The GEN Z Radium Girls & John McCain
JBL
From: Bob Donnan <donnanl...@yahoo.com>
Date: Tue, Nov 11, 2025, 6:32 AM
Subject: The GEN Z Radium Girls & John McCain
To:
These Sisters Unknowingly Partied in Radioactive Waste. Now, They Want Change
By Justin Nobel | November 2025
They were looking for a spot where the broken rules of the broken world broke down, an airy new order of adventure and wonder rose up. A place to get away, with no worries, plans, adults. And nature, a deep green valley rolled out of West Virginia woods, tapered down to the Monongahela River, which flows swift through hills all the way to Pittsburgh, St. Louis, New Orleans, then out into the Gulf, and on to the world. The micro leads to the magnificent. Of course, being Appalachia, there was a rundown factory above the river. A place of tanks and vats, rusted pipes and broken windows, creepy stairways, and dust and dirt. On this patina they painted their adventure, and picnicked, and partied, and lost their minds, and built their lives, and broke their hearts.
In 2020, Ashlin Bailey was 16 and working at Taco Bell in Fairmont, West Virginia when she first drove out with some friends to skateboard at what she thought was an abandoned paper mill. “We went up there and found a big tank and two abandoned buildings and just explored,” Bailey tells Teen Vogue. But the ripped-up gravel made the place crap for skating, and the weird machinery inside the abandoned buildings on the lonely hilltop just outside town gave off a spooky vibe. No matter, two childhood hangs had recently shuttered, Valley Worlds of Fun, and Skate-A-Way, and anyway, Bailey was getting older and soon running with a new crowd, which was also hanging out at the abandoned mill. “They would go up there a lot and party and do bonfires,” she says.
Rick Neptune, a Navy vet and retired Harley Davidson mechanic who lives behind the site recalls seeing these boozy infernos. “The flames,” says Neptune, “were 15 to 20 feet high.”
And the kids did other stuff. “I remember going into one building, it was rundown, full of graffiti, people had been partying in there,” says Bailey. She recalls a maze-like complex, a ceiling that was in the process of decomposing, and “a long room that had these big containers, and pumps.” And the dust, and the dirt. “I remember everything being caked in some sort of rust or dust or gunk,” says Bailey. “There was a number of situations that the dust would have been ingested.” In one building was a big strange sand pit, people would try to stay out of it but during parties, that was the bathroom. One day they climbed a raggedy staircase to the second floor, happened upon an old camera, and tried to get it to work but couldn’t. “We were trying to be like the kids in Scooby-Doo,” says Bailey, “solving the mystery.”
Seeking adventure in abandoned spots is a classic coming-of-age activity. But it’s a riskier endeavor in West Virginia, where centuries of fossil fuel development have left the landscape pockmarked with toxic sites. Here, the cozy world of the child, be it field, wood, abandoned building, or even elementary school, is infringed upon by the messiness of industry. Case in point, Marsh Fork Elementary School in southern West Virginia coal country, formerly located a few hundred feet from a coal-preparation plant, and where into the 2000s, students would find coal dust on their desks, their lockers, and wafting through the cafeteria. Local advocacy groups reported kids getting sick and teachers dying of cancer. (The school has since been moved away from the plant.) Protests erupted, but then-governor Joe Manchin refused to acknowledge the hazards, stating an “extensive investigation revealed no evidence of health risks or regulatory noncompliance.”
Manchin, who was a West Virginia senator, then secretary of state, then governor, then US Senator for a decade and a half, is probably the state’s best-known politician. During his time in office, Manchin not only advocated for the relentless fracking of his state, but crushed a spirited grassroots resistance trying to block corporations from dragging a gas pipeline across some of the Mountain State’s steepest and most pristine mountain forests. “Home of Joe Manchin III, US Senator, 34th Governor,” says the sign when you enter Farmington, West Virginia. Follow the Husky Highway for just eight miles and you will be in Fairmont, and soon at the doorstep of what was actually not a paper mill, but a fracking wastewater treatment plant called Fairmont Brine Processing, where Ashlin Bailey partied as a teenager.
