"In her book Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed, former Los Angeles Times reporter Judy Pasternak documents the toxic legacy of uranium mining in the Navajo lands of northeastern Arizona, where radioactive dust wound up in Navajo homes and drinking water.

IRA FLATOW, host:

You're listening to SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR. I'm Ira Flatow.

In the thick of World War II, with the government worried about atomic experiments in Germany, the Manhattan Project was born. And it had one mission, and that was full speed ahead on research to produce the atom bomb.

There was just one problem: where to get the uranium. At the time, there were two prime sources, the first, a mine way up near the Arctic Circle, over a 1,000 miles from the nearest railway; and the other, a mine deep in the Belgian Congo.

So the Army wondered: Wasn't there any more secure, domestic source of uranium ore? And they found it, and a lot of it, all over the Navajo homeland in northeastern Arizona, which is where my next guest's book takes places.

FLATOW: The book is "Yellow Gold(ph): An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed." It takes us back to those wartime days of exploratory mines. Yellow gold is I keep calling it "Yellow Dirt." I'm sorry: "Yellow Dirt: American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed." It takes us back to those wartime days of exploratory mines, to the decades of neglect after most of the mines closed, when the Navajos unwittingly built homes out of radioactive dust and drank lake water laced with uranium right up to today, where the federal government is working to clean it all up. ""

Get the Story:
'Yellow Dirt': The Legacy of Navajo Uranium Mines (NPR 10/22)

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