Original subtitles

[serious music]

- [Narrator] What would happen

if every human being on earth disappeared?

No matter how we might vanish

this is the story of what could happen

to the world we leave behind.

Now on "Life After People."

[static crackles]

Of all the things humanity built to power the modern world,

there are some so volatile

that they're always on the verge of exploding,

and when we're gone, there's nothing to keep them in check.

[explosion roars]

Everyday products become incendiary weapons.

- Those cans and containers

would be popping off like a bunch of grenades.

- [Narrator] The chemicals that once helped feed millions

unleash destruction across farmland instead.

- It would be like a massive bomb went off,

scorching everything for a quarter mile in every direction.

- [Narrator] And what happens

when the nuclear waste we've spent billions to contain

breaks free of its underground prison?

- The threat of the atomic age

doesn't disappear with humans.

It's just waiting for a comeback.

- [Narrator] Without people, the world

will blow the lid off what we built.

And the question isn't

if these ticking time bombs will go off, but when.

Welcome to Earth, population zero.

[disquieting music]

It's a blistering day in Houston, Texas,

but the city is shrouded in ghostly silence.

There are no tourists sweating

beneath the San Jacinto Monument.

No workers at the Space Center

toiling in the suffocating heat.

- In the summer, Houston can get brutally hot,

as hot as 110 degrees or higher.

Famously hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk.

- [Narrator] The city is sweltering.

And there's an unseen danger concealed

in every neighborhood, every home,

behind cabinet doors,

shrouded in darkness, waiting to explode.

- People don't realize

how many pressurized products we leave lying around.

Almost every kitchen and bathroom and garage,

you'll find aerosol cans.

We don't give it a second thought,

but every one of those is a little pressure ball.

- Inside an aerosol can you've got two things:

the actual product

and then a compressed gas like butane or propane.

It's squeezed down under pressure into a liquid form

so that when you press the nozzle, the liquid expands,

turns into a gas, and propels the product outwards.

That's super useful.

Until it's not.

- These cans are only made to handle so much heat.

After about 120 degrees Fahrenheit,

the pressure reaches a critical limit.

- [Narrator] In the time of people,

Houston was alive with the thrum of engines

and the whirl of air conditioners.

Now the power is gone.

Plants are silent.

And there's nothing to cool buildings

baking under the merciless sun.

- On a 110-degree day,

a house without air conditioning

could easily reach 120 degrees or more,

especially in rooms with south-facing windows

and no airflow.

[subdued music]

- In September, 2019 in St. Louis, Missouri,

an aerosol can of dry shampoo

was left in the center console of a car on a hot day.

The heat caused the can to explode,

blowing the console cover off its hinges,

shattering the sunroof

and propelling the can 50 feet into the air.

- [Narrator] All it would take is hands

to move aerosol cans out of direct sunlight.

Instead, extreme heat infiltrates them

and sets off volatile reactions.

[aerosol can booms]

- One can ruptures, then another.

A burst of flammable vapor sprays across the room.

- Cans would start exploding some, one at a time,

some in boxes, I mean in cars, in homes, in shops,

it would just sound like gunshots going off

all over the place.

It'd be total chaos.

[explosions boom] [glass shatters]

- This isn't just one fluke accident.

That's millions and millions

of pressurized time bombs now abandoned.

- [Narrator] Not just in Houston,

but across Texas, across the globe,

aerosols erupt like hand grenades.

[aerosol can booms] [glass shatters]

- So you could have spray bottles exploding

and splattering these Jackson Pollock paintings everywhere.

Just imagine like whipped cream erupting

and covering everything in white foam.

- [Narrator] If single cans can do this much damage,

how much could be done by a collection of thousands?

[distressing music]

In the heart of the American Midwest,

there are no farm hands tending the fields,

no machinery tilling the soil or reaping the harvest.

But in Iowa, nearly 124 million farm animals still graze

from sheep and goats to cattle and pigs.

- Midwest farm country covers an area bigger than France.

There are enough hogs and cattle

to supply New York, California, and Texas for a full year.

A single farm can grow enough wheat

to bake a million loaves of bread.

