I began this odyssey, innocently enough in July 2009 when I led a filmmaking crew to South Dakota to investigate what we had heard was an abandoned uranium mine which had contaminated local groundwater and made local ranchers, their children and even their livestock sick.
It was my own naïveté which kept me in the dark, and even though I had done a bit of research prior to leaving the driveway I still had no reasonable clue or expectation of the length and breadth of the problem, nor how many of us are affected by it every day.
I had no idea that there are more than 1,000 abandoned uranium mines in the southern Black Hills alone. There are countless abandoned mines elsewhere. I had no idea that there were over 4,000 abandoned test wells in the southern Black Hills...countless more elsewhere.
I had no idea, nor did any of the people I have interviewed, that the water that 38 million of us in the American southwest get from the Colorado River is filtered through 16 million tons of radioactive waste sitting less than 750 feet from the edge of the river in Moab, Utah.