Total waste shipped off-site can be found in the table below:
In West Virginia, a state one study ranked near the bottom in the country for education outcomes, it can feel as though the politicians have abandoned the students, the politicians have abandoned the teachers, and sometimes, even the teachers have abandoned the students. Kids like herself, that teachers appeared to view as not having college prospects, sometimes didn’t get homework assignments, explains Bailey, because “it was like we are not worth educating.” She assumes the teachers figured none of them would ever amount to anything.
But West Virginia is also a massively creative state, with a proud history of union activity, folk music and uniquely Appalachian culture. Bailey has always had artistic ambitions, and she had one teacher her senior year who believed in her. “My English teacher, she saw the work I put into my essays,” and recognized the talent in a painting she made of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and she “gave me my first set of pastels.” So, Bailey came to what she still had no idea was an abandoned frack waste processing plant that bordered those dark, alluring West Virginia woods not just to party, but to paint. Sometimes she even came to picnic. Carrying a wicker-like basket handmade by Bailey’s grandmother and a blanket, she and her friends brought up crackers, grapes, strawberries, Babybel cheese. Bailey also brought, first at age 14, her sister Rayanne.
“My sister introduced me to it,” Rayanne, who is still in high school and works at Burger King, tells me. “I would go up there to watch the sunset, because it does have a nice view. From our side, it sets above the city.” As one star set, and others emerged, the sisters listened to music. “Suicideboys,” says Rayanne. "And Deftones. And 'Today,' by Smashing Pumpkins.”
During a visit to Fairmont, I spoke with Bailey in a bedroom decked out with black light posters, a groovy billowing tie-dye ceiling hanging, and an impressive array of drawings, posters, signs, and cool hand-built things, like her glow-in-the-dark computer. On it, Bailey shows me photos of herself and her friends at the site, emphasizing the graffitied words: LOST; Play w/ my feelings; F**k you; i dont care. Lovers conveyed their breakup through spray-paint on the walls of a facility that had tried, in the middle of one of the country’s biggest gas booms, to do like the alchemists of yore, and turn waste into gold. Or, in this case, pull marketable salts out of the carcinogen-rich, heavy metals-laden, radioactive radium-spiked brew of fracking wastewater from the Marcellus formation.
“We had no clue,” says Bailey. No clue that the abandoned paper mill was actually a deeply contaminated and highly radioactive former frack waste treatment plant. No clue that the American Petroleum Institute actually stated 43 years ago in an internal report I received from the former secretary of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (in reporting my book, Petroleum-238: Big Oil’s Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It), that operators trying to treat oil and gas waste “must recognize the fact that radioactivity can not be modified or made inert by chemical means” and attempts to remove radioactivity risk transforming, “a very dilute source of radioactive materials into a very concentrated source.”
Meaning, even if some operation succeeded in removing the radioactivity and thus could safely transform frack waste into road salt, or table salt, or pool salt, they have inherently concentrated it and now face a new problem, because what are they going to do with that?
At Fairmont Brine Processing, I learned, in stumbling upon the spooky abandoned site with an Ohio community organizer and former Department of Energy scientist, that what these operators did was let it be smeared all over the place. Spots were more deeply contaminated with radioactivity than over most of the present-day Chernobyl exclusion zone, a security radius established after the 1986 meltdown at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in present-day Ukraine.
“The Site is unsecured and rampant trespassing and vandalism has been observed,” and radiation levels are above Nuclear Regulatory Commission limits, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reported in 2023, ramping up an investigation after I first broke news about the place. “Human exposure to radionuclides by inhalation, absorption, or ingestion is possible,” the EPA report continues, and those “partying at the Site” may face “exposure to radionuclides by inhalation, absorption, or ingestion.” The agency highlights radium, the “bone-seeking” radioactive element that killed the Radium Girls, and notes that it “is ‘a known human carcinogen’” and “can affect the blood, eyes, and teeth.”
Also, this from EPA: “The Site is directly upgradient of the Monongahela River” and “since the facility was abandoned…Radionuclides or other hazardous substances have the potential” to overflow ponds and spill into the river.
