Petroleum-238

In an extraordinary seven-year investigation, Justin Nobel traveled the United States reporting on the oil and gas industry and learned a disturbing and little-known fact: a lot more comes to the surface at a well than just the oil and gas. Each year the industry produces billions of tons of waste, much of it toxic and radioactive. The fracking boom has only worsened the problem. So where does it all go?

Petroleum-238 provides the shocking answer. Shielded by a system of lax regulations and legal loopholes, this waste has been spilled, spread, injected, dumped, and freely emitted across America. Nobel relies on intimate whistle-blower oilfield worker accounts, courageous community activists, over a century of academic research, and a trove of never-before released industry and government documents to lay out a series of game-changing reveals into the world's most powerful industry. Oilfield waste has been spread on farm fields, under the misguided belief it helps crops grow and cows love it. Radioactive oilfield waste has been shipped in from other countries, thanks to an outrageous exemption. The waste has even been used to build school playgrounds and sold in hardware stores. In many states, it's being spread on roads. None have been more deceived than the industry's own workers, who are suffering mysterious health maladies, and dying from rare and vigorous cancers.

Nobel's book is an impressive work of science journalism, with sweeping and surprising moments of literary beauty. It is also a welcome breakdown of America's red-blue divide and the false wall corporations and politicians often set between industry workers and environmentalists. In the tradition of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Petroleum-238 is a landmark work of environmental writing and an urgent call to action.