Your gas may be radioactive

No, not what you had from the beans at dinner, but what is possibly providing your electricity, maybe your heating and cooking, no joke involved.

Natural gas from shale formations, like the Marcellus in Pennsylvania, is brought out of ground using hydraulic fracking fluids that are nasty enough in their own right.

Now, it turns out, the deep subsurface water brought up with the gas and fracking fluids is more radioactive than once thought.

Problem? Yes. Much of this water gets sent to public sewage treatment plants that can't handle the radioactivity.

That said, it sounds like Pennsylvania regulators and elected officials are as much at fault as anybody. And, the AP had a story last week about how the drilling industry likes to pass out all sorts of free ducats to those elected officials.