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filter sock

Inside the Boom: Radioactive Waste In My Spare Bedroom

By Emily Guerin | February 6, 2015
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Emily Guerin

Photographer Andy Cullen hangs a filter sock from the author's spare bedroom in Bismarck, North Dakota.

When you’re a reporter, you take your work home with you. This is especially true for me in North Dakota: When I go away for the weekend, it’s to a cabin in the Badlands that’s surrounded by drilling rigs. When I go biking, it’s with people whose boyfriends work for oil companies. So coming home to find radioactive oilfield waste in my spare bedroom wasn’t that out of the ordinary.

My boyfriend, Andy, is a photojournalist. He covers the same oilfield stories that I do. And in the news recently was North Dakota’s effort to revise its rules on what kinds of radioactive oilfield waste can be buried in state landfills. Andy was assigned to take photos for this story, so naturally he set off to find an example of this waste: a filter sock.

Filter socks look like a cross between a butterfly net and a large condom. They’re used to filter the wastewater that comes out of oil wells before it gets injected back underground (watch this video for a good explanation of what they do and how they become radioactive). And a few weeks ago, there was one dangling on a thread from the ceiling of my spare bedroom when I came home. Andy was taking studio portraits of it.

He put it outside as soon as he was done, but the room stank like diesel. So I lit a candle, and got on with the evening.

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Inside the Boom

Emily Guerin came to North Dakota for the same reason as everyone else - to find work related to the huge oil boom transforming the state. This is an occasional series on her experiences living the boom.

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About Emily Guerin

Emily Guerin was Inside Energy's first reporter in North Dakota, based at Prairie Public Broadcasting in Bismarck. Currently Emily is the environmental reporter for KPCC in Los Angeles.

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