UNDER A GROVE OF PINES in Maryland’s Appalachian Mountains, Nick Fischer gathered his childhood friends around a campfire on a June night in 2023. Tucker wore a trucker cap and sported a beard. Bobbie’s flowing dress glowed green and blue in the light of the flames. They passed around beers and settled in. Then Fischer let his story unravel: His former job, he believes, destroyed his health. “I am falling apart,” he said. “I don’t know where to begin.”

Not all jobs in oil and gas country involve pulling fossil fuels out of the ground. During the extraction, an incredible amount of waste—often loaded with carcinogens, heavy metals, and shocking amounts of radioactivity—comes to the surface, and an invisible workforce inside the oil and gas industry toils away handling it. Fischer was part of it.

His introduction to the world of treating fracking wastewater started in November 2017, when he got a job at Clearwater in Doddridge County, West Virginia. The newly opened $255 million plant was a product of globalization: located in northern West Virginia but operated jointly by a Colorado energy company, Antero Resources, and the French environmental services firm Veolia. Clearwater was a hulking complex of strange tanks and pipes that pulled salts out of the wastewater from nearby gas wells. Once run through the treatment system, the water would be used to frack new wells, and the salts would be used as a deicer or even on food, explained Conrad Baston, a facility engineer, at a 2015 community meeting. “If anybody wants some, I can get you a big bag of it,” he said. “I thought about calling it Taste of the Marcellus,” he added, referring to the gas-rich geologic formation that produced the waste. The process was a model for closed-loop resource use. Earl Ray Tomblin, West Virginia’s former Democratic governor, applauded Clearwater in 2015 before it opened, and in 2019, one Antero official dubbed it “The best project like this in the world. Bar none. Period.”

Twenty-two months later, the plant shuttered. Fischer said he and his colleagues were dismissed without warning. “Clearwater was a failure,” reads a lawsuit Antero filed against Veolia in 2020. The fracking wastewater turned out to be a radioactive brew, and the salts a soupy mess. After combining the salts with fly ash—also toxic—Fischer had been required to scoop, transport, and grade the mixture with his bulldozer, building a controversial landfill adjacent to the plant that locals vehemently opposed, worried it would leach radioactivity into their rivers and contaminate drinking water.

Nick Fischer, who has lived with many health issues since treating radioactive oil and gas field waste, rests in his camper in Little Orleans, Maryland.

Neither Antero nor Preston Contractors, Fischer’s employer at Clearwater, have replied to questions. In January 2023, the District Court of Denver County, Colorado, decided the case in Antero’s favor, awarding the company $242 million for breach of contract and fraud. Last December, the Colorado Court of Appeals upheld this ruling. “This decision unfairly punishes innovators like Veolia,” which “conducts its business in an honest and loyal manner,” spokesperson Alexis Madelain told Sierra. Veolia has not responded to multiple requests for comment on whether the company informed workers at the facility about radioactivity risks.

FISCHER BELIEVED THAT he was part of “greening” an important American industry by treating fracking wastewater for reuse and helping generate beneficial products from oil and gas waste. Yet his job entailed working 12-to-14-hour days and scooping a mixture so corrosive it ate metal machines and rubber boots. He had to continuously breathe in its dust. Fischer maintains that no one told him radioactivity was a problem he had to worry about.

At the campfire in 2023, as bright embers drifted through the treetops and mingled with the light of the stars, Fischer said, “I truly thought I was helping the company.” He wondered why he and his coworkers were not informed of the health risks.

Tucker offered Fischer a campfire classic—a hot dog on a stick—but Fischer abstained and tugged at his belt, showing he was down to his last notch. Unable to keep down food, he had lost 40 pounds that year. At 38 years old, he has difficulty breathing; he experiences arthritic pain in his neck, spine, and knees; and he inexplicably loses feeling in his arms for months at a time. “I have no energy and spend most of my time in bed,” he said. No longer able to do heavy manual labor, he moved from West Virginia to his Maryland hometown to take up a job cleaning a campground. Fischer gestured at the campsite where he had parked the camper van he lives in and said, “Now I’m the maintenance man.”

