Exposure Episode 20 - The Radioactive Legacy of Fairmont Brine
Inside America's Radioactive Fracking Waste Problem
A former operations manager takes us inside one of the nation's most controversial fracking waste facilities, revealing what happens after drilling ends—and why workers deserve to understand the risks they face.
When most people think about hydraulic fracturing (fracking), they picture drilling rigs, towering well pads, pipelines, or flames rising from flare stacks.
Every unconventional oil and gas well generates enormous volumes of wastewater—often called produced water or brine. Mixed within that waste stream are salts, heavy metals, hydrocarbons, naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORM), and countless other compounds brought to the surface from deep underground. That waste has to go somewhere.
Some is injected into deep disposal wells called injection wells.
Some is recycled for future drilling—an option the industry often highlights, though in practice it occurs far less frequently than is commonly suggested.
Some is transported hundreds of miles by truck or rail to processing or waste facilities.
And for a brief period, one facility in Fairmont, West Virginia attempted something few others had done at scale: recover usable products from that waste while reducing what ultimately required disposal.
On paper, Fairmont Brine looked like part of the solution—a way to take this highly corrosive and hazardous material, extract and sell useful byproducts, and clean what remained for disposal.
Instead, it would become a case study in one of the least discussed and most troubling aspects of the industry: radioactivity.
In this episode of Exposure, former Fairmont Brine Operations Manager Sean Guthrie shares his firsthand account of working inside the facility—what employees believed they were accomplishing, what they later learned, and why he believes future workers deserve better information and stronger protection.
Solving the Fracking Waste Problem
The growth of shale drilling created an enormous logistical challenge.
Every well produces wastewater that cannot simply be dumped back into rivers or streams (although plenty of that was done in the early days of the fracking boom) Industry and regulators have spent years searching for economical ways to transport, dispose of, recycle, or treat these waste streams.
Fairmont Brine was designed around an ambitious idea.
Instead of treating wastewater solely as something to dispose of, the facility sought to recover useful products from it. Through a series of evaporation and treatment processes, incoming wastewater would be separated into three primary products: calcium chloride, sodium chloride, and distilled water that, if it met regulatory requirements, could be discharged into the Monongahela River.
To someone like Sean Guthrie, the concept made sense.
Rather than sending every barrel underground into injection wells, the facility appeared to be recycling waste while producing materials that could be used commercially.
"I thought we were doing something really good for the environment," Sean recalls during the interview.
That perspective is important. Sean was not an environmental activist or a whistleblower looking for a fight, but rather an operations manager who genuinely believed he was helping solve a difficult environmental problem, which makes what happened afterward all the more significant.
What Is Radioactive Fracking Waste?
There are two key classifications of radioactive material.
Naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORMs)
Technologically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive materials (TENORMs)
Deep geological formations often contain naturally occurring radioactive materials such as radium. For millions of years these materials remained locked underground. When oil and gas are extracted, highly saline formation water comes with them, carrying dissolved minerals—including radioactive elements—to the surface.
For years the industry has often referred to this material as “NORMs”—naturally occurring radioactive materials—emphasizing that low levels of natural radioactivity are common in the environment. We encounter NORMs in everyday life: potassium in bananas, for example, is naturally radioactive. In a single gallon of produced water, the amount of radioactivity is typically very small and, in isolation, is generally considered to pose minimal risk.
However, that framing can be misleading when applied to industrial scale operations. The issue is not the radioactivity of a single gallon, but the sheer volume being handled. In oil and gas production, millions of gallons of produced water are brought to the surface, transported, stored, and processed. As this material moves repeatedly through tanks, pipes, trucks, and filtration systems, naturally occurring radioactive elements can become concentrated in solids such as scale, sludge, and filter media.
This is where the distinction between NORM and TENORM becomes important. TENORM—technologically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive material—refers to NORM that has been concentrated or redistributed through industrial activity. Unlike processes where radioactive material is intentionally handled and controlled, such as uranium enrichment for nuclear fuel, TENORM in oil and gas operations is not deliberately created. Instead, it emerges as an unintended byproduct of large-scale extraction and repeated processing of vast quantities of subsurface water, which can gradually concentrate radioactive constituents in certain waste streams and equipment.
When wastewater containing naturally occurring radioactive materials enters a treatment facility like Fairmont Brine, those materials are not destroyed—they are redistributed and can become more concentrated in certain waste streams.
