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Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of Lawless Planet ad free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. On a cold, dark morning In March of 1979, operators at a nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, sit at their control stations, staring at hundreds of knobs and buttons. They notice that something is wrong.
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We do have a new development. It is not clear yet the extent of this development. There was an uncontrolled release of radiation from the facility approximately 20 minutes ago.
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That morning at the Three Mile Island Power plant, a pressure valve inside a nuclear reactor failed to close, allowing water that is supposed to cool the reactor to escape. Without the cooling water, the core began to overheat. The emergency replacement pumps kicked on, pushing more water in. Normally that would help, except that because the valve is open, water and steam kept escaping. Faced with blaring alarms and flashing lights, the control room operators get confused. In a panic, they shut off the water system. So the core keeps heating and heating and heating until it reaches over 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. If this keeps up, it won't be long before it reaches full meltdown. The heat allows radioactive material to mix with the escaping water and steam within hours of the malfunction. After radioactive gases fill the plant, operators take shelter and news of the crisis spreads.
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At about 4:00 clock this morning, two water pumps that helped cool reactor number two shut down. Officials say some 50 to 60,000 gallons of radioactive water escaped into the reactor building and that the radioactivity penetrated the plant's walls.
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As plant operators scrambled to cool the core. The plant's parent company, Metropolitan Edison, tries to keep the public calm.
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We may have some minor fuel damage, but we don't believe at this point that it's extensive. We do have our crews out. We're monitoring for airborne contamination. The amount that we found is minimal.
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State leaders assure nearby residents that things are under control, but that's not exactly true. They soon learn that radiation has been detected a mile away from the plant. The governor advises residents to stay indoors and and for pregnant women and young children to leave the area entirely. At this news, Pennsylvania residents panic. Over 100,000 people hastily pack up their cars and flee.
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A lot of people are leaving the Harrisburg area right now. The gas stations are flooded. The banks were busy. People were withdrawing some of their money so they could get out of here.
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President Jimmy Carter arrives on the scene four days later. Speaking as a former nuclear engineer himself, he makes a guarantee that the leak will be thoroughly investigated and the radiation levels are now safe.
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I would like to say to the people who live around the Three Mile island plant that if it does become necessary, your governor will ask you and others in this area to take appropriate action to ensure your safety.
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By the time the danger had passed and residents could breathe a sigh of relief, the country had lost confidence in nuclear power. The accident triggered a national reckoning about safety and regulations. But less than four months later, an even worse radiation disaster would unfold across the country. And unlike the near meltdown at Three Mile island, this one would go virtually unnoticed. From audible originals. I'm Zach Goldbaum, and this is Lawless Planet. Each week we tell a new story about the true crimes fueling the climate crisis and the people fighting to save the planet or destroy it.
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They should have been more environmentally conscious because they were guests to our native lands they didn't own. The.
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You know that moment when you order food and suddenly everyone around you gets very interested in your dinner? Yeah. That's what GrubHub does. Gives you deals so good you'll have to guard them. Gold days of grubhub plus is here. Four weeks of grubhub's best offers all month long in May, only for grubhub plus members. And if you're not a member, you can sign up now for just 99 cents a month for six months. That's 90% off Grubhub membership. Auto renews and terms apply. Sign up now on the app or@grubhub.com plus gold. Don't miss it.
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When I think of massive radiation events, three places come to mind. Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island. But on July 16, 1979, not long after that last disaster in Pennsylvania, there was an even bigger radioactive spill. To this day, it's the largest accidental release of radioactivity in the history of the United States, and the third largest in the history of the world. So why have you never heard of it? Well, this accident happened on indigenous land, the Navajo Nation, to be precise. It would prove catastrophic for the locals in the short term. But you could make an argument that the long term effects on the people and the environment and the have been even worse. This is the story of Church Rock, New Mexico. In the high desert of the western United States, in a region known as the Four Corners, Colorado, Arizona, Utah and New Mexico converge to form what's called the Colorado Plateau. And hiding within the plateau's mesas and canyons are a lot of natural minerals, including uranium.
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Yellow ore shows good uranium, while black ore is extremely rich in fissionable material. At $7 a pound. The uranium search rivals the Old West's gold rush.