- [Narrator] Not far from the abandoned state capital

of Des Moines, there's a factory hiding an explosive secret:

a stockpile of ammonium nitrate.

- Ammonium nitrate makes up about 80%

of the explosives used in North America.

[explosion booms]

And that use is mostly for mining and quarrying.

- [Narrator] But this factory was never meant

to manufacture destruction.

It was meant to nourish the soil instead.

[subdued music]

- Roughly half of the world's food supply

depends on nitrogen-based fertilizers.

Nitrogen is like a superfood for plants

and farmers need to get as much of it as they can

for as cheap as possible.

Ammonium nitrate works in almost any type of soil,

so it's an extremely popular base for fertilizer.

- It looks harmless.

It's like chalky white salt.

But don't be fooled, that stuff has a dark side.

Under normal conditions, it's stable,

but if it comes into contact with oil or fuel or soot,

it is very explosive.

Now, if you're thinking you need

to go check the fertilizer in your shed

to make sure it's not ammonium nitrate, just relax.

You probably don't.

The concentration in fertilizer that you buy at the store

is way too low to be any kind of hazard,

but the industrial stuff

has to be handled way more carefully,

especially when it comes to heat.

- [Narrator] In the time of people,

fertilizer plants were kept cool

to prevent ammonium nitrate from becoming volatile

because the hotter it gets,

the faster it breaks down and becomes combustible.

- We've seen this kind of thing before.

In 1947, the SS Grandcamp was docked in Texas City, Texas

loaded with 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate.

A cigarette tossed into the hold

started a slow-burning fire.

- An hour later, the ship exploded.

The blast was so powerful

that it created a 15-foot tidal wave

that ripped through the docks.

It killed 400 people and injured another 5,000.

It even leveled a thousand buildings in the area.

[brooding music]

- [Narrator] After people, the power grid is down,

but thanks to a backup generator,

the power is still on.

But there's no one to sweep up fertilizer

blowing across the facility

and no one to make sure the generator is running safely.

- Diesel engines produce heat, fumes, even sparks,

which is bad news around a chemical

that can become explosive

under the right or wrong conditions.

- All it takes is a single tiny spark

popping off the generator's exhaust,

drifting lazily through the air,

and landing on a dusty pile of ammonium nitrate.

When that happens, you've got a problem.

- But it's not the sudden explosion you're expecting.

When ammonium nitrate first starts to burn,

it just kind of smolders for a long time.

It gives off this thick white smoke

and it almost looks harmless,

but it's a slow-burning chemical reaction

that is surprisingly hard to stop.

- The second that smoke turns gray or black,

that's the danger sign.

It means soot and hydrocarbons

are mixing with the ammonium nitrate,

creating the perfect fuel-rich conditions for detonation.

- [Narrator] The ammonium nitrate is smoldering,

and when the generator fails, the temperature will rise.

What will happen when more

than 66,000 pounds of it explode?

[grim music]

- [Narrator] Two weeks after people,

Iowa farmland is being consumed

by the livestock we used to tend.

But at an abandoned fertilizer factory

outside of Des Moines,

a ticking time bomb is smoldering.

And it's heating up.

- As ammonium nitrate burns, it can release oxygen.

And fire feeds on oxygen, so as the fire grows,

it produces more oxygen that makes more fire and so on,

and it's got this positive feedback loop

that makes things more and more intense.

The ammonium nitrate also starts to break down,

producing heated gases.

And if you have a confined space

like a warehouse or a silo,

that's gonna build up the pressure.

All you need now is some carbon

and you've got a perfect recipe for detonation.

- The fire is so intense

that it could heat the inside of the warehouse

to as high as 500 degrees,

hot enough to liquefy the roofing asphalt,

which would begin to drip down like molten black lava

on to the burning fertilizer.

And what does the asphalt contain? Carbon.

[subdued music]

- [Narrator] There's no ventilation, no release.

The air grows heavy, the warehouse swells,

and then the inevitable happens.

[fire roars] [glass crashes]

- It would be like a massive bomb went off.