The oil and gas industry has experienced record profits in recent years, and its CEOs take home multimillion-dollar earnings. Meanwhile, its working muscle—the people who perform the jobs supporting the industry—face a harm that few in the public see. “The companies are just fighting over the money,” Fischer said. “I’m stuck holding the radioactive bag at the end of this thing.”

Workers like Fischer, who want to shine a light on the unsafe conditions they were exposed to, face companies protecting themselves with a formidable shield made of greenwashing and attorneys. (Veolia recently ran a series of sponsored content ads in The New York Times to promote its role in halting climate change. “Ultimately,” reads one ad, “everything will come back to health.”) There are significant risks in speaking out. Even Fischer’s parents told him it was a bad idea.

But Bobbie reassured Fischer in the glow of the fire. “You’re doing the right thing,” she said. “Somebody has gotta say something.”

WE LIVE ON A RADIOACTIVE PLANET. Soil, rocks, and even the air we breathe and the water we drink contain what’s called background radiation. Oil and gas extraction bring to the surface some of Earth’s most interesting, and notorious, radioactive elements. Radium levels in the deposits accumulated on the inside of oil and gas pipes can be 400,000 times those of background radiation. Yet radioactive oil and gas waste, unlike that from the nuclear and medical industries, is not regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Environmental Protection Agency does not regulate it either. In fact, a sweeping 1980 federal exemption—the Bentsen and Bevill Amendments to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act—defines radioactive oil and gas field waste as “non-hazardous.”

Many of the oil and gas industry’s radioactive troubles stem from a waste stream referred to as “brine,” “produced water,” or “saltwater.” These names are deceptively benign. Brine can be loaded with toxic levels of salt, heavy metals, and radium thousands of times higher than the EPA’s safe drinking water limit and hundreds of times greater than the threshold that defines a liquid waste stream as radioactive. America’s oil and gas industry generates a trillion gallons of brine per year. Put into oil barrels and stacked atop one another, they would reach the moon and back at least 25 times. The industry wants the oil and gas. It doesn’t want the waste, which operators have never had a good solution for.

About 96 percent of the oil and gas industry’s brine is disposed of at facilities called injection wells, where high-pressure pumps push the waste deep underground. Although the EPA regulates these wells—there are 181,431, or roughly 11 for every Starbucks in the United States—the US Geological Survey has linked them to earthquakes across the country. In Ohio and Texas, they have been documented leaking fracking wastewater back to the surface, contaminating surface water, pastureland, and other oil and gas wells. Occasionally, wastewater spews from the earth in cinematic geysers.

In the early 1970s, as injection wells proliferated across the nation, top EPA officials were skeptical of the process. “We really do not know what happens to the wastes down there. We just hope,” stated Stanley Greenfield, a former EPA assistant administrator for research and monitoring, at a 1971 Texas symposium. In recent years, the industry has tried to pivot away from these wells, and that has meant a greater focus on setting up facilities to treat wastewater. New Mexico’s Democratic governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, believes that treating fracking wastewater will help solve the state’s water crisis, and an article published last year in the journal Nature touted the “substantial extractable lithium” that wastewater from fracking could yield. As sweet as these solutions sound on the front end—industry discards a burden, farmers get water, critical minerals enter the market—their proponents fail to acknowledge that wastewater treatment plants pose significant and understudied risks to air quality, drinking water systems, food networks, and the general environment. And no group has been more contaminated, and inappropriately informed about the risks, than the oil and gas industry’s own workers.