Earlier this year, I walked with Bailey back behind Rick Neptune’s place. Neptune who lost his wife, the love of his life, Debbie, to a mysterious liver ailment, still vividly recalls when the plant burped in the night and upchucked salty frack waste onto their yard and roof. At the edge of his yard, Bailey and I enter the “Fairmont Forest” and begin to see the plant appear through the trees. At last, at least, it’s now fenced off by the EPA. From this unique angle, overlooking one pond of radioactive frack waste — where, as I was told from a former Fairmont Brine manager, a diver once submerged with weights attached to get them through the thick brine and repair a leak in the liner — the abandoned upper building, where Bailey once explored, climbed the raggedy stairway, picnicked on Babybel, painted with Ms. Fisher’s pastels, and her friends graffiti-memorialized their broken hearts, actually does resemble the Chernobyl reactor core.
Fairmont Brine operated under the ownership of a Pennsylvania firm called Venture Engineering & Construction and having trouble paying off debts, the plant shuttered in 2018. “The facility was designed in accordance with the codes and regulations at the time,” Venture Engineering President and CEO Dave Moniot told me when I interviewed him in 2023. “To our knowledge Fairmont Brine followed all regulations.”
“I feel horrible,” says Bailey. We are standing on the edge of the radioactive frack waste lake. For one, she loves Rayanne, and she brought her to this hell-place, thinking it was almost heaven. “Being an older sister you just kind of learn to protect your younger sister, and you just go throughout the day thinking everything is fun and nice, and then you learn, I don’t know, everything is not like that, and it is radioactive.” She pauses. Somewhere birds are chirping. Bailey is 21 now, graduated high school, still loves painting, and in just a moment will have to head out for her job at a weed dispensary, which she says she loves.
“I am just a teenage West Virginia girl who fell upon a radioactive brine site,” Bailey had told me in an earlier conversation, “so I am listening and trying to take every piece and connect the puzzle.” Now she really has become the kids in Scooby-Doo, and that has transformed her into something else that she never expected, can be a dirty word in this part of West Virginia, a dangerous word in today’s America — activist.
“There is a stigma around it. I understand it, I can appreciate it; it’s scary, I’m scared of it,” Bailey says, “but I feel as if there is a stronger will in me in changing things that are wrong than in being scared of things that are wrong, so I’d rather call it what it is.”
We walked back through the woods toward Neptune’s place. We were almost to the yard. Beyond, her job, her life, awaits.
“There’s nothing I can do about the past,” she says. “I just really hope they fix the future.”
# # #
MORE ABOUT THE BOOK ‘THE RADIUM GIRLS’
New York Times Bestseller “The Radium Girls” The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women KATE MOORE
The book focuses on young women from New Jersey and Illinois, often referred to as “artists,” who used luminescent paint to make the numbers and hands on watch and clock faces glow-in-the-dark. The most commonly used material was Radium 226 (Ra226), while at least one factory also added some Radium 228 (Ra228) to the paint mix.
As hard as it is to believe now, 100 years ago there was even a health supplement containing Ra228 known as Radithor. The dangers of exposure to these radionuclides began to reveal themselves in the radium girls during the Roaring 20’s, between World War I and America’s Great Depression.
The radium girls used fine bristled brushes to paint the luminous dials, and were taught a method known as “Lip – Dip – Paint” with the critical first step being repeated “pointing” of the brush with their lips, to keep the bristles close together in a point. They were repeatedly placing these brushes into their mouths.
Since they were told, and believed, the luminescent dust and paint was “safe,” they didn’t take any safety measures when it came to their exposure.
As we have learned from pesticide safety training, there are 4 routes of pesticide poisoning, easily remembered using the abbreviation “ODIE.” The radium girls’ primary exposure route would have been oral, since they were constantly putting those brushes in their mouths. Oral – mouth; Dermal – skin; Inhalation – lungs; Eyes.
Once the serious dangers of radium poisoning revealed themselves, there were many long, drawn-out court cases, where the girls fought for justice. The corporations involved fought them tooth and nail, using various tactics to deny them compensation for medical bills and damages. Their sacrifices led to many of OSHA’s worker safety standards in place today.
