“Petroleum 238” is the story of how a powerful industry spreads harm across the land and sickens the American people, especially their very own workers. This industry puts enormous resources into making sure no one ever put all the pieces together, and no one ever has — until now. Many people tell me there is nothing to see here, the levels aren’t that bad, but unfortunately this is the same thing the oil and gas industry’s shadow network of radioactive waste workers have often been told. So, they work on, shoveling and scooping waste, mixing it with lime and coal ash and ground up corn cobs in an attempt to lower the radioactivity levels, without appropriate protection, sometimes in T-shirts, eating lunch and smoking cigarettes and having cookouts in absurdly contaminated workspaces. Sludge splatters all over their bodies, liquid waste splashes into their eyes and mouths, they inhale radioactive dust as waste eats away their boots, soaks their socks and encrusts clothes that are often brought home and washed in the family washing machine, further spreading contamination. Oil field waste has been spilled, spread, injected, dumped and freely emitted across this nation. And contamination has been discharged — sometimes illegally, often legally — into the same rivers America’s towns and cities draw their drinking water from.

And the industry has triumphed: the radioactivity brought to the surface in oil and gas development has never been federally regulated. Instead, the industry was granted a federal exemption in 1980 that legally defined their waste as nonhazardous, despite containing toxic chemicals, carcinogens, heavy metals and all the radioactivity. The same 1980 exemption allows radioactive oilfield waste to be transported from foreign countries seamlessly across America’s borders and deposited in the desert of West Texas. I have been there.