Friends, I want to tell you the very disturbing news of a new corporate-driven scheme to poison you, your family and your pets with radioactive waste. 

Aqua Salina is a product you can purchase by the gallon at Lowe’s or a hardware store right now. It’s also sold in huge quantities to department of transportation regional garages for use as a de-icer. It’s bottled in the Cleveland area by an owner of several oil and gas wells. Aqua Salina has been sold for several years.

It is called "brine," marketed as “ancient sea water;” and it is bottled radioactive waste. Depending on the concentrations of radioactive toxins in this "ancient sea water," it is called "NORM" (naturally-occurring radioactive material) or "TENORM" (technologically-enhanced naturally-occurring radioactive material). Here's a page from the website of the seller and distributor of this poisonous stuff:   

http://naturesownsource.com/product-information/

Here's how I know Aqua Salina is radioactive waste.  Scientists at the Ohio Department of Natural Resources - an agency generally viewed as owned by Ohio's oil and gas industry, analyzed Aqua Salina in 2017.  I’ve attached their report. Samples of Aqua Salina bought right off the shelf ranged as high as 500 times background radiation in Radium-226 and -228.  The average of the samples tested by ODNR were 300 times federal drinking water limits for Radium-226.

Why is any of this significant?  Well, those of you who know me know that I’ve litigated against fracking for years. And I've learned that oil and gas drilling, using fracking pulls enormous amounts of radium to the surface, mostly in liquid form.  Radium-226 is a major radioisotope in the liquid and solid drilling wastes brought to surface to get natural gas and oil. Ra-226 is especially dangerous because unlike a lot of radioactive isotopes, it dissolves readily in water. If you drink water containing Ra-226, the body incorrectly recognizes it is as dissolved calcium and deposits it in bone tissue. Ra-226 is an “alpha particle emitter,” meaning that an atom of it is energetic enough that it will electrically bombard surrounding cell tissues and cause cell mutations.  Cell mutations often become cancers, also called blastomas.  Ra-226 causes bone cancer. In fact, radon gas - radium in gas form - is the second leading cause of lung cancer in the U.S.  We all know the first leading cause of lung cancer is smoking, but few people know that the tobacco plant concentrates Ra-226 as it takes up nutrients from the soil.  Smoking involves inhalation of Radium-226.

On May 15, 2018, a committee in the Ohio House of Representatives voted House Bill 393 out of committee for a floor vote. HB 393 would prohibit any regulation whatsoever of the sales of “ancient seawater” aka cancer causing brine if the seller makes a one-time paperwork filing showing that this radioactive waste has been approved for use elsewhere. And it has, so the approval by ODNR is a given.

But this legislation not only would legalize sales of radioactive waste as a commodity; it also would give bulletproof protection to the drilling industry against liability. They already sell fracking waste by the hundreds of thousands, even millions of gallons, for use as a dust control device on hot country roads in the summer, and as a de-icer on highways in the winter.  And for those who don’t understand that they are purchasing radioactive waste, it is used, right now, on residential driveways, patios and sidewalks as a deicer.

And when people finally wake up to the fact that we're drowning in radioactive deicer and dust control, they will have a huge roadblock to filing suit, courtesy of the Ohio General Assembly. Unless we do something now.

This is not just a matter of diluting a little radium in a lot of water. It will take roughly 11,000 years, give or take a decade or so, for all the Ra-226 in Aqua Salina being applied today to roads and sidewalks and driveways to disintegrate down to background levels.  And it only takes a few atoms of radium in your drinking water - which, incidentally, cannot for the most part successfully be filtered to remove radium - for the body to deposit Ra-226 in your bone tissues and commence the process of destroying you and your family. So lots and lots of Ra-226 will be washing through Ohio's surface and subsurface water for the next 11,000 years or so, plenty of time to kill and destroy the health and lives of millions.

The oil and gas industry is eager for HB 393 to pass because fracking creates an enormous amount of liquid and solid waste, most of it radioactive.  And it costs a lot to get rid of it. The frackers don’t like to pay to get rid of radioactive waste if they can get away with poisoning you and your family for free. Indeed, some of them profit, now, from selling it!

When your city or township or state highway garage buys this stuff for ice control, the recommended spray is 30 to 50 or so gallons per lane/mile. Understand? If you’re driving on a six-lane Ohio Turnpike, there are 180 to 300 gallons sprayed on the roadway per mile.  This radioactive waste then unavoidably washes into streams, wetlands, rivers and lakes. And we all live downstream.

Attached are the ODNR laboratory results, the Sierra Club testimony against the use of this radioactive waste, and House Bill 393. Don’t be put off by the length of HB 393. Only the underlined part, beginning on page 4/11 of the pdf, is the new change.  You can see for yourself that once a good housekeeping seal of approval is filed with ODNR, the agency is flatly prohibited from regulating this radioactive waste any further.

Our political system, once again, contrives to poison and kill us to make a buck - actually, millions of them. And while I thank and respect the Sierra Club for its opposition to HB 393, we don’t need “better regulation” or “ODH regulation” of this poisonous radwaste. It should be flatly and completely illegal to sell it as a commodity at all, with serious criminal penalties. We will not consent to a little poisoning. A little poisoning is more than enough to kill.

Whether we work together to stop this - by initiating local and state laws to neutralize the General Assembly and voting the political thieves, brigands and corporate poisoners out of office and by sitting down and sitting in at the Statehouse - whether any of that happens or not is keaup to you and me.

How much longer will we let corporations and their hack politicians poison us for profit?