“There [are] night and day differences between radioactivity protections received by a worker in the nuclear industry and that of an oil field worker, and it is not fair,” said Phil Egidi, a former staff scientist in the EPA’s Radiation Protection division. Before retiring, Egidi worked on radiation and environmental safety for four decades, and he has spoken at conferences around the globe on oil and gas radioactivity. “This issue doesn’t have a bumper sticker,” he explained. “It doesn’t have a mascot. It doesn’t have a cute phrase. It doesn’t have a politician carrying it in a briefcase.”

Except for one. Democratic Pennsylvania state senator Katie Muth grew up in southwest Pennsylvania’s oil and gas country and studied sports medicine at Penn State, then at A.T. Still University in Arizona. She moved back to Pennsylvania in 2015, shortly before Donald Trump was elected president. Around the same time, Sunoco’s Mariner East pipelines began carrying propane, butane, and ethane—a plastics feedstock—through her county. This region, which includes suburbs of Philadelphia, is critical terrain connecting the state’s western gas fields to the coast. Muth, a skeptic of corporate America and its politicians and a proponent of climate action, was repulsed by the new president and by the shameless way the oil and gas boom had infiltrated Pennsylvania. In 2018, she decided to run for state senate—in a red suburban district and with no political experience—on a campaign focused on holding corporations accountable, including the oil and gas industry. She won, and then won again in 2022.

“I won a lot of independents and a lot of Republicans who care about the environment and the preservation of open space,” said Muth. There are landfills in her district that receive oil and gas waste, and tracing its trail has led her back to oil and gas country, and to the industry’s workers.

“We have no regulatory protection for these workers, and no one is calculating the cumulative radiation exposure they are receiving. This is a government failure on so many levels,” said Muth, who is up for reelection in 2026. “If you are going to harm people, I am at least going to fight for them,” she said. “I am not a martyr, but I am willing to listen.” With so many workers and their families still suffering in silence, it is an important start.

SHANNON AND MICHAEL LUTZ met in the mid-1990s while working at a West Virginia mall kiosk. “The movie Mallrats was our life,” Shannon said. The couple took office jobs in the same communications company, which led them to Buffalo, New York, where they lived together in a city for the first time and then had a child. But their love story ran headlong into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Their jobs disintegrated, and they returned to West Virginia with their young son, moving in with Shannon’s parents. Michael was into computers, not oil and gas, but in 2009, unable to find better work, he got a job at a fracking wastewater treatment plant in Fairmont called AOP Clearwater—not related to the Clearwater where Fischer worked.

Radium attaches to dust particles. At oil and gas waste treatment facilities, inhalation of this contaminated dust can expose workers to significant radiation, according to the nuclear forensics scientist Marco Kaltofen, who has studied radioactivity contamination all over the world. “There are a lot of ways to bring radioactivity home with jobs like this,” he said. “It will be in the floor mats in your vehicle, on your clothes, in your septic system, and therefore in your yard.”

“I just knew there was exposure,” said Shannon. “[Michael’s] shoes and clothes got damaged, the bottom of his pants were crunchy and hard from the salt and chemicals, and the dust was crazy! He would come home filthy, and I would have to wash his clothes.”

The other main route of radium exposure is ingestion, from eating, drinking, or smoking in the workplace with dirty fingers. Shannon said Michael grilled ribs in the AOP Clearwater parking lot, and she would come by with their son to drop off dessert.

In 2018, Michael was diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer called glioblastoma. He passed away in March 2023. Another coworker at the plant died of stomach cancer in 2022. Michael donated his body to the West Virginia University School of Medicine’s Human Gift Registry so that doctors could try to figure out what caused his cancer, to keep this from happening to other people in the future.

“I want health providers to learn about where their patients live,” said Ned Ketyer, president of Physicians for Social Responsibility Pennsylvania and formerly a pediatrician in southwest Pennsylvania’s oil and gas country. “Ask patients about where their water comes from. Look at a map and see what’s around them. Consider environmental exposure for every differential diagnosis.”