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This potent desert landscape contains more than half of the country's uranium mineral reserves. It's also historically home to many Native American tribes. The Navajo Nation, which covers more than 6, 17 million acres across the desert, is the largest reservation in the country. It's about the size of West Virginia. And the people who've inhabited this region for nearly a thousand years call themselves the Dene, meaning the people. What you're hearing is Dene bazaad, the Navajo language. And the man speaking it is Larry King. No, not that Larry King. Larry is a Navajo activist in his 60s with speckly white hair often kept hidden under a baseball cap. As a kid, Larry heard tons of stories about the land they lived on, including about the mysterious yellow dirt under his feet.
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It's like Mother Earth's weapon, and as long as it's not disturbed, it remains harmless. But once that yellow dirt is disturbed and brought to the surface, it will create disharmony.
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Everyone on the reservation knew not to mess with the strange yellow dirt. Later, Larry would learn that there was another name for it.
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The yellow dirt is referred to in the white man's world. It's. It's uranium.
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When World War II started, uranium was essential to the United States government's secret atomic bomb program known as the Manhattan project. So in 1943, they sent government officials to the Navajo Nation and began setting up mines around the Puerco river, one of the main water sources for the Dene and their livestock. Despite being a river, the Puerco is dry most of the year and looks like a deep gully or a sunken road. When uranium companies started to set up shop in the region, they used this dry path to pump out water from the mines. One of the many hotspots for mining and milling in the area is the village of church Rock, New Mexico, roughly 30 miles east of the Arizona border. Church Rock is named for its most prominent landmark, a sacred over 300 foot tall rock formation. It's a quiet town on Route 66, made of jagged stretches of desert and dotted with ranch style homes and arid brush. These days it's home to a casino and about 3,000 people, mostly Danae. Back in the 60s and early 70s, it's where Larry grew up, alongside the Puerco river, right near the mine's site. As far as he knew, the water was safe to play in, to drink and to give to his family's livestock.
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We had our home and a corral, livestock and everything. There was also A windmill. And when I used to herd sheep as a young kid, I used to take our flock of sheep to that windmill to water them. And I used to run around and play on those piles of dirt. Nobody said anything. The staff from the mining company were there within earshot, and they didn't say, hey, kid, get away, or anything like that. There was no signs of any sort saying, danger, keep away.
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When World War II ended, the mines didn't shut down. Instead, the US ramped up production for the Cold War. Energy companies ended up building more than 1,000 mines. To keep up with demand and to do the actual mining, they hired mostly indigenous workers. By the 1960s, there are hundreds of uranium mines scattered across the Navajo Nation and. And the largest one of them, in fact the largest in the country, is in church Rock. In 1968, a mining company called the United Nuclear Corporation, or UNC, begins extracting uranium from the mine and eventually hired Larry King.
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After I graduated in 1975, I got a job with UNC, United Nuclear Corporation, a uranium company. I worked from midnight to 8 in the morning, and I was like a custodian cleaning up the change room or the shower room, sweeping up the dry uranium dust that miners had brought back with their clothing from underground.
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By the 1970s, mining had become a way of life in Church Rock. When Navajo men finished high school, they didn't have many options besides heading underground.
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I used to sweep the whole place, and nobody told me that breathing in all that mine dust might affect me later on in years. Nobody. There was no PPEs, no respirators, nothing.
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The extraction process is messy. When uranium is milled, it leaves behind a sandy residue called tailings. And because tailings are wildly radioactive, they're mixed with water and stored in tailing ponds to minimize the spread of radioactive dust. These tailings ponds aren't fancy. They're essentially big lined holes filled with radioactive slurry. UNC adds another feature. They tout as state of the art a large earthen dam next to the ponds to keep the tailings from seeping into the Puerco River. But two years into Larry's tenure at unc, the cracks are starting to show. Literally. While he's at work one day, Larry follows his supervisor on a walk around the site. He notices a group of strangers checking out one of the tailings ponds. And while he's not sure who they are, he can tell they're definitely not miners. Then he looks down at the tailings ponds himself.
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That's when I noticed cracks perpendicular running across the dam. They were wide, very wide, and you couldn't see the bottom of these cracks, so I knew they were deeper than what I could see.
