Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

In my day, never was longer.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Republicans can’t even be trusted with their own money.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

“I never thought they’d lock HIM up,” sobbed a distraught member of the Lock Her Up Party.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Second rate reporter says what?

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

Take your GOP plan out of the witness protection program.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

Everybody saw this coming.

You are here: Home / Economics / Free Markets Solve Everything / Everything You Wanted to Know About Radioactive Wastewater

Everything You Wanted to Know About Radioactive Wastewater

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And how gas drillers are dumping it in your sewage treatment plants, where they are completely unprepared to handle it, and simply pass on all the toxic water for you all to drink. Pennsylvania’s response, as we have noted, was to suspend regulations. That way we can play a solid game of hoocoodanode later on.

I love the smell of the free market in the morning. Smells like… tumors.

Although I’m just sure I overlooked the way the free market can handle this more effectively than public regulators. Surely I just missed all the Reason pieces about this that were no doubt up in between all their posts defending the Koch brothers.

Reader Interactions

44Comments

  1. 1.

    Xboxershorts

    Where the hell was the NY Times when they rammed the frack exemptions through congress in 2005?

    bet hey, at least they’re on the case now.

  2. 2.

    Brazilian Rascal

    You can sue the bastards! If you have the time to spare and the money to face their legal team, staffed by velociraptors in armani suits. And after tort reform, you might get all of 25 grand!

    As my commie teacher used to say back in college, if you hate the US and want to see it destroyed, help them elect and re-elect free-market republicans again and again.

  4. 4.

    Hypnos

    So the Republican plan is basically for Americans to have no affordable health care and then dump radioactive material in their drinking water.

    You know science fiction author David Brin has a pet conspiracy theory where Saudi and Russian petro-oligarchs have taken over the Republican party – via its executive arm Fox news – and are actively undermining American society from within.

    He’s obviously joking.

    But still, it’s clear that the Republican party really fucking hates American. Islamist terrorists the world over are probably thinking to themselves why should they risk their lives trying to smuggle a dirty bomb into the USA when you guys seem to be getting ahead with the plan so well on your own.

  5. 5.

    Kryptik

    Dude, the free market will take care of it, if your water is that shitty, just buy more bottled water and take baths rather than showers! Free market solutions for everything, dude!

  6. 6.

    Mike E

    Civil engineers give our failing infrastructure appropriate D grades when assessing our society’s ability to deliver potable water, and take away nasty water to be suitably processed for general health. Your local wastewater treatment plant is easily thwarted by a good rainfall, just a 0.25″ of a cloudburst, when it comes to routinely keeping fecal matter from dumping back into streams and rivers. Hardly anyone is talking about this.

  7. 7.

    Bill H.

    Just to dispel your ideas that I’m sort of right wing jackass because I think that a Republican governor, not the one in Wisconsin for God’s sake, but one who declined federal money, might have done something that was not totally corrupt, stupid and evil, this fracking business has been bothering even before nopw, and this NYT article freaked me out. This shitty process is horrible on the face of it, and it has to stop.

  8. 8.

    beltane

    I could be mean and say that an increase in genetic mutations among rural white Americans is good for the Republican’s long-term electoral prospects, but I’ll just state that I’m grateful my state was not cursed with the presence of oil or natural gas.

  9. 9.

    The Dangerman

    I love the smell of the free market in the morning. Smells like … tumors.

    Only for poor people; the wealthy will have high quality water through reverse osmosis, or similar, filtration systems.

    Also, since water will become increasingly scarce, we might as well get on with desal plants (in the wealthy areas, of course).

  10. 10.

    beltane

    @Kryptik: Hygiene is overrated anyway, just another liberal elitist plot to enslave Jesus loving Americans. Real FREEDOM smells like feces and halitosis.

  11. 11.

