[NB CONTEXT: Irving Fairy Dust muddles a working premise -- - TopicsExpress

[NB CONTEXT: Irving Fairy Dust muddles a working premise -- fracking waste disposal will make a river unclean, but NB shale gas development will go apace. Its all about money for shared risk under the pretense that a clean up is possible or recompense for it is just. Really? Greg] T&T NOV 27 [...THATS WHY IM AGAINST JDI ... mary] OPINION Set ground rules for waste water disposal The ongoing debate over the disposal of waste water produced by hydraulic fracturing (or ‘fracking’) in the shale gas extraction process has raised some complex issues for Metro Moncton now that the Town of Amherst has withdrawn as a potential site and left the City of Dieppe as the sole candidate to receive the material from Nova Scotia. For starters, whether or not money has been discussed yet, who eventually gets paid? The City of Dieppe for initially storing the water, all three Metro communities because all three have a role in the operation of Metro’s water treatment plant (through which the water would pass after being poured into Dieppe’s part of the Metro sewer system) or TransAqua alone, even as a commission funded by the tri-communities? And all that is a discussion solely from the point of view of doing the work. The Nova Scotia company making the proposal says this water is nearly potable, though an Environmental Impact Assessment is ongoing. Should the EIA reveal even the smallest potential for contamination, will that engender a fresh debate about money in exchange for ‘shared risk?’ Given that the water eventually returns to the Petitcodiac River, any effect however minimal touches every river community from Metro to Alma on the edge of the Bay of Fundy. We have no reason to believe whatever ends up in the Petitcodiac River will be anything but clean, but in the long run we believe fracking will proceed apace in New Brunswick and the public benefits will be appreciable enough to have Nova Scotia reconsidering its current ban on fracking. Thus we foresee the day when moving either money or waste water from one province to the next ends up as little more than a shell game.The New Brunswick government’s stringent regulations on shale gas extraction should include a rule that fracking waste water be disposed of in the province, or even the region within the province, of origin.