Many Americans are excited about the prospect of exploiting vast domestic reserves of shale gas, and a recent Foreign Affairs article by John Deutch makes a strong pro-fracking case. But nuclear power enthusiast Rod Adams raises a legitimate concern:

The sad thing is that all of this drilling is not even resulting in sustainable wealth generation; shale gas wells have a completely different production characteristic than conventional wells drilling in sandy formations where migration to the well is enabled naturally. When a tight formation is stimulated with millions of gallons of fracking solution at high pressure, it enables gas that is relatively close to the collecting pipe to flow quite freely – initially.
Within just a few months, most of that newly released gas has been extracted and the flow rate drops rather dramatically. Within the first year, about 50% of the gas that will ever come from that round of fracking has been collected. While it is possible to drill some additional bores and perform the fracturing process all over again, that requires additional expense, additional water, additional chemicals and additional risk to the local area.

There is a significant environmental and public health downside to all of this:

While I caution people to understand, rather than to fear radiation, there is a very real threat if levels are not measured, not properly controlled and not properly respected. I have written about the exceedingly low quantities of tritium associated with leakages from water carrying systems at nuclear power plants and demonstrated that those quantities produce no risk to human or animal health. I have also pointed out that tritium is a weak beta radiation emitter that is almost always tightly bound with oxygen in water molecules that do not linger in any tissue for plants or animals.
In contrast, the radioactive materials that come up with fracturing fluids in a formation like the Marcellus, which has a high enough concentration of uranium and thorium that it was once considered a potential heavy metal mining area [include radium]. …
The health consequences of frequent exposure radium at high enough concentrations are quite different from those of tritium. Here is another question that begs to be asked – if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s charter includes protecting the public from the hazards of radiation emitting materials, why aren’t the truckloads of waste water from fracked wells subject to NRC monitoring and reporting?

Adams’s ultimate point is that a true accounting for the costs associated with exposure to radioactive materials would make nuclear power look far more attractive than fracking:

Despite the claims of antinuclear activists, a very good case can be made that the nuclear industry comes closest of all energy industries to this high, but important standard of internalizing and accounting for all costs associated with generating its important and vital electrical power output. If the nuclear industry’s competitors did the same, the playing field would be significantly closer to being level, the world would be a cleaner and safer place, and our overall prosperity would increase because costs would be properly allocated to the people that impose them.

I’m not in a position to evaluate Adams’s claim, but this does merit further attention. Costing in clean-up is a first step we should take before making any public investment, certainly, and private firms that intend to frack need to take on this burden, which they can then pass on to consumers. I just don’t see why the the federal government should implicitly subsidize these firms and pass on the cost to all taxpayers, including those who don’t benefit.