    A Farmer

    Frank Rich nails it today:

    The 2011 rebels are to the right of their 1995 antecedents in any case. That’s why this battle, ostensibly over the deficit, is so much larger than the sum of its line-item parts. The highest priority of America’s current political radicals is not to balance government budgets but to wage ideological warfare in Washington and state capitals alike. The relatively few dollars that would be saved by the proposed slashing of federal spending on Planned Parenthood and Head Start don’t dent the deficit; the cuts merely savage programs the right abhors. In Wisconsin, where state workers capitulated to Gov. Scott Walker’s demands for financial concessions, the radical Republicans’ only remaining task is to destroy labor’s right to collective bargaining.

    That’s not to say there is no fiscal mission in the right’s agenda, both nationally and locally — only that the mission has nothing to do with deficit reduction. The real goal is to reward the G.O.P.’s wealthiest patrons by crippling what remains of organized labor, by wrecking the government agencies charged with regulating and policing corporations, and, as always, by rewarding the wealthiest with more tax breaks. The bankrupt moral equation codified in the Bush era — that tax cuts tilted to the highest bracket were a higher priority even than paying for two wars — is now a given. The once-bedrock American values of shared sacrifice and equal economic opportunity have been overrun.

  13. 13.

    Scott

    @Hypnos:

    You know science fiction author David Brin has a pet conspiracy theory where Saudi and Russian petro-oligarchs have taken over the Republican party – via its executive arm Fox news – and are actively undermining American society from within.

    He’s obviously joking.

    He may be. But ya know, we keep saying that everything the GOP accuses someone else of doing is something that the Republicans are already doing secretly or about to do openly. And the GOP pundits make an awful lot of noise about Evil Conspiracies of Foreigners Trying to Destroy America…

  14. 14.

    JPL

    Good news bad news. The good news is that we have the energy necessary to serve us for 100 years. The bad news is that the water will kill us if we drink it. Hmmm…maybe that’s the Republican plan to cut Social Security and Medicare.

  15. 15.

    trollhattan

    If teh marketz(tm) demanded you have clean groundwater than damnit, you’d have clean groundwater. QED

    Please note that the House majority wants to unfetter our fettered coal, awhl & gas industries because within months, we’ll be completely energy-independent. It’s magic, I tell ya.

  16. 16.

    trollhattan

    If teh marketz(tm) demanded you have clean groundwater then damnit, you’d have clean groundwater. QED

    Please note that the House majority wants to unfetter our fettered coal, awhl & gas industries because within months, we’ll be completely energy-independent. It’s magic, I tell ya.

  18. 18.

    Walker

    This should definitely make the fracking war more interesting where I live. Because of the university, everywhere you go inside the county, you see “no fracking” signs everywhere. But as as soon as you cross county lines, it is “pass the gas” and “NYers for responsible gas drilling”.

  19. 19.

    A Farmer

    Speaking of magic:

    A Massachusetts biotechnology company says it can produce the fuel that runs Jaguars and jet engines using the same ingredients that make grass grow.

    Joule Unlimited has invented a genetically-engineered organism that it says simply secretes diesel fuel or ethanol wherever it finds sunlight, water and carbon dioxide.

    The Cambridge, Mass.-based company says it can manipulate the organism to produce the renewable fuels on demand at unprecedented rates, and can do it in facilities large and small at costs comparable to the cheapest fossil fuels.

    What can it mean? No less than “energy independence,” Joule’s web site tells the world, even if the world’s not quite convinced.

  20. 20.

    The Dangerman

    @A Farmer:

    No less than “energy independence,” Joule’s web site tells the world, even if the world’s not quite convinced.

    There’s many SoCal companies doing similar things; Origin Oil in LA, there’s a couple big ones in San Diego whose names escape me. It’s all a matter of being able to scale up (and for the Money to be able to pick the winner).

    I could be FOS (it’s been known to happen, plus only one cup of Joe into the morning), but this deep drilling for NG sounds like it could be a stepping stone to deep drilling for Engineered Geothermal (true energy independence). I say let the Money invest in this deep drilling and then the Hippies take over and go green with geothermal.