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July 16, 1979, is a typical Monday morning in Church Rock. Before the sun rises, the desert is still cool, quiet and very dry. But at 6:30am One man is getting ready for work at the mine when he hears a strange sound. His name is Robinson Kelly. He's in his mid-20s and he lives near the dry Puerco riverbed. Robinson's morning routine includes taking his family's horses out of their corral before he heads to the mine. On his way out, his uncle warns him to leave the horses today. And when Robinson walks down to the Puerco river to see why, he's shocked to find a rushing stream. It's way more water than usual, especially on a clear day. As he later told the Navajo Times, he doesn't know what's going on, but when he notices the water is yellow, he knows something has gone very wrong. Not far from Robinson's house, about a mile and a half south of where Larry lives, an elderly woman is getting ready to care for her family's sheep and goats. She usually walks them across the Puerca Wash in the mornings, and today is no exception. But as she leads them through the unusually full river, she smells something strange.
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The little old lady smelled the sulfur. She walked across, it, burnt her feet.
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Meanwhile, over at the mine site, Larry's having a normal morning underground. He's not aware of the trouble that's brewing above him.
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I get to work at 6, so driving through there at 5 in the morning, I didn't notice anything. Went to the change room, put on my work clothes, went underground. It was until about 9 o' clock when I first started running into workers for the day shift. And I heard people talking to each other about did you see the dam?
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It turns out around 5:30am about an hour before Robinson Kelly heard the rushing water, a 20 foot wide section of the dam wall had collapsed, releasing millions of gallons of wastewater into the Puerco. The water surges more than 20 miles downstream, pushing up manhole covers and backing up sewers. In all, about 100 miles of the riverbed are contaminated with radioactive waste. With wastewater traveling as far as Chambers, Arizona. It wasn't until Larry and the other miners got off work and emerged from underground that they learned what had been happening above.
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I looked in that direction and it was in the same place where I seen those cracks that there was a huge gap in the dam as polluted
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Water rages down the gully of the Puerco River. Residents don't know what to do. Over the next few hours, the water levels drop slowly, and by noon, Robinson's uncle is able to cross the acidic river to retrieve the family's ship.
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When it broke, it released over 94 million gallons of acidic radioactive tailing solutions, and the acidity was equivalent to a battery acid or more.
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A little boy who wades in the river finds himself with burns on his feet. Robinson's uncle also later finds that his feet are covered in sores and blisters. Crops along the banks of the river begin to wilt, and the sheep that are so essential to the livelihoods of many Church Rock residents start dying off.
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People were confused. Community people, ranchers, livestock owners were not told that it's not safe to water your livestock.
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With this happening just a few months after the accident at Three Mile island, the 350 families who live near the Puerco river are freaking out. All told, 1100 tons of radioactive waste and 94 million gallons of noxious water were released into the riverbed. The flood of toxic water is gone within hours. But the government doesn't tell Church Rock residents about the risks of radiation for several days. And by the time they finally get around to warning them, it'll already be too late. In the days after the spill, the water in the Puerco showed up to 7,000 times the allowable amount of radioactivity for drinking water. So the Indian Health Service ran a few radio announcements warning people not to drink it and to keep their livestock away. But with limited electricity in the area, the radio warnings go unheard by many of the people who needed them most. But even if they could understand the warnings, it's not like they have a lot of other options. One Dine woman talked about the Post spill confusion in a documentary called the river that Harms.
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The officials told us that our livestock should not go near the water, but what are we supposed to do? We don't have any other water for them.
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In the weeks that follow, there's very little media coverage. The few newspapers that do write about it note the extreme levels of radioactivity being measured. But they also call Church Rock a sparsely populated area, and environmental officials downplay the threat to public health. Here's Larry King again.
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The Navajo Nation requested that it be declared a federal disaster area. But at the time, our governor, Bruce King, refused the Navajo Nation's request, and there was hardly any news media. But if you think back three months before that, the Three Mile island accident. I remember even President Carter was present at that area. Nobody came to our area.