It's almost like a major military airstrike

scorching everything for a quarter mile in every direction.

[explosion booms]

- The roof tears off

and a toxic orange-red mushroom cloud

of nitrogen dioxide shoots into the sky.

- [Narrator] The blast was only the beginning.

Now, a lethal cloud is sweeping over every living thing

in every direction.

- Nitrogen dioxide becomes nitric acid

when it touches water, so it's gonna react with dew,

with sap, and that's gonna leave chemical burns

all over plants and trees over a huge area.

- Nitrogen dioxide is also deadly when inhaled,

just a few whifts of it

can burn your lungs from the inside out.

In high enough concentrations it can kill in a few minutes.

- This crucial nutrient that helps to grow the crops,

is now doing the exact opposite,

wiping out all the farms and crops.

- [Narrator] Huge swathes of land

are stripped bare by the toxic cloud,

spreading for dozens of miles.

But what new disasters are lurking,

lying in wait to wreak havoc on the heartland?

[distressing music]

In the Pacific Northwest,

Seattle, Washington is a ghost town.

No sight-seers peer down from the Space Needle

and food rots in the stalls of the Pike Place market.

But less than 200 miles away

lies a complex network of safeguards designed to keep

one of the biggest nuclear threats on the planet at bay.

- In the world without people,

the nuclear threat is not the thousands

of nuclear warheads we've left behind.

Those are locked up tight,

layered with safety systems and engineered not to blow up

without some serious human intervention.

The real danger is the toxic waste that we left behind.

- They call it radioactive sludge.

It's the byproduct of the plutonium production process.

And one of the biggest stockpiles

of this stuff anywhere in the world is Hanford, Washington.

- Back during the Cold War, Hanford cranked out plutonium

for the nation's nuclear arms race.

- After the Cold War,

Hanford was left with a massive radioactive hangover.

The reactors were shut down,

but the mess was just left there.

- [Narrator] The Hanford site is teeming with animal life

from elk and marmots to bald eagles and coyotes,

but it's also home to some 56 million gallons

of radioactive sludge

stored in 177 underground tanks.

And keeping it contained is a constant struggle,

one that relies heavily on human intervention.

- Radioactive sludge is highly unstable

and gives off heat,

so it requires constant stirring and cooling

to prevent a chemical reaction and pressure buildup.

- Essentially, someone needs

to keep an eye on this situation all the time

because if you don't, gases like hydrogen

and ammonia build up inside of the tanks.

And if the pressure gets too high, it doesn't just seep out.

It bursts.

Scientists even have a name for this phenomenon.

They call it a burp.

- [Narrator] In the time of people,

pressure was carefully controlled

by skilled technicians,

and when the contents of a tank became too dangerous,

they were diluted with water and moved to another tank.

But even with rigorous oversight,

accidents have happened before.

- Back in 1957 at a place called Mayak

in the Russian Ural Mountains,

one of the waste tanks lost power.

The cooling system failed.

Nobody noticed in time

and the waste heated up,

the pressure spiked and, kaboom, that tank exploded.

[grim music]

- It launched a massive radioactive cloud into the sky

that stretched across thousands of miles.

Towns were evacuated, whole regions were contaminated.

It was one of the worst nuclear disasters in history.

- [Narrator] Many of the Hanford site's tanks

are modern double-walled beasts,

but others are single-walled

dating all the way back to the start of the program

in the 1940s.

Without people, the pressure is increasing

and there's no one to watch the gauges,

no one to operate the pumps.

How long before this lethal cocktail

of nuclear waste escapes its cages

and what new havoc will it wreak?

[brooding music]

- [Narrator] Two years after people.

On the outskirts of Santa Fe, New Mexico,

a massive warehouse sits in silence.

There are no workers to drive forklifts,

no pallets being moved,

but inside, there's an explosive danger

just waiting to happen.

- Warehouses like these can be huge,

like the length of three football fields.

Now they have metal roofs, so they need to be cooled

with air conditioning and industrial fans.

But without electricity,

the temperature inside those things is gonna be stifling.

- The roof traps the heat.

