Kate Brown (1)

Incredible book. Fascinating , thorough, deeply disturbing. While the book really strives to unlock the suppressed history of the Chernobyl accident, it reveals the world wide problem of motivated reasoning, and outright lying about nuclear fallout. From all of the bombs tested all over the world we are living in a minor nuclear disaster and have learned nothing to help us in the future. Also, don’t eat berries or mushrooms from Eastern Europe. At least not for the next few generations. Sigh.

A somewhat rambling account of how the United States and the Soviet Union both managed to create planned communities that embodied the apparent public virtues (and the actual social prejudices) of their respective societies, which at the same time put a public relations band-aid on the running sore of the radioactive pollution these sites were producing; to the point that the favored inhabitants of these regions were loathed to give up their privileges even as their way of life was show more destroying the health of them and their loved ones. Frankly, Leslie Groves and his NKVD counterparts would preferred to have simply built installations with all the living amenities of a third-rate military post to save resources, but these projects took on a life of their own once the actual controllers of the means of production took over day-to-day operations; if only to make living in an area cut off from the wider culture look attractive to the high-level managers and skilled upper crust of the onsite workforce. While gaffs like how the author refers, at one point, to a "navy" general can make one's eyes roll the basic depressing point remains that even if the powers-that-be had had a better sense of the dangers that they were playing with you know that they would have still gone forward with these projects. show less

This book focuses not on the Chernobyl accident, but on the after-effects of radiation on humans and the environment. As with the accident itself, the Soviet government constantly downplayed the health consequences and environmental impact of the radiation releases--frequently increasing the dosages considered "safe" and often ignoring the health complaints of people residing in zones it said were safe. Surprisingly to me, both the US and the UN atomic/radiation experts also played this show more game, although perhaps I should not have been surprised since both are proponents of "safe" nuclear energy and don't want any inconvenient facts to discourage the continued growth of the nuclear energy industry.

One difference between the radiation exposures after Hiroshima as compared with Chernobyl is that Chernobyl victims received a constant barrage of lower level radiation on a daily ongoing basis. In addition, Chernobyl victims were eating contaminated food. I was amazed at the way that the government manipulated the radiation measurements of food so that dangerously radioactive food--meat, milk, berries--was miraculously deemed safe to eat, i.e. mix contaminated berries/milk/meat in with enough uncontaminated product so that the whole measures within safe levels. Then, when people started getting sick, the experts, including US and UN experts claimed that their illnesses were not caused by the radiation itself, but by people's stress resulting from their fear of radiation.

There were many interesting factoids in this book. For example, the Soviet government engaged in cloud seeding to ensure that radioactivity would not reach Moscow. Instead, the seeding caused the radioactive rain to fall in Belarus, so that areas of Belarus are much more radioactive than areas around Chernobyl. While 90,000 were relocated from areas of the Ukraine around Chernobyl, only 20,000 were relocated from the much more heavily contaminated southern Belarus.

Those involved in the Chernobyl cleanup are known as liquidators, and not surprisingly many of them received heavy doses of radiation. The author found records indicating that certain wool workers were designated as liquidators and wanted to know why. It turns out that after heavily contaminated sheep were slaughtered, the government couldn't bring itself to "waste" the wool, and so had the wool sheared. The workers who sorted the wool became contaminated. (The government also sent the hides to be processed into leather). The author also tells the story of train cars full of radioactive meat that station after station refused to accept, and which floated around for 3 years before ending up in a highly contaminated Ukrainian town. Railroad workers put a fence around the train and warning signs, but the train sat there for months in the middle of a transit hub. The KGB stepped in finally, four years after the meat had been slaughtered (and after the cooling equipment had failed) to bury the meat in a cement-lined trench.

There is a huge amount of information in this book that should be concerning to us all. As Dr. Robert Gale states, "A nuclear accident anywhere in the world is everywhere in the world." show less

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” These were Oppenheimer’s oft-quoted recitation of the Bhagavad Gita following the first nuclear weapons test in New Mexico in 1946, Trinity.

There are two kinds of death: regenerative death—such as the microbial decomposition of plant matter which creates a rich humus for new life, and degenerative death—the sort that saps the vibrancy from living systems. Fission products (the refuse from nuclear fission, such as those resultant from show more plutonium production, atomic bombs, and nuclear accidents) contribute to the latter.

Unlike many deadly hazards, such as fire, our bodies have no significant reaction or awareness to radioactivity until we’ve received extremely high doses, such as the kind that result in radiation poisoning. For me, this make them both fascinating and scary.

I came across this book when reading a chapter in Michael Lewis’ “Fifth Risk” on the Department of Energy, and the fact that it oversees the US nuclear arsenal. Having grown up within the fallout radius of Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, I’ve had a personal interest in learning more about this world.

The author, Brown, is a Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. In this book, she tracks the parallel histories of Hanford (near Richland in Washington State), and Mayak (near Ozyersk in the Ural Mountains of Russia). These were the first two sites in the world to produce plutonium, supplying materials necessary for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the nuclear arms race of the Cold War. Brown chose a somewhat surprising angle, choosing to focus on social ironies and parallels of the two projects. The title, “Plutopia,” refers to a utopia created by plutonium production. Although employees in both facilities received higher pay than locals in the surrounding area, any wish of a utopia was dashed by the chronic exposure to radiation and the resultant diseases.

I read this book as a process of mourning of the practically eternal damage we’ve done to our peoples and ecosystems through radioactive pollution. Plutonium 239—the sort produced at Hanford and the Mayak plant—has a half-life of 24,110 years. 13.5% of fission products have a half-life exceeding 1.5 million years. In other words, much of the radioactive pollution we’ve created will endure on a geological time scale.

The book illustrates an impossible logic under which our governments operate on a daily basis. The only way to justify the immeasurable loss of life and vitality caused by plutonium production was the threat of loosing a nuclear war. Both projects have permanently contaminated thousands of square miles of land and water bodies.

In high doses, radiation leads to painful death. At moderate doses, radiation leads to leukemia, failure of the thyroid, autoimmune disorders, as well as numerous other ailments. At low doses, radiation leads to infertility and genetic mutation, resultant in genetic mutations and physiological disfigurement in offspring.

How did the USSR and United States manage unmanageable risks?

In the US, we hired corporations to run plutonium production, beginning with DuPont, followed by GE, followed by a series of other entities. When corporate and government scientists found that the plant was resulting in unaffordable environmental costs, they hired new scientists to produce new studies refuting those claims.

In Russia, they just didn’t tell anyone. Hundreds of thousands of villagers lived in deadly zones for decades without any assistance.

How did these governments run these projects?

Both were highly secretive. We failed to be secretive enough, in that Russians nuclear program directly copied our blueprints, rather than developing their own methods.

In the USSR, Mayak was run by the Gulag, which had 5 million prisoners at the end of World War II and employed one quarter of non-agricultural workers. Whereas in the US, we had some semblance of precaution, the USSR was able to burn through hundreds of thousands of soldiers and prisoners without even the most basic safety measures. The fate of this class of workers is poorly documented and likely atrocious.

Ultimately, our nuclear projects were morally repugnant, and their results be with us for the indefinite future. If you’re looking to bask in every detail of this misery, “Plutopia” is an excellent book on the subject. show less