The big oil companies love to portray the rise of fracking as a great American success story -- using 21st Century technology and know-how to locate and extract pockets of cheap energy that were thought to be unreachable, reducing America's dependence on foreign oil and lowering your energy cost. But Big Oil doesn't want you to know the sausage-making, as it were, that goes into pulling those resources out of the deep earth. That's because the only way to pull that oil and natural gas from the deep earth is to bring up the gunk that's down there with it -- and when I use the word "gunk" I'm being very polite. Americans are just learning what Big Oil didn't want you to know -- that there is also a boom in radioactive waste and in salty water that is highly destructive for our surface environment. In Pennsylvania and other neighboring states that sit atop the gas-rich Marcellus Shale formation, the fracking boom has been going on for about six years, yet officials seem to just now be wrapping their arms around the extent of the problem:
States in and around the fracking boom are trying to figure out what ...