Outside temperatures would spike in the middle of the day,

so inside it could get as high as 140 degrees.

- We all know that aerosol cans can explode in the heat,

but if you had thousands of them going off at once,

I would be a little bit like peppering the inside

of a warehouse with machine-gun fire.

- [Narrator] In the time of people, simple cooling

and product rotation would prevent aerosols from exploding.

But now, the fans are silent

and products have been roasting on the shelves.

First, one can ruptures, then, another.

Soon, the air is filled with the chaotic thunder

of hundreds of explosions every minute.

- The thing about these explosions

is that they're completely random.

I mean, at least with a bullet, you can aim the gun,

but these things are exploding

in every direction with no rhyme or reason.

[aerosol cans crashing]

- Cans will be flying everywhere

with enough force to shatter bones.

Picture a popcorn maker, but every kernel is razor sharp

and carries the destructive force of buckshot.

- And then of course, you've got things

that are extremely flammable.

Things like cooking spray or solvents or cleaning agents.

- One spark.

It could be from a static charge,

it could be from the sudden pressure release

of metal on metal.

It wouldn't take much.

The vapors ignite.

- Without humans, there are no first responders,

there's no fire department.

There's no one to contain this explosion.

So the resulting fire is just gonna burn.

[fire crackling]

- [Narrator] Triggered by countless tiny explosions,

the warehouse is wiped off the map.

But there's more pressure building.

[distressing music]

A year later.

On nearly every highway across the globe,

a similar threat is lurking.

18-wheelers lie in their final resting places,

carcasses strewn among the skeletons

of human transportation.

On an abandoned stretch of road

in the American Southwest

in one truck's aging cargo hold sweltering in the sun,

there's a catastrophe waiting to unfold.

Fueled by a substance

found in homes and stores all over the world.

- Paint thinner is made out of really volatile stuff

like toluene, xylene, and acetone.

Imagine 9,000 gallons of that stuff sealed in steel drums

and baking in the summer heat.

- Paint thinner is more explosive than gasoline,

and in the heat, it evaporates, becoming a dense vapor,

like a heavy super-flammable steam.

- If a spark hit inside the tanker, watch out.

It's gonna be a massive explosion.

[barrels creaking]

- Inside the steel drums, the pressure builds.

There are no relief valves.

And as the temperature rises,

this volatile cocktail inside expands,

forcing vapor into the weakest seams of the metal.

- [Narrator] In the time of people,

this dangerous payload

would never have been left to swelter in the heat.

Now there's no one to keep it cool,

and no one to check for problems.

And for months, a pinhole leak has been releasing

a shimmering cloud of explosive fumes

just waiting for a spark.

- It's a textbook chain reaction just waiting to happen.

All it takes is a burst

of expanding metal scraping against steel.

- [Narrator] The fumes ignite, the flames spread,

and all at once, the whole truck explodes,

turning the highway into a riot of sound and smoke.

- Without people to keep all this in check,

thousands of these ticking time bombs

are scattered all over the continent, all over the world.

[flames roar]

- [Narrator] In the Sudan,

an abandoned tanker truck carrying propane

is consumed by flames.

And outside Buenos Aires, Argentina,

a diesel tanker erupts.

[explosions boom]

All over the world, cars are consumed by flames

and pierced by shrapnel

turning empty vehicles into tombs of scorched chrome.

And as plants and animals reclaim the roads,

more time bombs are lurking in the heat.

[grim music]

10 years after people, the toxic cloud

that spread just outside of Des Moines

has left destruction in its wake.

But to the south in Oklahoma,

more than 32 million acres of farmland

have been growing unchecked.

Once carefully managed, crops now rot, go to seed,

and grow again.

And as spring arrives,

there's a new threat lurking in the soil.

Not a plant, but a disaster waiting to happen.

And it's alive.

[grasshoppers chitter]

- All winter long, grasshopper eggs

have been lying dormant in the soil,

and now the ground's warming,

they're starting to hatch.

- And these guys are voracious.

Each one can eat up to 250%

of its body weight every single day.

Left alone, they'll rip through farmland

like a swarm of tiny weed whackers.

