Do we want a Chemical Chernobyl in New York?

Dear Commissioner Martens:

Do we want a Chemical Chernobyl in New York?

I worked for over three decades as a theoretical physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico where I devoted most of my professional effort to enhancing the prospect of the alternative energy source of magnetic fusion. The uniquely beautiful environment of western NY State attracted my wife and me back to our native state after my retirement six years ago.

One of the unquestionable tenets of physics is the law of increasing entropy. Entropy can be thought of as a measure of disorder. Thus the law states that the total disorder of a system can only increase. If one attempts to increase order in part of the system, then elsewhere even greater disorder must occur. This law would appear to be especially relevant to hydrofracturing.

The natural gas located in New York State is not situated like an oil or natural gas reservoir in a localized well or mine, but is distributed throughout huge expanse of the state. So unlike the case of "mining" localized sources of oil or gas, one has to hydrofracture New York State in order to get at and concentrate; i.e., order, the gas from its previous state of random, disordered distribution. But the law of increasing entropy implies that this comes at a price; i.e., increased disorder. The necessarily increased disorder will manifest its ugliness as environmental destruction: poison in the biosphere, pollution in the waters and air, including arsenic and other heavy metals, and radioactive nuclides, such as radium and the gas radon.

Furthermore, the recent Cornell University research of R. W. Howarth, R. Santoro, and A. Ingraffea has demonstrated that the impact on global warming due to the released methane in shale gas production may be more than twice as great as that released in conventional coal. They documented this in "Methane and the greenhouse-gas footprint of natural gas from shale formations" that appeared in the journal Climate Change: DOI 10.11007/s10584-011-0061-5.

The possible immediate financial gain to the energy companies of the short-lived 10-year supply of natural gas will be far outweighed by the future loss to the public through health and environmental degradation whose financial effect will end up being borne by New York State. The farming, dairy, and wine industries will be destroyed. Future tourists, avoiding such devastation, will look back at beautiful photographic relics and ask why didn't our state officials "Just Say No!" The value of real estate will plummet.

Therefore, I have grave reservations about the shortcomings of the SGEIS.
I write to request that the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) immediately expand the scope of its efforts to revise the draft Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement (SGEIS) pursuant to Executive Order No. 41.

With that goal in mind, I write to request that DEC address the issues described below.

I understand that DEC has been ordered to complete its revision by 7/1/11. The original draft SGEIS received such scathing criticism that Executive Order No. 41 was necessitated. I have never heard of a regulatory do-over of this magnitude in recent decades. I respectfully urge DEC to complete its revision without regard to any arbitrary deadline.

Leaf T