Comedian John Oliver offered the nation a lesson in the history on New Jersey pollution on Sunday evening.

The popular host of HBO's "Last Week Tonight" dedicated the show's most recent episode to illustrating the U.S. government's inability to safely dispose of nuclear waste, which has been dangerously accumulating around the nation for decades.

New Jersey played an intriguing part in Oliver's narrative.

At one point in the segment, the comic uses a clip from "The Atomic Sailors," a 2013 special report by The Tampa Bay Times, to illustrate just how recklessly nuclear waste has been handled by the U.S. government in the past. He plays a clip of Robert Birsic, a retired sailor, describing the extent of radioactive dumping by the U.S. Navy off of the Jersey shore in the 1940's and 1950's.

"It's funny that the ocean don't glow out there outside of Red Bank, New Jersey, really," Birsic says. "Because we dumped a lot of barrels out there."

Oliver hammers the point home with a timely punchline about a reality show that we're all too familiar with.

"We didn't just dump barrels of radioactive waste in the ocean, we did it off the coast of New Jersey," Oliver said. "That is so horrifying, I'm surprised that 'Jersey Shore' was the title of a light-hearted MTV series and not the name of a harrowing documentary."

Other instances of nuclear dumping off the coast of New Jersey have been reported. In 1981, the Washington Post published the claims of a retired Navy pilot who said that he'd flown missions to drop nuclear waste into the ocean 100 miles southeast of Atlantic City. In the story, the Navy denied knowledge of the mission.

Watch the full segment from "Last Week Tonight" below. The New Jersey parts start at the three-and-half-minute lesson.

Michael Sol Warren may be reached at mwarren@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MSolDub. Find NJ.com on Facebook.