No, the article is misleading. Those radioactive elements aren't just deep underground - they're literally everywhere. The soil is naturally full of them. They'

No, the article is misleading. Those radioactive elements aren't just deep underground - they're literally everywhere. The soil is naturally full of them. They've got this damning-sounding quote from an internal report that “almost all materials of interest and use to the petroleum industry contain measurable quantities of radionuclides”, but again, that's true of ordinary soil and all kinds of things. What the oil industry and its regulators mostly seem to worry about is their production processes inadvertently concentrating them in places like pipes. (Incidentally, rare earth production is particularly nasty because it involves taking feedstock that's already quite high in radium, thorium, etc and intentionally concentrating them.)