Drill Cuttings
During the drilling process, large amounts of ground up rock, mixed with drilling mud and brine, are pulled out of the well and transported off the site. This waste then gets buried in landfills. Beside the large waste volume that needs to be accommodated, a concern with drill cuttings is the presence of naturally occurring radioactive materials in them. Radium and uranium can be found in drill cuttings (and produced water – see below) from a proportion of wells, and these elements eventually leach out of the landfills into the surrounding ground and surface waters.