As treatment systems remove solids and separate contaminants, radioactive elements may accumulate in sludge, mineral scale, filter media, filter socks, and other residual waste products.
This distinction is important: a treatment facility can reduce contaminants in one output stream while simultaneously concentrating them in another.
According to Sean, that gradual concentration became one of Fairmont Brine's biggest operational challenges. As engineers modified the process to remove more solids and improve efficiency, increasing amounts of material accumulated in filter presses, filter socks, and sludge handling systems, though the actual risk to him and his co-workers was never clearly communicated.
Life Around Oilfield Waste
Sean recalls that for most of his time at Fairmont Brine, radiation was not something anyone in management or operations seriously discussed as a workplace hazard. It was treated almost as a background fact of nature—something that existed in trace amounts everywhere, not something that could meaningfully accumulate in an industrial setting like theirs.
That understanding, he says, only began to shift very late in the facility’s life cycle, after outside scrutiny started to increase. A consultant was eventually brought in to take radiation readings at different points in the process, and for the first time, workers were told that certain waste streams—particularly roll offs containing spent filter socks and other concentrated solids—were very hot and registered elevated levels.
But even then, Sean says, the information did not immediately register with him as a serious occupational health issue. The warning he remembers most clearly was practical and limited in scope: that dumpsters containing used filter socks should not be stood around for long periods of time. It was presented more as a handling precaution than a broader health alarm.
By that point, however, Sean says he still did not fully understand what those readings meant in terms of long-term exposure or cumulative risk. The idea that he and others might have been routinely working in environments where radioactive materials were being concentrated had not yet fully taken shape in his mind.
It wasn’t until several years after Fairmont Brine had shut down—and after Justin Noble’s reporting on the facility was published in Rolling Stone—that Sean says he began to seriously reconsider what he had been part of. Seeing the site described in a national investigative context, and reading the allegations and findings laid out in detail, forced him to revisit years of assumptions he had never previously questioned.
Around the same time, a former co-worker who had also read the article reached out to him and encouraged him to connect with Jill Hunkler. That introduction ultimately led to a site visit that brought together Sean, Justin Noble, Hunkler, and Yuri Gorby, a retired scientist from the Department of Health. Returning to the facility under those circumstances—this time alongside journalists and an independent scientific perspective—gave Sean a very different frame of reference for what he was seeing.
Looking back, he says the earlier consultant visit now feels less like a clear warning and more like an incomplete signal—one that, at the time, neither he nor many of his coworkers were equipped to fully interpret.
Working Inside the Process
Listening to Sean describe day-to-day operations provides a rare glimpse into an industry few outsiders ever see.
Maintenance crews routinely entered equipment to remove mineral scale, while workers handled wet filter socks loaded with concentrated solids. Processing equipment frequently clogged, and brine would splash onto clothing during routine operations. Boots deteriorated rapidly under constant exposure, and heat inside portions of the processing building regularly exceeded 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
The work was physically demanding, dirty, and relentless.
Like many industrial workers, Sean says employees focused primarily on getting the job done safely from an immediate mechanical standpoint. The standard protections were what you would expect in an industrial setting: hard hats, safety glasses, latex gloves, and basic dust masks. These were the baseline precautions everyone relied on.
Looking back, however, Sean believes respiratory protection deserved far greater attention. If he had understood more about the materials they were handling, he says he would have pushed much harder for better respiratory protection—not just for himself, but for everyone working alongside him.
Exposure Is Often About More Than Standing Nearby
One of the themes throughout this conversation is the difference between simply being near radioactive material and working with it every day. In environmental health research, that distinction is often described as the gap between ambient exposure and occupational exposure—the difference between passing through a space where a hazard exists and being embedded in the systems that generate, concentrate, and physically handle that hazard for hours at a time.
Sean describes changing filter socks, cleaning equipment, entering confined process areas, repairing pumps, and occasionally being soaked by concentrated brine when valves or piping failed. These were not rare or exceptional events, but routine parts of keeping the facility operational. Filter socks in particular required frequent handling; they were removed, replaced, and disposed of as part of normal maintenance cycles, often while still wet and heavy with whatever solids the treatment process had concentrated. Confined space entries added another layer of complexity, requiring workers to physically enter tanks or enclosed systems where residues could accumulate and where airflow was limited or inconsistent.