# # #
RADIOACTIVITY IN MARCELLUS SHALE
Excerpts from a report prepared for Residents for the Preservation of Lowman and Chemung (RFPLC) dated May 19, 2010 titled Radioactivity in Marcellus Shale by Marvin Resnikoff, Ph.D., Ekaterina Alexandrova, and Jackie Travers of Radioactive Waste Management Associates, New York, NY
Uranium, a radionuclide present in the Marcellus shale formation, is not soluble in water, but radium-226, a progeny of uranium, is soluble in water and can become mobilized when formation water is brought to the surface with drilling fluid and drill cuttings. Due to its prolonged existence in an underground formation, formation water can become highly concentrated in radium-226 and other radionuclides.
During horizontal drilling, a liquid drilling fluid is used to circulate drill cuttings to the well surface. Again, this drilling fluid mixes with formation water that may be highly concentrated in radium-226 and other water-soluble radionuclides.
Radioactivity in the Marcellus shale results from the high content of naturally occurring radioactive uranium and thorium, their decay products including Radium-226, and radioactive potassium elements. The evidence of high radionuclide content is present in geochemical studies and in gamma-ray logs from wells drilled into the Marcellus formation.
In 1981 the United States Geological Survey performed a geochemical study of trace elements and uranium in the Devonian shale of the Appalachian Basin. Since Radium-226 is in secular equilibrium with U-238, it is also on the order of 30 pCi/g. These data show that the radioactivity of the Marcellus formation remains consistently high throughout.
In addition to geochemical studies, gamma ray drill logs also indicate high radioactivity in Marcellus shale. In fact, the Marcellus shale formation is identified using a gamma-ray detector that produces a chart of radioactivity (measured in GAPI units) versus depth. Shale rock always displays a spike on such graphs, but compared to other shales the Marcellus shale formation spike is substantially greater.
Several problems exist concerning contaminated liquid in the landfill. First, municipal waste landfills are lined with a layer of clay and plastic and are not designed to contain low level radioactive wastes. The leachate could mobilize radionuclides and distribute them in other locations throughout the landfill or potentially transport the radionuclides to groundwater sources outside the landfill in the event of a breach in the landfill lining.
Second, the fluid will mix with leachate collected in the Chemung County landfill. This leachate with residues of radionuclides will be sent to the Elmira wastewater treatment plant, which, like the landfill itself, is also not designed to deal with radioactive waste. Radium-226 has a 1600-year half-life, so this is a long-term problem.
Third, from the increasing inventory of radium-226, the landfill will generate progressively increasing volumes of radon gas over time, much of which can be expected to escape uncontrolled. As an inert gas, the landfill gas combustion device cannot control radon.
Fourth, trucks transporting cuttings waste to the landfill will carry a substantial volume of liquid with the cuttings and therefore can be expected to leak on occasion. The leaking liquid is particularly radioactive and, over time, can be expected to contaminate local roadways and roadways inside the landfill site.
The Marcellus shale has elevated radioactive concentrations, approximately 25-30 times above background concentrations. The drilling and dewatering processes enhance the concentration of radium in the drilling fluid. Rock cuttings that hold up to 20% of this fluid are still considered solid waste and will be disposed of in the County landfill. The introduction of this radioactive material into the landfill will give rise to serious problems due to the generation of radon, radiologically contaminated leachate and to potential reuse of the site in the future.
NYSDEC regulations regarding the radiation doses from a decommissioned site and the allowable concentrations of radium in soil will be exceeded. In our opinion, these radioactive rock cuttings and associated radioactive drilling fluids belong in a radioactive landfill, such as the Envirocare landfill in Clive, Utah. Radium-contaminated waste is similar to U mill tailings, which the Utah landfill is designed for.
# # #
On January 20, 2018 Reid Frazier of StateImpact Pennsylvania reported:
Study: Conventional drilling waste responsible for radioactivity spike in rivers
Treatment plants that handle conventional oil and gas waste water are causing a buildup of radioactive materials at the bottom of three Western Pennsylvania waterways, according to a new study from researchers at Duke. “We concluded that recent disposal of treated conventional (oil and gas waste) is the source of high (radium concentrations) in stream sediments at (waste) facility disposal sites,” the authors wrote. The study found high levels of radium, a naturally occurring, radioactive material, in river and stream sediment at levels up to 650 times those found upstream of three industrial waste treatment plants that handle fluid produced by conventional oil and gas wells.
