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Yellow Dirt: Chronicling a toxic legacy on Navajo land

By Daniel Kraker

http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/knau/local-knau-935734.mp3

Flagstaff, AZ – In the thick of World War II, the government worked feverishly on a top secret plan to build an atomic bomb. There was just one problem: where to get the uranium to fuel it? Well, they found it, and a lot of it, on the Navajo reservation. But as Judy Pasternak details in her new book "Yellow Dirt," the uranium that helped end the war also left a painful toxic legacy that exists to this day. Pasternak told Arizona Public Radio's Daniel Kraker how the government first found uranium on Navajo land.