He recalls salt constantly hanging in the air around portions of the plant. The ventilation system, he says, rarely functioned properly, meaning that airborne mist and fine particulate matter from the brine process would linger rather than being effectively drawn away. In industrial settings, ventilation is not just about comfort—it is a primary control for reducing inhalation exposure to aerosols, dust, and chemical vapors. When that system is underperforming, workers are left relying more heavily on personal protective equipment and administrative controls, both of which can be difficult to maintain consistently in fast-moving operational environments.
Walking past certain equipment, workers could literally taste salt suspended in the air. That sensory detail is more than just an anecdote; in industrial hygiene terms, it suggests the presence of aerosolized material at concentrations high enough to be perceptible, especially in warm, enclosed, or poorly ventilated areas. Over time, conditions like that can become normalized to workers on site, even when they would be considered unacceptable in a more strictly controlled or well-monitored environment.
A Personal Story—Not Proof
Years after leaving Fairmont Brine, Sean says he has developed several medical problems, including COPD, extremely low testosterone requiring treatment, an adrenal lesion, and unexplained dental deterioration.
He also recalls coworkers who became seriously ill, including one who developed a rare form of brain cancer and another who later developed stomach cancer.
Researchers continue studying occupational exposure associated with naturally occurring radioactive materials in oil and gas operations, and Sean is careful not to claim scientific certainty about his own health. However, experts have repeatedly noted that one of the most concerning pathways of exposure in fracking waste is the inhalation of particulate matter bound to radioactive isotopes. Once an alpha-emitting isotope enters the body, it can behave similarly to calcium and may be incorporated into bone, lung tissue, and teeth. With a half-life of approximately 1,600 years, these materials can remain in the body for extremely long periods, where they may continue to pose a potential risk with ongoing or repeated exposure.
One of the more frustrating and difficult aspects of this situation is that it is very difficult to prove a causal link between health complications and exposure. So even when workers like Sean are exposed in this way, and even when they develop health issues that appear related, drawing a definitive conclusion remains challenging. That uncertainty can make it difficult to pursue justice or obtain compensation for harm.
Fairmont Was Never Just About One Facility
It would be easy to dismiss Fairmont Brine as an isolated incident. That would miss the larger point.
Every unconventional oil and gas region must answer the same question: what happens to the waste? Whether wastewater is recycled, transported, evaporated, injected underground, or processed through treatment facilities, someone must ultimately handle it.
Someone drives the trucks. Someone repairs the pumps. Someone changes the filters. Someone cleans the tanks. Someone manages the sludge. And if the industry—through a convoluted web of interstate shipping, regulatory loopholes, legal wordsmanship, and lack of oversight—can obscure the real risk of the waste so that the workers in the next stage of the process are completely unaware of what’s actually in it, then it becomes easy to see how widespread this problem can become. And it has.
Sean's story reminds us that behind every industrial process are workers whose health depends on understanding the materials they handle. Fairmont Brine simply offers one of the clearest windows the public has ever had into that reality.
The Facility Closed. The Questions Didn't.
After Fairmont Brine ceased operating, the story did not come to an end—in many ways, it was only entering a new and more scrutinized phase. What had once been a relatively obscure industrial site quickly became the focus of environmental investigations, with testing and reporting on contamination at the property drawing broader public and regulatory attention to what had been happening there for years.
Sean later returned to the site alongside journalists and investigators, revisiting the place where he had once worked daily. During that return, he says he personally observed radiation readings that he describes as deeply unsettling, leaving him “flabbergasted” at the levels being detected in certain areas and materials. The experience, he explains, forced him to reconsider how much had been understood—or overlooked—during the facility’s operational years.
He also describes what he saw on the ground: containment ponds that appeared to be deteriorating, areas of dead or dying vegetation surrounding parts of the site, and visible signs of long-term operational stress that had not been fully addressed before shutdown. To him, these conditions suggested that the environmental footprint of the facility extended well beyond its active years, persisting even after the equipment went silent.
In the aftermath, cleanup efforts have been taken up by government agencies tasked with assessing and remediating the site. At the same time, the situation has raised broader and still-unresolved questions about how radioactive and industrial byproducts from fracking operations are managed across Appalachia, and what long-term safeguards are truly in place once facilities close.
Fairmont may be closed, but the challenges it exposed—and the questions it raised about waste, accountability, and long-term environmental stewardship—are still very much ongoing.
Lessons Beyond Fairmont
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Sean’s story is what he does not ask for.