- In the world we used to know,

this is the moment when trucks and planes would roll out,

spraying insecticides across millions of acres,

but that defense system is gone.

- [Narrator] In the time of people,

American farmers spent

more than $18 billion a year on pesticides.

Now, there are no trucks rumbling through the fields

and no technicians to spray them.

And the grasshoppers

aren't just feeding, they're transforming.

- A lot of people don't realize that a locust

is really just a grasshopper.

With nobody to control the grasshopper populations,

there are gonna be a lot more of them than normal.

And when the crowd gets big enough,

it triggers this massive change.

- The constant bumping into each other

is a signal to the grasshoppers

that there is too many of them for the present food supply.

It means they need to find more food elsewhere.

They need to fly farther and cover more ground.

They need to become super grasshoppers.

- They change into something else. Literally.

They become locusts.

- They stretch their wings, their brains totally rewire

to make them less afraid and more active.

And what results is a swarm.

Because listen, one insect's not gonna cover

a lot of ground, but millions of them?

They can cover huge areas.

- [Narrator] A single swarm of locusts

can contain 40 to 80 million insects.

And every time they descend on a patch of land,

they strip it bare,

leaving behind nothing but dust and bone.

- It's the stuff of nightmares,

and it's been that way for thousands of years.

Locust plagues show up everywhere.

I mean the Bible, obviously.

But even before that, in Greek mythology

and on Ancient Egyptian tombs.

- The last time the US got hit hard,

it was in the 1930s and it was biblical.

In Colorado alone,

they counted 7 billion locusts in just 10 square miles.

Trains couldn't even climb hills.

Their wheels slipped on the grease of crushed locusts.

- [Narrator] The swarm is relentless.

Wings beating, jaws tearing

through Oklahoma farmland acre by acre.

How much damage can they do

before they're done?

[distressing music]

A decade without people.

And in Oklahoma,

the sound of tractors running and farm equipment working

has been replaced by a much more sinister hum:

the sound of locusts, swarming in the air by the billions,

tearing through what was once the bread basket

of a now-vanished civilization.

- The sky darkens

and then you hear it before you see anything.

The air buzzing like a giant engine.

[brooding music]

And there they are on the horizon.

All across the Midwest, a swarm 200 billion strong.

- These things are like flying jaws.

They travel up to 120 miles per day.

A single swarm can stretch for miles,

but what's most terrifying is how fast they work.

- Locusts don't nibble, they strip.

Crops: gone. Grass: Gone.

Whole fields reduced to bare dirt in hours.

- They'll even eat the wool off of sheep.

They'll chew the hair off of cattle.

They'll bite through canvas tents,

wooden fences, leather saddles.

If it has a trace of organic material, it's on the menu.

- [Narrator] For months, the swarm consumes

everything in its path.

And the locusts aren't just erasing

what humanity left behind,

they're decimating other species as well.

- Locusts don't leave anything behind for other insects

like beetles or butterflies or caterpillars,

but they also eat all the food

that grazers would normally eat.

So there's nothing for deer,

there's nothing for horses, there's nothing for cattle.

That swarm is gonna leave a lot of death in its wake.

- But there is one thing

that can stop a swarm of locusts: cold weather.

By fall, the swarm of locusts would

begin to slow down,

and by the winter, the adults would be all dead,

but not before laying their eggs

and burying them deep underground,

protecting them from the cold

to rise again come springtime.

- Locusts can breed like wildfire.

One female can lay up to 300 eggs

in a single season.

Now multiply that by billions

and you start to get the picture.

- [Narrator] Like a time bomb with a new fuse,

the threat of locusts once again sleeps beneath the soil,

a vicious cycle that could repeat itself for centuries.

[static crackles] [moody music]

In the Pacific Northwest,

56 million gallons of radioactive sludge

have been straining

against the aging tanks that confine them.

10 years after people,

there's no one to stir the sludge to keep it cool,

no one to vent the building pressure.

- That radioactive sludge starts to literally brew.

And it contains all sorts of nasty substances

like nitrates, cesium, plutonium, and uranium.