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It's not lost on Larry that the Navajo are being treated differently. And UNC's cleanup efforts reflect this lack of urgency. In the wake of the spill, they get workers to shovel radioactive mud out of the Puerco riverbed. And because they can't use heavy machinery on the uneven terrain, they're stuck using simple shovels and five gallon pails.
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They were told to scoop up the yellow slime that was left behind into these buckets and then into larger containers where they were eventually taken out of there.
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After the spill. Larry thinks back to the cracks he'd noticed two years earlier. And those other people walking around the dam who were checking it out.
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There was a lot of people there on the dikes. And I'm sure they were there because of these cracks. They were obvious. And I didn't think anything because, you know, I'm just a local individual employee. But from what I understood, there were people from the New Mexico Environment Department. I didn't think anything.
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Because you thought it was getting handled.
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Yeah, it was being handled, I thought,
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but it wasn't handled. And on the morning of October 22, 1979, officials from Environmental organizations and Washington representatives from the Navajo Nation file into a room in Washington, D.C. they're all here today for a congressional oversight hearing on the dam break. Seated in front of the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment. Since the spill, experts and regulatory agencies have been investigating the circumstances of the accident. And what they've found does not look good for the United Nuclear Corporation. As it turns out, UNC was well aware of the same cracks Larry noticed in 1977. And from the very start, UNC knew that the land they were building their ponds on was structurally unsound. When the dams were initially put in place, UNC's engineering consultant insisted on a number of protective measures to prevent cracking. But the company ignored him. And in 1978, when UNC found even more cracking, they chose to hide the problem from state regulators. Instead, they apparently just kept filling the tailings ponds until they were nearly overflowing. At the hearing, the vice chairman of the Navajo Tribal Council, Frank Paul, tells the committee, we are unwilling to submit to either the tyranny or the exploitation by energy companies like unc, whose only interest is in the almighty dollar to experiment with the future of America. After Frank takes his seat, J. David Hahn from UNC gets his turn to speak. He assures the committee that everything is under control. Radiation levels are normal, and there Were no lasting effects from the spill. And just four months after the spill, the mine reopens.
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There was still a lot of contaminations. A lot of mine waste Was still evidence in the area. I think a lot of this unequal treatment. What happened here with unc and church rock, because we're an indigenous community.
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At the tail end of 1979, Stuart Udall, the former interior secretary and a staunch environmentalist, Filed a lawsuit on behalf of nearly 100 Navajo people who'd suffered from corporate negligence. By this point, dine workers had been mining uranium and other radioactive minerals for about three decades. Many of them had developed cancer and died. And udall doesn't think it's a coincidence. His suit included workers, Widows, and children. And they're all accusing seven corporations of exposing them and their loved ones to radiation. The suit alleges that the named corporations didn't protect their workers enough. By the time uranium mines Were being blasted in the four corners, Lung cancer was already a known risk of working in poorly ventilated mines.
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They could have done a better job on keeping their employees safe, Safety trained, all the time, Provided safety equipment, but they did not.
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The seven corporations listed as defendants in udall's lawsuits Included energy and oil enterprises in Oklahoma, Mineral producers in Pennsylvania, and energy firms in new york. But there's one conspicuous absence. United nuclear corporation. Months after the spill, the navajo land is still tainted, Both because of unc's slow efforts and the fact that the temporary workers have only skimmed the top three inches of the puerco riverbed. The dine notice that when the riverbed dries, it looks different than it used to. The bottom is now crusted with yellowish crystals of salt. With residents struggling with the after effects of the spill, the like dying sheep, A loss of income and painful burns from radiation exposure and a lack of clean water. They haven't been compensated for any of it. The victims of the accident at three mile island, in contrast, are starting to receive damage payments that would end up totaling around $71 million over the next several years. Larry is still working at the mines, and it's hard for him to ignore this massive double standard.
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We try to get unc to clean out and get all this uranium waste, Mine waste, out of the community, but the first thing they say is, it's too much money. But yet they can do that to a white community. And to me, it's always race related. It's always race related.
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By the 1980s, the uranium boom starts to bust. With the cold war winding down, the arms race and the Rush to build new nuclear power plants comes to a halt. In the decade following the Three Mile island and Church Rock accidents, almost 70 proposed nuclear power plants have their plans scrapped. With uranium prices dropping, companies began to abandon their uranium mines, including United Nuclear, which ends its mining operations in church Rock in 1982.
