on the front lines of environmental fights, it can feel, and sometimes it often is the case that the workers are against you, and yet that’s why we need that important framing of: this is harming all of us and we all have a right to work and live in safe environments.

And so I really appreciate that about your work. And so there are organizations that have it covered from the I don’t want this happening in my community perspective. Are there unions or worker’s groups that you’ve been in touch with that are also bringing this up from the worker’s rights perspective?

Justin Nobel: Yeah, on that issue, first, I just want to say your film did that so well on West Virginia. I mean, I was in tears. The voices of people who can see things from both ends can be very, very powerful. And, the workers did that. And those are often the voices I look for as well. Because you’re right.

I mean, in the end, talking about environmentalism, and you bring this up too in the movie. You know, people in West Virginia know the species of every tree, of all the frogs. They have all the streams named. I mean, they are much more environmentally in tune than most other people in the country.

So they really are in line with the people who care about the environment in a different way and are trying to block some of these toxic projects. But they also, they don’t have what you just mentioned. They don’t have unions. They don’t have support within the workplace to foster that kind of homegrown environmentalism that if they have at home, it isn’t really translated.

And that’s why I think one of the surprising things is when workers realize what is happening they actually do speak out. They reach out and they’re really angry, they’re really alarmed, and they do go against the industry, and they’re really, at times concerned, but they are eager to tell their stories.

And just one example with the West Virginia story. After I published the article we’re talking about all these workers started coming out. Usually there’s like one, maybe two, and no one wants to go on the record. In this case, a whole bunch came out and two are fully on the record and their stories are just astonishing.

And that’s going to be published in a follow up article with truthdig. But one thing most of them told me is like, we were really proud of this plan. We thought we really were cleaning fracking waste and you know, they know oil and gas has problems. They have kids. And were making the world better by helping the industry deal with this problem.

And the article was like this big smack in the face that, well, no, you actually weren’t doing that. And they knew there were problems with the plant. So the article helped synthesize all these issues they were experiencing over the years. But not only that, you contaminated yourself in the process, which is a hard pill to swallow.

Of this specific facility, two of the workers, and there aren’t that many workers who work at plants like this, two of the workers have already died from cancer, one stomach cancer and one brain cancer. And when I learned the process, it makes sense. Again, you’re taking contaminants, radioactive ones, out of a waste stream and the workers are describing to me a work environment that is filled with this salty dust, and they are breathing that in 12 hours a day. I mean, the exposure potential there is outrageous, and then getting splashed with it and contaminated in other ways. So it’s really, they do get hit the hardest.

But, as far as the organizing, I think that is the next step. For example, Center for Coalfield Justice is really, I think, on the front lines of really trying to connect with workers and help tell the story through them and not just step out and say, like, you know, ban oil and gas. They would never say anything like that. But again, the little asterisk point is if you do this well, the industry actually can’t do it. So it would be banned, right?

Eleanor Goldfield: And that kind of leads me to this last question here, which is how do you feel that, I mean, your book hasn’t come out yet, but especially with people reacting and responding to your articles, which I think is so powerful and obviously it shows the importance of investigative journalism.

How have people been feeling about what does the future look like then if we don’t, if we can’t do this in the proper way, what kind of future are we going to have? Has there been conversations about just transitions or what can we look at instead of fracking?

Justin Nobel: Yeah. I mean, I think again, West Virginia is a good place to examine that. When I was there reporting on Paula Jean Swearengin’s campaign which was some years back, this woman running a grassroots campaign against Joe Manchin. A coal miner’s daughter, and I got to see a really cool grassroots side of the state.

And yeah, there’s interesting things people are trying to do on mountaintop removal sites in terms of products they can grow that can make energy, that can make food. There’s really good conversations happening, I think, across Appalachia. They might not rise to the surface, and they don’t have the money behind them.

You know, the problem when you report enough is you realize like, oh, the people with the best ideas aren’t the guys on Wall Street who are chucking the projects around.

Where I live now, there’s all these solar plants coming in, I think which is good. Like farming has diminished in this area, there’s all these open spaces and we need energy. And I think, all the country has to take a little bit of the burden of supplying it, not just Appalachia and places like that anymore. But it’s like, who are these companies? And then you see they’re these kind of like shady companies coming in from Texas.

So that’s a systemic problem. It’s a structural problem that somehow these people smell the money and the funds, and they’re the ones who jump in and the person with the cool idea on how to turn mountaintop removal mining into different fields of hemp that can be grown and a million beautiful things can happen with it, they can’t get the funding.

And so, it’s something that has to be worked on on many levels, but I think ideas are there. It’s just helping make sure they’re the ones that get put into practice and not just another version of an extractive economy, even if it’s slightly greener.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, green capitalism, as it stands.

Well, Justin, thank you so much for taking the time and outlining this. This is horrifying, but also, of course, as we like to say on Project Censored, if you don’t know about it, you can’t fight it. So, where is the best place for people to follow your work?

Justin Nobel: Yeah, I gotta be more out there, I guess.

I still am on Twitter, and I write regularly for Rolling Stone, for Truthdig, and for DeSmog. And the book, it’s going to be a major way. That’s going to be all of this tied together across the country. And that comes out April 24th.

It was going to be published by Simon and Schuster, but then they were bought by a private equity company called KKR with massive investments in oil and gas.

So I pulled the book and we’re now doing it ourself. But yeah, the title, you just Google that and get an advanced copy or go to your local bookstore and make sure they order it. That is a super way to make sure that you’re going to be there and get the information.

The title is Petroleum 238, Big Oil’s, Dangerous Secret, and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It.

Eleanor Goldfield: Awesome. Well, yes. Go to your local bookstore, folks.

Justin, thank you so much again for taking the time, and for covering this topic.

Justin Nobel: Yeah. Thank you Eleanor. Really nice to talk.

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