Living in Appalachia comes with a baseline carcinogenic risk. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics show Kentucky and West Virginia are among the three states with the highest death rates from cancer. The risks of working with radioactive oil and gas waste specifically have been documented in scientific journals and the industry’s own reports. Taken together, the toxic substances that oil and gas waste workers are exposed to “can cause cancer, heart and brain damage, liver and kidney problems, central nervous system issues, and poor birth outcomes and birth defects, among other health concerns,” said Alison Steele, executive director of the Pennsylvania-based Environmental Health Project.

Legal cases from the oil and gas fields of Louisiana and Mississippi have been successful in linking the harms to the bones and bodies of the workers themselves, but in the science field, longitudinal cancer attribution studies are much more difficult to pull together. People face repeated exposure to a variety of carcinogens in their daily lives, and such studies require decades of consistent data to be valid. Workers in industries such as oil and gas tend to move around, making the link—or even locating people—difficult. A scientific conclusion about whether laborers in Appalachia’s Marcellus and Utica oil and gas fields, and other formations across America, have been harmed by their work may come long after many of them have died.

IN FAIRMONT SITS the now-abandoned fracking wastewater treatment plant that AOP Clearwater sold to Fairmont Brine in 2012. When I visited in 2023 with Yuri Gorby, a former Department of Energy scientist, and Jill Hunkler, an Ohio organizer, the place had become a party spot for local kids. One of the processing buildings was littered with empty beer cans, and there was a fire circle in the parking lot. A soiled mattress and an inexplicably crashed speedboat floated in a pit in front of the main building. Gorby scanned parts of the site with his Geiger counter, which conveyed more radioactivity than 99 percent of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

Gorby and Hunkler sampled the water in the pit and sediment near the edge of the parking lot, not that far from the fire circle. They had the samples tested at Eberline Analytical, a radiological analysis lab in Tennessee. The water results showed elevated levels of radium and thorium, while the soil recorded radium at 5,072 picocuries per gram, more than 5,000 times general background radiation levels. “There are going to be long-term chronic effects from this,” said Gorby. After the EPA assessed the plant, the agency stated that “contamination at the site is uncontrolled,” adding that “human exposure to radio-nuclides by inhalation, absorption, or ingestion is possible.” Dave Moniot, president and CEO of Venture Engineering & Construction, the Pennsylvania-based company that operated Fairmont Brine, said that to his knowledge, “Fairmont Brine followed all regulations.”

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The former operations manager at Fairmont Brine, Sean Guthrie, listed several problems with the facility, including difficulty in disposing of radioactive sludge accrued in the treatment process and oppressive amounts of salty dust that hung in the air of the processing room. Without personal protective equipment, he and his coworkers had been forced to breathe in that dust. There were also regular incidents in which equipment broke down or backed up, resulting in improperly treated salty wastewater overflowing. Guthrie said he was informed that some materials were radioactive, but the harms were downplayed. “I would like to see some accountability,” Guthrie said.

Fairmont Brine in West Virginia closed in 2018, leaving behind a contaminated site.

Industry lobbyists and politicians build walls between environmentalists and oil and gas workers, but the stories of the people who work with the industry’s waste show a more nuanced reality. These are Americans with an appreciation for public land, clean water and air, and a livable planet. Some of the industry workers I have met can name every species of tree on their land—and sometimes even the salamander species. When they take their families on vacation, it is not to Thailand, the Caribbean, or Europe but often to a campsite in a state park.

For a lot of people living in extraction zones, the oil and gas industry may be problematic, but at least it provides work. And when an employer makes grand claims that the job they’re offering can actually solve a waste problem—even transform it into a public good—backed by company scientists and state governors, then that offer can be hard to turn down.

“I felt good about the job,” said Guthrie, “and thought we were doing something beneficial for the environment.”