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They announced a huge layoff in April of 1982. We were told to all assemble at the mail office. Some people were given their pink slips, But I was fortunate enough to just pick up my check. I was transferred from the mine site to the mail site. I got laid off in April of 1983.
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Despite UNC being gone, the company's presence hovers like a ghost over the Navajo nation, Because a year later, they still have only cleaned up just a small portion of the spill they had created. The radioactive tailings ponds still dot the land around the mine. According to a UNC spokesman, the situation with the spill is that it has all been cleaned up. But that wasn't true. And later studies revealed something else to worry about. The water deep underground that the dine rely on is radioactive. Turns out this poisonous problem started way before the spill, and the serious health issues it will cause are just beginning. As it turns out, the danger at Church Rock didn't start in 1979, before the cracks in the dam ever appeared, when UNC was routinely pumping water out of the mine and into the puerco river, it was radioactive. And the whole time Larry King lived there before the spill, he and his neighbors had relied on the river for both their livestock and themselves.
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Ever since UNC started operating in the early 60s, the company was pumping water to the surface because they had to keep the mine as dry as possible so the workers and the machine can do the work underground. And the water was untreated.
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Unc never mentioned that fact to the Navajo people who relied on the tainted river. They didn't warn them about the possibility that radiation could sink into nearly every material in the surrounding area. As a result, as hundreds of mines were opening across New Mexico and Arizona, the dine continued to live as they always had, Building their homes from the radioactive scrap rock, watering their sheep in the radioactive water, and breathing in the sandy dust of the desert, which now contained uranium. And the radiation that had seeped into the groundwater below had spread for miles. Here's a physiologist speaking in the documentary the river that harms.
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When you talk about this area of the country where water is so critical and your sources of water are not great, that once you have polluted the groundwater, you are Basically, if that occurs, selling the birthright of your children and your grandchildren. And that, I think, is criminal.
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A few years after the spill, one resident killed a sheep to sell it as mutton. That's when they noticed that its insides were strangely yellow. Other sheep were born hairless. But otherwise, the spill's impacts were largely invisible.
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People don't really understand what is going on. That's the nature of radiation. You can't touch it, you can't taste it, you can't feel it. So it's hard to imagine that anything dangerous is going on.
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For a long time, the federal government, state officials, and nuclear energy companies assured the public that uranium mining was safe and containable. But 15 years after the spill in 1994, the United States Geological Survey found that the daily pumping of contaminated water from the mine into the Puerco river was responsible for at least 300 times more uranium and six times more gross alpha radiation than the actual spill. Even if the tailings ponds had never overflowed in the first place, many of the dine were already in danger, and Larry had been living next to this radioactive river for decades.
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This July 16, 1979, spill just intensified contaminated water flow through that brook by thousands. But I always say it was happening. The contaminated mine water was already flowing from the early 60s all the way up to 1990.
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This report is big news to the EPA and other government agencies, but it really doesn't change much for the Navajo people. By the 1990s, they'd been fighting for help for nearly 20 years. Fast forward to the spring of 2005. In front of a crowd of roughly 50 Dene, the president of the Navajo nation signs a bill banning uranium mining at the four corners. And he accuses the powers that be of committing genocide on Navajo land by allowing it for all those years. In the more than 40 years the nuclear companies spent mining the Navajo Nation, they extracted nearly 30 million tons of uranium. And when demand dried up and the companies started to abandon their mines, they left their waste behind. That included plenty of tailings piles. As locals noted in the documentary the river that harms.
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I'm not sure how many families even know the tailings are there.
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Uranium mine.
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It's almost taken for granted that it's just like having a gas station on
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the block with all the waste that still hasn't been cleaned up by the companies that ran the mines. The dine have continually been exposed to radiation. Over time, they've noticed their friends and neighbors getting cancer at a higher rate than usual. And the people who actually Worked in the mines have an increased risk of lung cancer. In particular, Robinson Kelly, who was in his 20s when he worked in the mines and heard the rush of water the day of the spill, watched many of his family and friends suffer from various cancers. His uncle, who'd found blisters on his feet after crossing the river that day, eventually died of cancer of the foot. His father, who worked in and lived next to another uranium mine in Colorado, also died of cancer. And his mother in law, who never worked in the mines but simply lived in Church Rock, met the same fate. If you ask almost anyone in Church Rock, they probably have a story about how the mines affected their health. That includes Larry. What sort of health issues have you experienced that you believe were related to the mine?
