With all the falderol about Utah being turned into the world's radioactive waste dump, it's fun to learn that tons of Utah N-waste was exported to Hollywood.

Most Utahns know the story of the 1954 John Wayne movie The Conquerer (though few, mercifully, have seen the stinker). This epic cinematic bomb was filmed in southern Utah during of a series of atomic bomb tests at Yucca Flats, Nevada. Legend has it that a statistically suspicious number of the cast and crew, including the Duke and Susan Hayward, later died of cancer.

Protest artist Nobuho Nagasawa created a whimsical work to commemorate the events, called Cloud of Mushroom Soup. She writes in her notes:

The Hollywood aspect of the tragedy continued when 60 tons of radioactive earth from Utah was transported to a Culver City studio by RKO Pictures, in order to recreate a desert set for additional filming. After the filming was completed, the dirt was distributed over the Hollywood area. To this day, parts of Hollywood may still be radioactive, since the half-life of plutonium is estimated at 24,000 years.