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The Shadow of the Soviet Legacy on the World's Nuclear Future

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 August 2020

Kate Brown
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Extract

I woke one day the spring of 2019 to a jammed inbox and the realization that I had become a character in my own history. I have not shied away from writing in the first person, but publishing Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future involved a heightened level of exposure that left me for a time wishing I could sink down under the earth's crust, the book with it.

Type
Critical Discussion Forum: Kate Brown, A Manual for Survival: Chernobyl Guide to the Future
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 79 , Issue 2 , Summer 2020 , pp. 275 - 279
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

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References

1 C. C. Lushbaugh, M.D. Oak Ridge Associated Universities to John Kozlowich, Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, June 18, 1980. Steve Wing Personal Files.

2 Interview with Robert Alvarez, Takoma Park, MD, May 24, 2019.

3 Karen Dorn Steele, “Radiation Study Set up as Defense, Records Show,” The Spokesman Review, February 13, 2005, 1.

4 Indeed, the study found in 1999 that the children in eastern Washington exposed to exceptionally high doses of radioactive iodine were the only children known so far in the world not to have incurred higher rates of thyroid cancer from exposures to radio-iodine. Scott Davis et al. 2004. “Thyroid neoplasia, autoimmune thyroiditis, and hypothyroidism in persons exposed to iodine 131 from the Hanford nuclear site,” JAMA 292, no. 21 (December 1, 2004): 2600–13.

5 Even when the National Cancer Institute carried out radiation medicine studies in the 1980s and 1990s, the chief administrator and many researchers on epidemiological studies transferred from the Department of Energy or the International Atomic Energy Agency to the National Cancer Institute. See Wacholz, November 21, 1986, Correspondence Files, 1986, UNSCEAR Archive and “Request for Waiver of Department Regulations to Allow Reappointment of Members to the NCI Thyroid/Iodine 131 Assessments Committee,” June 5, 1990, NCI, RG 43 FY 03 Box 5, part 1.

6 USAID, for example, has embraced it in their work tracking disease in the global south. DHS Biomarker Program, https://dhsprogram.com/What-We-Do/Biomarkers.cfm; and Kazuki Saito, et al., “Intestinal Bacteria as Powerful Trapping Lifeforms for the Elimination of Radioactive Cesium,” Frontiers in Veterinary Science 12 (March 2019); available at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fvets.2019.00070/full.

7 Samet, Jonathan M. and Burke, Thomas A., “Turning Science into Junk: The Tobacco Industry and Passive Smoking,” American Journal of Public Health 91, no. 11 (November 2001): 1742–44CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

8 See the HBO series, Craig Mazin, Chernobyl (2019).

9 Alvin M. Weinberg, The First Nuclear Era: The Life and Times of a Technological Fixer (Woodbury, NY, 1994), 188.

10 See Adriana Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl (Princeton, 2013).

11 For detailed descriptions, see Trisha Pritikin, The Hanford Plaintiffs: Downwinders and the Fight for Atomic Justice (Lawrence, KS, 2020).

12 J. Lochard, T. Schneider, R. Ando, O. Niwa, C. Clement, J. F. Lecomte, and J. I. Tada, “An Overview of the Dialogue Meetings Initiated by ICRP in Japan after the Fukushima Accident,” Radioprotection 54, no. 2 (April-June, 2019): 87–101, available at https://doi.org/10.1051/radiopro/2019021.