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A lot of respiratory issues, fatigue and all that. I know there's a lot of local community members that have passed on. I know a lot of people that have severe health issues, especially respiratory issues, breathing issues that have passed.
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One study shows that 67% of the men diagnosed with lung cancer on the reservation were former uranium miners. As of now, According to the EPA, there are over 500 abandoned mines and mill sites scattered on or near the Navajo Nation. It's hard for people like Larry to understand how their land could have been permanently changed by companies like uncle.
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C
They should have been more environmentally conscious because they were guests to our native lands. They were guests. They didn't own the place. They should have listened to the community. They should clean up their mess. But no, these companies, they come in, take what they need, and leave the waste for the community to clean up themselves.
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In early 2025, the leaders of the Navajo Nation made a controversial decision. They signed an agreement to allow uranium to be transported across their lands. And while things are done differently than before, with careful safety inspections and radiation monitoring, Dine people like Larry are rightfully suspicious. Some Navajo leaders insist that this is the only way for the Navajo people to have some control over the mining of their land. But many people feel betrayed. Last year, another cleanup effort got the green light, this time from the EPA under the Trump administration. In August 2025, the Justice Department announced that the federal government would enter a consent decree with UNC&GE to clean up uranium mine waste near Church Rock. At a cost of $63 million, they plan to remove around 1 million cubic yards of toxic debris from the area. It's expected to take about a decade to complete. Since the decree was announced, only one uranium mill on the Navajo Nation has actually been cleaned up. And while the plan sounds like a hopeful long term project. The Trump administration has also repeatedly cut funding for tribal environmental agencies and the epa. Many Danae have left Church Rock in the last few years. But now, despite the risks, Larry is staying put. At 68, he splits his time between his family and his cause. When he's not advocating for the Mayans to finally be cleaned up, or arguing against building new ones, he's focused on his most important job, taking care of his grandchildren. And to Larry, that's why this place is still worth fighting for.
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According to our Navajo tradition, our native way of life, we're tied to the land. It's not easy to just up and leave. I'm encircled with contamination. We got the abandoned mine less than a thousand feet to the west. But I can't give up. I cannot see myself moving from here. Since my dad died, I took over the area here, my little ranch. I'm here. I have no desire to move. This is where I'm going to be until my days come to an end.
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Follow Lawless Planet on the Audible app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to all episodes of Lawless Planet ad free by joining Audible. Next week on Lawless Planet. In West Virginia, Don Blankenship was already known as the Dark Lord of Coal for proudly skirting worker safety and environmental regulations. And that was before don't has Asterstruck one of his biggest mines. Breaking news in America's coal mining country. We now know today's deadly mine explosion
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in West Virginia has claimed the lives
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of at least seven workers, and that number could rise substantially. For today's episode, we relied heavily on Yellow Dirt, an American story of a poisoned land and a people betrayed by Judy Pasternak, the documentary the river that Harms, and Marly Shabala's article Poison in the Earth from the Navajo Times. Lawless Planet is produced by Audible. This episode was produced and hosted by me, Zach Goldbaum. It was written by Olivia Briley. Our senior producer and senior story editor is Derek John. Senior producer for Audible is Andy Herman. Our senior managing producer is Lata Pandya. Our managing producer is Jake Kleinberg. Our producer is Lexi Perry. Sound design by Kyle Randall Music by Kenny Kuziak. Our music supervisor is Scott Velasquez for Frison Sync Fact checking by Naomi Barr. Our legal counsel is Shepard Mullen, Executive producer for Audible Jenny Lauer Beckman, head of Creative Development at Audible Kate Navin, Head of Audible Originals North America Marsha Louie Chief Content Officer Rachel Chiazza Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals, LLC. Sound recording Copyright 2026 by Audible Originates, LLC. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.