  21. 21.

    Maude

    @A Farmer:
    Is this like the oil bug? They can produce oil.
    I love this typeof stuff. Some of these things are going to solve big problems and energy is one of the.
    With the price of gas rising, food will go up.

  24. 24.

    bcinaz

    …I’m just sure I overlooked the way the free market can handle this more effectively than public regulators.

    Me too. I also missed how effectively the free market endeavors to prevent companies from killing miners and oil platform workers. Good thing there aren’t any strong unions around to insist on worker and consumer safety.

  29. 29.

    Adolf Jones

    And Medicare and Medicaid are socialist plots against jobs and freedom too. Not to mention how bad the idea of a public option of single payer. Let them eat cake!

    Except in their world the cake is not angel or devils food but one of those things you find in a urinal.

  31. 31.

    Jamie

    It’ll be fine. People can alway sue afterwards. Regulations suck. It is better to ask forgiveness than to be forward constrained.

    Does this leather jacket make my sweat creases less obvious?

  33. 33.

    Comrade Kevin

    @Walker:

    But as as soon as you cross county lines, it is “pass the gas” and “NYers for responsible gas drilling”.

    And, of course, by that they actually mean “irresponsible gas drilling”.

  34. 34.

    Martin

    I cannot possibly express how happy I am that CA opted out of the batshit insane Republican governor game.

  35. 35.

    Corner Stone

    @Jamie:

    Does this leather jacket make my sweat creases less obvious?

    No.
    BTW, what are the top 3 songs on your jukebox? If you had to thump one and have a tune come up, what would it be?

  38. 38.

    Comrade Dread

    The Invisible Hand declares that you libruls are fools for doubting him.

    This is a job creation plan. Just think of all of the free market jobs that will open up in the medical and pharmaceutical fields in 20 years to treat the spike of cancer patients. And Hospice care.

    Also, it is a good long term plan to save Social Security since very few will survive long enough to collect.

  39. 39.

    James E Powell

    @A Farmer:

    The once-bedrock American values of shared sacrifice and equal economic opportunity have been overrun.

    When were these values in the bedrock? I don’t mean when did people say this. I mean when did the American ruling class act on these values?

  41. 41.

    tp

    and the sad thing? Corbett’s actually among the more sane of this current crop of Republicans.

    for everyone downstream of us, I personally apologize.

    I sat through a presentation last week about transportation and the Marcellus shale. it’s a big mess. roads shredded to bits. Some reverted to gravel. The drillers spilling their frackwater (One incident involved the district in question buying every bottle of bleach along the northern tier of Pennsylvania and scrubbing the road). they’re really straining our resources and the state’s decided to let them just have the gas for free. (and thanks Rendell, for gutting DEP. Really gave your successor a real treat.)

    At least they aren’t injecting it back into the ground: that apparently causes earthquake swarms elsewhere.

  42. 42.

    Hart Williams

    Ah, so THAT’S how the invisible hand of the marketplace flips us all the bird, removing the weak and unfit while multiplying the two-headed and one-eyed.

    All Hail Cthulu!

  43. 43.

    mikkel

    @Hypnos: That math is wrong.

    “15.000 gal * 3.79 l/gal * 35 * 10^9 J/l = 2 * 10^15 J”

    10^9 = GJ not MJ

    The average irradiance is about 5kwh/m^2/day in the US, so that’d be

    4000 m^2 * 5 kwh/m^2 * 3600000 J * 365 = 2.6e13 J energy

    vs

    15000 gallon * 3.79 l/gal * 35e6 = 1.9e12

    So it’d have to convert 7.5% of incoming sunlight to gas.

  44. 44.

    180 South

    We should wait til a enough of the populace has little time pieces of metal jammed in between their neurons frying the myelin sheaths or our children get a couple of good doses of the water when they are young. That will makes us real competitive.

    Oh, but that’s ok… the GDP will rise cause we all have health care.

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