IN 2022, AN APPALACHIAN advocacy group called Concerned Ohio River Residents sampled a public roadway in Martins Ferry, Ohio, and discovered a trail of radioactivity that led to the door of Austin Master Services. This plant was located in an old steel mill on the Ohio River, just down the street from the high school football stadium and the city’s water wells. Its function was to treat a second level of waste, downstream of treatment plants like Clearwater and Fairmont Brine. The radioactive sludge that had been removed from the wastewater at treatment plants and had accumulated on the bottom of tanks and trucks holding brine arrived here, along with other waste from the treatment process such as spent filters.

A list of rules for operating a food truck in Ohio is 14 pages long, but companies interested in treating radioactive oil and gas waste in the 2010s, such as Austin Master Services, merely had to answer questions on a one-page application (it’s now two pages). A special order from the chief of the oil and gas division of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources then allowed such companies to operate. Austin Master received its authorization in 2014, earning the right to take in 120 million pounds of radioactive oil and gas waste annually. Workers mixed this waste with lime or coal ash in an attempt to lower radioactivity levels enough so the waste could be taken to regional landfills rather than low-level radioactive waste disposal facilities. The latter are in remote locations out west. By not using these facilities, the oil and gas operators that produced the waste, such as EQT Corporation and CNX Resources, saved money, although exactly how much has never been properly calculated.

In addition to testing the public roadway, Concerned Ohio River Residents worked with Kaltofen to collect samples of sludge caked on Austin Master worker David Duvall’s boots and hard hat, then sent them to Eberline Analytical. The group learned that radium levels in the samples were 17 times higher than what the EPA allows in the soil at Superfund sites. I met Duvall in 2022 at a gas station coffee shop in southwest Pennsylvania, about an hour east of the plant where he once worked. “They treat you like garbage,” he said. As was the case with Fischer, Duvall was not informed of even basic risks. “Workers would eat, drink, and smoke cigarettes one after the other with dirty hands,” he said. “I did the same thing.”

We spoke for over an hour. Not long after, Duvall disappeared back into the shadows. The organizer who connected us has also lost track of him. Duvall is yet another worker who won’t show up in a longitudinal cancer study. As Jesse Lombardi, who worked as a manager in the fracking waste industry told me, “It’s part of the trick of the industry. The waste company they worked for will be gone, and they will die in agony in the trailer park they came from, and no one will give a fuck. I came, I conquered, I got what I wanted, I’m out.”

Last year, Republican Ohio attorney general Dave Yost filed a lawsuit against Austin Master, alleging that the company had “committed egregious violations of Ohio law.” The facility shut down in early 2024 and remains filled with radioactive waste that is scheduled to be removed later this spring.

MANY OF THE LEGAL CASES that make the connection between oil and gas jobs and cancer were brought by the late New Orleans attorney Stuart Smith, who defended workers against the likes of Shell, Chevron, and ExxonMobil—known collectively with other top global producers as “the big majors.” Smith linked many of the industry’s most common jobs to radioactivity risks that pile up over time and may lead to lethal cancers. His legal team used an analysis program developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for nuclear weapons workers to show that, with over 99 percent certainty, the leukemia as well as the lung, liver, and colon cancers his clients developed were caused by radiation exposure during their work in the oil and gas industry. “These men are guinea pigs,” Smith told me in 2020. “All of the big majors have done tests to determine exactly what risks workers are exposed to.” Smith won his cases and crafted a thriving business suing some of the world’s largest firms for oil and gas radioactivity. “Once you have the information,” said Marvin Resnikoff, a nuclear physicist who served as an expert witness, “it is indisputable.” Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell have not replied to repeated requests for information about Smith’s cases and the radioactivity risks that remain for oil and gas workers.

