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Water contaminated with some of the chemicals found in drinking water and fracking wastewater has been shown to affect hormone levels in mice:
More than 15 million Americans live within a one-mile radius of unconventional oil and gas (UOG) operations. UOGs combine directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," to release natural gas from underground rock. Scientific studies, while ongoing, are still inconclusive on the potential long-term effects fracturing has on human development. Today, researchers at the University of Missouri released a study that is the first of its kind to link exposure to chemicals released during hydraulic fracturing to adverse reproductive and developmental outcomes in mice. Scientists believe that exposure to these chemicals also could pose a threat to human development.
"Researchers have previously found that endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) mimic or block hormones — the chemical messengers that regulate respiration, reproduction, metabolism, growth and other biological functions," said Susan C. Nagel, Nagel, an associate professor of obstetrics, gynecology and women's health in the School of Medicine. "Evidence from this study indicates that developmental exposure to fracking and drilling chemicals may pose a threat to fertility in animals and potentially people. Negative outcomes were observed even in mice exposed to the lowest dose of chemicals, which was lower than the concentrations found in groundwater at some locations with past oil and gas wastewater spills."
Researchers mixed 23 oil and gas chemicals in four different concentrations to reflect concentrations ranging from those found in drinking water and groundwater to concentrations found in industry wastewater. The mixtures were added to drinking water given to pregnant mice in the laboratory until they gave birth. The female offspring of the mice that drank the chemical mixtures were compared to female offspring of mice in a control group that were not exposed. Mice exposed to drilling chemicals had lower levels of key hormones related to reproductive health compared to the control group.
Adverse Reproductive and Developmental Health Outcomes Following Prenatal Exposure to a Hydraulic Fracturing Chemical Mixture in Female C57Bl/6 Mice (open, DOI: 10.1210/en.2016-1242) (DX)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday August 31 2016, @01:23AM
You're right. The people living on the lands leased ALWAYS could set the water coming out of their taps on fire. They ALWAYS could test the water and find hydrocarbons. They ALWAYS had greatly increased rates of earthquakes.
The first two are not "ALWAYS" and when they are caused by fracking would be considerably reduced or eliminated. The last hasn't been shown to be a problem. We don't care able small earthquakes, we care about big ones that actually cause damage.
I was the loudest apologist for fraccing up to a few years ago when somebody on the old site dared me to expose myself to new information and attempt to disprove the detractors. Well guess what? The detractors were right. Needing huge amounts of water all the time is a big fucking red flag. It's a CLOSED system again. CLOSED. Finite amount of "water" going in, and a strong expectation of what needs to come back out. Before I saw the "continuous water injection" (direct quote) documents that illustrated the fraccing process (which looked like a Google indexing fuckup on a corporate web server corrected later) I believed fraccing was a responsible activity just poorly understood by the public.
I think this shows the retarded nature of your whole argument. I was for it, then someone showed me this single case where someone was doing something particularly dangerous, irresponsible, and suboptimal, and I got religion. The obvious answer is improve regulation and shut down particularly incompetently or negligently run wells, right? Anecdote is not data, right?
Stop trying to talk about regulations you know nothing about, especially its effectiveness. Are those regulations as effective as the ones Deep Water Horizon ignored? BP never respected regulations, and those fraccing regulations you don't know about don't regulate this apparently. Again, how could anyone know with FOIA being prevented from seeing?
For starters by looking at what's going on. There's a huge amount of fracking going on in the US and there isn't a huge amount of problems to go with that fracking. You don't need a FOIA request to figure that out.
There are plenty, but keep lying to yourself to make yourself feel better about the pursuit of profit at all cost. Remember, when everything is polluted, we are at civil war, and your life becomes running for next resource, you brought it all upon yourself by supporting the unsupportable .
Once again, not even one ecosystem named. And there is a reason for this, because there isn't an ecosystem destroyed by fracking. It's just another bit of puffery.