- The heat keeps rising, the gases keep building up.

There's just nowhere for them to go.

Each tank has its own level of volatility,

depending on how hot it is and how much pressure it's under.

And some tanks may be weaker than others.

But eventually they're all going to reach that red line.

And one explosion could trigger more.

- Think of it like a row of overstuffed balloons.

Pop one hard enough and the others start straining.

And if many are close to critical pressure already,

it could unleash a domino effect.

[tanks bang]

- [Narrator] One tank lets go.

A violent shuttering belch of radioactive steam

that cracks the silence and rattles the earth.

Instantly, pressure spikes across neighboring tanks.

Now, Hanford is a radioactive minefield.

Steel groans, walls bulge,

another tank gives way.

[explosion booms]

Then another.

- That much radioactive material released all at once

would be catastrophic for all plant and animal life.

And the most terrifying thing of all

is that there would be nothing to see.

No explosion, no mushroom cloud.

The toxic wave would be invisible.

It would have no taste, no smell.

- For hours, nothing would look different,

but things would be different.

The closest plants and animals are probably already dead.

It's just the ones farther away don't know it yet.

It's not like fire or acid, which burns things.

Radiation kills from the inside.

It damages your DNA, so it takes a little bit of time

for the system to go haywire enough to kill you.

- The air would be filled with radioactive particles

that would be immediately carried away by the wind.

The sludge would seep into the groundwater.

- And what's sitting right next door?

The Columbia River.

A perfect highway for radioactive runoff.

Water, fish, wildlife,

they're now all in serious danger.

- [Narrator] Nuclear waste is spreading like a plague,

silent, invisible, deadly.

With no one to contain it, how far could it spread

and what damage will it wreak?

It's been 25 years since the end of humanity,

but there's something we left behind,

something that's been festering,

growing more and more dangerous with each passing week.

- There are more than 2,600 municipal landfills

in the United States

and thousands more that have been closed.

The average American also generates

about five pounds of garbage per day.

So the amount of trash

that will be left behind after people,

it's pretty significant.

- Normally, trash is buried in layers,

kinda like a garbage lasagna,

and then it's capped with clay or plastic sheeting

to keep the oxygen out of it.

- Beneath the surface, bacteria go to work,

breaking down organic matter,

old food, diapers, newspapers.

And in the process, they literally fart out methane.

Lots of it.

- [Narrator] In the time of people,

landfills were routinely vented

to siphon off methane and other dangerous gases.

Now there's no one to monitor them,

no one to relieve the pressure.

- Methane is extremely flammable,

and in the heat, pressure builds, the trash compresses,

maybe lightning strikes, maybe a chemical reaction sparks.

And then you're in big trouble.

- Back in 1992 at a landfill in Charlotte, North Carolina,

a methane buildup blew up a nearby home

and launched it right off its foundation.

And that was with people still around,

still trying to manage it

- [Narrator] From coast to coast, the danger is rising.

Leaked methane hangs above landfills

like an invisible deadly haze.

And beneath the ground, deep pockets of it lie in wait,

and it's just a matter of time

before they begin to unleash destruction.

[static buzzes] [grim music]

50 years after people,

radioactive waste from the Hanford Nuclear Site

has spread to surrounding cities

bringing with it rot and decay,

infecting everything it touches.

- Richland, Pasco, and Kennewick

are all between 5 and 15 miles from the Hanford site

so toxic chemicals would easily spread there.

Wind would likely carry radioactive particles

as far away as Yakima 60 miles away.

Plutonium and cesium are able to embed themselves

in porous materials like brick, stone, concrete and wood,

that would speed up the rate of decay significantly.

- Roofs are gonna cave in, buildings are gonna collapse,

and after just a few decades,

the cities near the Hanford site are gonna start

to look like Chernobyl's ghost city of Pripyat.

Pripyat was built

to house Chernobyl's workers and their families,

and it was evacuated when the reactor melted down.

So radiation has been working away at it.

And as a result, that whole city has just been sinking

into the surrounding forest ever since.