Paul Ziemkiewicz, director of the West Virginia Water Research Institute at West Virginia University says even conventional waste water can be high in radium, so he’s not surprised at the study’s result. “When we’ve compared conventional and unconventional brines, chemically they’re almost identical,” he said. “It would be surprising to me if radium didn’t show up.” Ziemkiewicz says drinking water facilities must remove radium from drinking water; the most obvious concern he has would be for the accumulation of radium in the food chain, and eventually, fish. According to the federal Environmental Protection Agency, long term exposure to radium increases risk of lymphoma, bone cancer, and leukemia.
# # #
A report from Dartmouth College dated September 18, 2018 reports:
How slick water and black shale in fracking combine to produce radioactive waste
The first research paper found that radium present in the Marcellus Shale is leached into saline water in just hours to days after contact between rock and water are made. The leachable radium within the rock comes from two distinct sources, clay minerals that transfer highly radioactive radium-228, and an organic phase that serves as the source of the more abundant isotope radium-226.
The second study describes the radium transfer mechanics by combining experimental results and isotope mixing models with direct observations of radium present in wastewaters that have resulted from fracking in the Marcellus Shale. Taken together, the two papers show that the increasing salinity in water produced during fracking draws radium from the fractured rock.
By Lily Rothman / TIME/ September 11, 2018
John McCain, (front, right) with his squadron in 1965. Library of Congress/AP
And then, like so many of the American troops who were prisoners of war in Vietnam, McCain’s story seemed to pause. Word of what he could be experiencing trickled out in bits, if at all. In 1969, the release of a group of POWs came with reports that, as TIME put it, “the most seriously wounded among the prisoners was Lieut. Commander John S. McCain III, son of the American commander in the Pacific.” According to one former prisoner, word was that McCain had several broken bones and had been in solitary confinement since August of 1968 — more than a year at that point.
By the time McCain was released in 1973, Americans were learning more about the treatment of prisoners in North Vietnam.
The return of almost all of the Vietnam POWs meant that former prisoners could finally tell what they had seen — free from the fear that their comrades would be targets of retribution. “They conceded that treatment had varied for each P.O.W., that conditions had improved remarkably by the fall of 1969, and that high-ranking officers had absorbed the worst of it,” TIME reported.
The details that comprised “the worst of it” were grisly: starvation rations, iron manacles, solitary confinement, the sick left to sit in their own filth. The end goal of such torture was often the extraction of information.
But, along with those reports came word that American prisoners had proved tough to break. Asked to list the names of the men in his squadron, McCain instead listed the offensive line of the Green Bay Packers. When his famous name afforded him a chance to jump the line to go home early, he refused; prisoners were supposed to be released in the order in which they had been taken, and he knew he wasn’t next in line. When his cellmate’s broken arm went untreated, McCain fashioned a cast out of his own bandages.
All told, he had spent five and a half years as a prisoner, with a substantial amount of that time in solitary confinement. And, though he was self-deprecatingly aware of the irony of becoming well-known as a military man for what he did as a prisoner of war, his story struck a chord with Americans of all political leanings. And McCain, as much as anyone, knew that such a feeling was rare — and something that should not go to waste.
“Until the day I went down, I lived under my father’s shadow,” McCain told TIME in 1978. “Incarceration relieved me of that burden — he couldn’t affect my future there.”
Senator John McCain, right, leads a group of men released from a P.O.W. camp in Hanoi, North Vietnam, on March 14, 1973. USAF/Getty Images
In the decades that followed, he proved that incarceration did more than merely offer the opportunity to make his own name. It shaped his life and gave him an origin story that would sustain the McCain mythology throughout the rest of his time in the military, as well as in the House and the Senate.
“It’s not just that he survived being hung by ropes from two broken arms and beaten senseless; it’s that when his captors learned of his famous father and offered to let him go home, he refused unless they let the rest of the prisoners go as well,” TIME noted in a 1999 cover story about his run for the Republican presidential nomination.
“Such conduct enthralls a generation that aches for heroes and doubts the moral detour it took during the years John McCain was becoming the icon of Duty, Honor and Country.”
# # #
