Plan could place 400,000 tons of Marcellus Shale drill cuttings near Pa.’s ‘Grand Canyon‘. Date: July 14, 2015

A Montgomery County company that processes Marcellus Shale gas drilling cuttings wants to relocate its Williamsport processing center to heavily drilled Tioga County.

The plan is to use 400,000 tons of drilling cuttings — dirt and rock — that Clean Earth Inc. processes to extend the Wellsboro Johnston Airport’s runway, StateImpact Pennsylvania reports. That would keep the material out of landfills.

But some people would rather the plan not get off the ground.

The airport is near the Pine Creek Gorge, which is also known as the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania and is a major tourist draw. A 2006 book by an Elizabethtown College professor gave high marks for tent camping to nearby Colton Point State Park.

When you take the amount of energy involved in a shale frack, it’s the equivalent of a thermobaric bomb. In 1969, the Atomic Energy Commission actually exploded a nuclear bomb in the Mancos Shale in Rulison, Colorado.

It made a big hole in the shale but the gas was too radioactive to sell and they closed the hole up.

Ironically, the shale is radioactive itself. That’s how you find shale on a well log, you’re looking for radioactivity.

And what comes back up in the fracking flowback is radioactive because it’s coming back from the shale.