Smith’s legal theory is backed by the industry’s own documents. A 1982 report from the American Petroleum Institute’s Department of Medicine and Biology acknowledged the dangers of radium and radon in oil and gas waste and warned that regulating waste “could impose a severe burden on API member companies.” The industry consultant Peter Gray, writing in 1993 in the Society of Petroleum Engineers’ Journal of Petroleum Technology, stated that “contamination of oil and gas facilities with naturally occurring radioactive materials is widespread” and discussed several jobs that could “present a serious health hazard to industry personnel,” including cleaning out pipeline sludge; removing the radioactive scale that forms in pipes, pumps, and valves; and handling the radioactive sludge that accumulates in tanks and trucks. Much of the material removed from these contaminated facilities and infrastructure “must be handled as low-level radioactive waste and disposed of accordingly,” wrote Gray.

Still, government reports on oil and gas radioactivity can be deceptive, at times containing placid conclusions that don’t jibe with their own damning findings. “The radiation link has not been appropriately looked at for oil field workers,” said Egidi, the former EPA staff scientist. “We are screwing these workers just like we screwed the uranium miners.” When I reconnected with Egidi in December, he told me he planned to spend his retirement fighting to reverse this. “First you have outrage,” he said, “then you get legislation.”

LAST AUGUST, I RECEIVED an urgent text message from Muth, the Pennsylvania state senator. “Can you talk? I have a bomb of a story,” the text read. Another fracking wastewater treatment plant appeared to be in trouble; this one, operated by Eureka Resources, was in north-central Pennsylvania. The company claimed to be “a pioneer and leader in development of innovative, cost-effective, and environmentally responsible solutions” for treating the fracking industry’s wastewater. Eureka packaged the salts it pulled from this waste and, in 2017, several chain stores began selling the product branded as Clorox pool salts. As of late January, both Walmart and BJ’s were still selling the salts online. Neither company has responded to questions, nor has Clorox.

Muth arranged to meet a few whistleblowing workers from the plant in the conference room of a local hotel—14 showed up, including Patrick McIntosh, a former maintenance and operations manager. They described the harrowing conditions that led to the death of one coworker when a salt tank exploded. They also told Muth about a scheme in which food-grade salts were allegedly used to mask lab results and contaminated batches of pool salts were sent to stores, and about an idled site containing leaking tanks and dumpsters that discharged directly into the Susquehanna River, which flows into Chesapeake Bay.

The whistleblowers in this shadow world are still emerging. If there is hope in this situation, it lies in unexpected alliances—like a state senator in America’s most politically divided state taking the time to travel many miles from the boundaries of her urban constituency to meet with workers in conservative oil and gas country.

Last autumn, I traveled to Wysox, Pennsylvania, to meet McIntosh, who lives down the street from the plant. As we sat at the picnic table in his backyard, his wife tended the garden, and one of their three young kids played with chickens. McIntosh said he missed his coworker, Jeremy, who died in the explosion at the plant—a “kindhearted man” whose home was “filled with the laughter of children and the love of a good family.” McIntosh attributed the accident to the CEO’s consistent refusal to upgrade equipment and spend money on maintenance. McIntosh, like other Eureka workers I spoke to, worried that in the industry’s rush to find novel ways to dispose of its waste, it wasn’t contaminating just one facility, its workers, and the adjacent community but also swimming pools and the children who swim in them across America.

In September 2024, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection sent members of its Radiation Protection Program to the plant site, after receiving a complaint that it may be radioactive. In their report, inspectors noted finding “rejected processed salt containing elevated levels of radium” and radiation levels in at least one area that were 30 times higher than the International Association of Oil & Gas Producers’ definition of a contaminated workspace. Although Eureka had a Radiation Protection Action Plan for this site, the inspectors found evidence of only four employees receiving awareness and safety training.

I sent detailed questions to Jerel Bogdan, vice president of engineering at Eureka Resources, and Dan Ertel, the CEO, asking how the company ensured the safety of its pool salts and treated its workers. Bogdan’s reply made me wonder if he forgot to remove me from the email chain.

“Once you engage with these crackpots,” he wrote, “they just keep digging at you until they get whatever sensational data or information that they are after to get eyeballs on their publications. Let him write his stupid piece.”