He doesn’t demand revenge, and he doesn’t frame his experience as a personal vendetta against the company or the industry. He doesn’t claim to know every answer about what went wrong, or pretend that every engineer, operator, or manager involved acted with malicious intent. In fact, he is careful to acknowledge that many of the people designing and running the facility likely believed they were doing something innovative and even environmentally responsible at the time.
His concern is much simpler, and in some ways more unsettling because of that simplicity.
Workers deserve information.
They deserve honest, upfront conversations about the potential hazards of the materials they are handling—not only the obvious chemical risks, but the less visible ones that emerge over time, like concentrated radioactive scale or contaminated filter waste. They deserve appropriate protective equipment that reflects the real conditions of the job, not just the assumptions made on paper during permitting or design. And they deserve ongoing, independent research into the occupational risks associated with processing and concentrating fracking waste streams, especially as those streams change over time and become more complex.
But there is another layer to this story that Sean’s experience points toward—one that has little to do with any single company and everything to do with how these systems are overseen, or sometimes not overseen at all.
One of the most striking lessons from Fairmont Brine is how long it operated without broader scrutiny of what was actually accumulating inside the facility. It wasn’t until outside observers—people like Jill, Noble, and Yuri—happened to come across the site, almost by chance, that the scale of what was present there began to come into focus. Their discovery was not the result of a structured regulatory inspection or a planned scientific review. It was, in a very real sense, accidental.
That randomness matters.
Because it raises an uncomfortable question: how many other facilities, operating in similar conditions, have never been looked at closely enough for anyone to fully understand what is building up inside them?
Sean’s point is not that anyone acted in bad faith by not knowing. It is that the system itself often assumes someone else is watching, someone else is measuring, someone else is asking the hard questions. And when that assumption goes unchallenged, entire categories of risk can remain invisible for years.
In that context, the fact that it took an unplanned encounter with Fairmont Brine to bring attention to what was happening there becomes more than just a detail—it becomes part of the lesson. It suggests that awareness in this space is often reactive rather than proactive, shaped by chance discoveries rather than systematic transparency.
CITATIONS
Below is the complete deduplicated source list from the Sean Guthrie fact-check, formatted the way you requested. I’ve kept sources that were actually used in the verification document rather than adding new research. The underlying fact sheet reviewed 14 claims and recorded 12 as validated, 2 as mixed, and none as invalidated.
Fairmont Brine Processing Superfund Site Profile – U.S. Environmental Protection Agency – 2026
Company Agrees to Pay Civil Penalty in Radioactive Waste Dumping Case – WKYT – 2017
Hidden Cost of Plastic: Toxic and Radioactive Oil and Gas Waste – Earthworks – 2024
Lessons Learned from an Army Corps Radioactive Waste Disposal Plan for Michigan That Went South – Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists – 2026
Strange Byproduct of Fracking Boom: Radioactive Socks – Forbes / Jeff McMahon – 2013
Method of Cleaning Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials from Filtration Socks – Justia Patents – 2019
Fairmont Brine Site Cleanup Update – U.S. Environmental Protection Agency – 2026
Learning About Radioactive Scrap Metal – Zore’s Recycling – 2016
Justin Nobel Shares One Treatment Plant’s Story, Answers Questions – The Athens Messenger – 2024
Fairmont Brine Processing Facility NPDES Outfalls to the Monongahela River – U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 3 / Christine Wagner Correspondence to Michael Towle – EPA Administrative Record
EPA Administrative Record Document, Counter 436242
A Slow-Rolling Disaster in Fracking Country – Truthdig – 2023
Fairmont Brine Processing Plant Owners Neglecting Public Health Hazards – Diane Nichols – 2023
Source preserved in the Fact-Checking Project; no URL recorded in the source entry.
Charges: Man Illegally Hauled Radioactive Waste to KY Landfill; Feds Seek $127K Payment – Lexington Herald-Leader – 2020
Low-Level Radioactive Waste Illegally Dumped in Kentucky – Low-Level Radioactive Waste Forum – 2016
Radon and COPD Mortality in the American Cancer Society Cohort – European Respiratory Journal / Turner et al. – 2012
Fracking Chemical May Interfere with Male Sex Hormone Receptor – Endocrine Society – 2020
Marcellus Impacts Project Report #8 – Penn State / Marcellus Shale Education & Training Center
Source preserved in the Fact-Checking Project; URL not included in the retrieved source entry.
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