oil & gas companies produce tons of literal radioactive waste and then sell it to rural towns to spread it on roads as de-icer. radium. fucking radium. radium on the roads, in the water, in the soil. radiation in the cornfields. nobody is warned, nobody is told, nobody knows to check for fucking radium. this shit will outlive us. that dirt is radioactive forever. this isnt shit you can undo. xxxxxx
This article was published in 2020
Here is a more recent article about efforts to prevent this
With climate change, winters are getting icier due to frequent temperature ups and downs and extreme weather events. We can get 12 inches of snow one weekend and wake up Monday morning with yards flooded because now it’s 40 degrees but later that night we’ll need brine because it dips to 10 and now all that water is a sheet of ice. My sidewalk was a hard flat sheet of ice for at least a week this winter. When it gets cold enough, salt doesn’t work as well if at all and we resort to brine. However, these are both disastrous to Lake Erie. Not just radioactivity but the Great Lakes are freshwater lakes and the salt and brine runoff have been increasing the salinity of Lake Erie and Lake Michigan to the point where you can almost taste it.
This on top of agricultural runoff increasing phosphorous levels in the lakes leading to incredibly toxic algae blooms every summer. (Toxic to the point where fish wash up dead and your dog may die if you let it go in the lake).
I don’t really have any resources or anything. But our Great Lakes and freshwater natural sources are dying due to salting, brining, and fertilizer runoff.