[subdued music]

- [Narrator] Already abandoned, the ghost towns surrounding

the Hanford site are now ruined husks,

a haunting reminder of the power of nuclear fallout.

But what has become of the living creatures roaming

the contaminated wilderness of the Pacific Northwest?

[static crackles and buzzes] [gloomy music]

50 years after people.

All across the United States,

landfills have become land mines,

explosive methane gas crawling through the decomposing trash

and snaking up to the surface.

- In low-lying basins, you would have pools of rainwater,

but it's tainted by toxic chemicals,

deadly reminders of man's long-ago presence.

And all the while the heat is intensifying.

- The land itself has become this massive, invisible,

ticking time bomb.

- [Narrator] Not all at once, but at random,

disaster comes in the form of thunderstorms, static charges,

even simple sparks from metal striking metal

as the relics of humanity shift

in the piles of refuse we left behind.

[explosion booms]

- Methane explodes from the ground

in a violent, flaming geyser.

The earth is ripped apart.

All kinds of garbage launches

in all directions like shrapnel.

- The chemical waste catches fire

and flames spread across the landfill.

- It's like a chemistry set gone wrong under there.

Flammables, oxidizers, and pressure,

building in every direction.

- Remember, there are thousands of these garbage dumps,

and the danger would be there in every single one of them.

Now, since they're spread out across the country,

they continue to explode

whenever the conditions happen to be right

in each particular place.

If you could watch it from space,

it would be like the longest, slowest,

most unpredictable fireworks show you've ever seen.

- [Narrator] In Mississippi, South Carolina, and California,

human waste erupts in flames.

These time bombs have gone off

and there are thousands more to follow.

[static crackles and buzzes] [brooding music]

A hundred years after people,

the wilderness surrounding the Hanford Nuclear Site

is alive with the sounds of wildlife,

but with radiation contaminating the ground,

the nearby Columbia River and everything it touches,

not everything is as it seems.

- The Columbia River Basin is rich

with beautiful, delicate plant life

like sage brush and native grasses,

aquatic vegetation all around the river.

- The Hanford waste gets sucked up by plants

just like normal nutrients.

But that's where they cause their damage.

Sometimes they kill plants outright, other plants survive,

but they grow up deformed or distorted.

- As for the Columbia itself, the radioactive sludge

and dust would leak into the river.

- Over time, contamination climbs the food chain,

small fish to big fish, to birds and mammals,

animals that rely on the river

like otters, ospreys, and more.

- Not all radiation leads to spiders the size of Buicks

or deer with two heads.

Most mutations are much more subtle

because what the radiation does is subtly rewrite DNA,

which is like the tiny instruction manual

inside of our cells.

That changes the way

that cells grow, divide, and function,

which can also change the way animals look

and also the way they behave and grow and reproduce.

- If you look at the exclusion zone around Chernobyl,

the animals are weird there.

The birds are less likely

to produce color properly in their feathers.

Mice and frogs have strange markings on them.

And get this, cuckoo birds have less complex songs

depending on how much radiation there is

in the soil where they live.

So you can see these effects on wildlife,

and those are exactly the kinds of things

we're gonna be seeing happening around the Hanford site.

[haunting music]

- [Narrator] Without people, nature still finds

a way to thrive.

- Chernobyl taught us something wild.

After the reactor blew in '86,

the surrounding area was a radioactive ghost town.

But in less than a decade, nature came roaring back,

complete with wolves, boars, wild horses,

and even European bison.

- The same thing could happen at Hanford.

In the dead zones, sure, some species might disappear,

but out on the edges where the radiation's lighter,

life could find a way.

[static crackling] [moody music]

- [Narrator] 200 years after people.

Swarms of locusts still darken the sky,

leaving behind only dust and cracked earth.

But the markings of all that we built,

even the powder kegs we left behind,

are outlasted by Mother Nature

and the signs of our very existence

are slowly swallowed up by wilderness.

- All those ticking time bombs we built

have long since gone off one by one.

What remains of the human world is scattered in fragments.

- No matter how significant our contributions,

our monuments, there is some comfort

in knowing that the world will keep turning.

Mother Nature will find a balance with or without us.