At the same time, in the Ukraine, between 30 and 90 percent of milk in “clean” areas was judged too contaminated to drink.Īs part of her efforts to study Chernobyl’s effects in person, Brown also ventured into the forests and marshes near Chernobyl, accompanying American and Finnish scientists - who are among the few to have extensively studied the area’s wildlife in the field. In Belarus, one-third of milk and one-fifth of meat was too contaminated to use in 1987, according to the official in charge of food production in the state, and levels became worse the following year. Such scenarios may have been significantly overlooked in some Chernobyl assessments.Ī significant section of “Manual for Survival” - the title comes from some safety instructions written for local residents - also explores the accident’s effects on the region’s agricultural economy. The wool factory workers had become sick because they were dealing with wool from highly contaminated sheep. Why were the wool workers so exposed to radiation? As Brown found after investigating the Chernihiv wool factory itself, Soviet authorities had workers kill livestock from the Zone of Alienation - and then send their useable parts for processing. This is the same designation applied to emergency personnel working at the Chernobyl site itself. As Brown discovered, 298 workers at a wool factory in the city of Chernihiv, about 50 miles from Chernobyl, were given “liquidator status” due to their health problems. Then too, the effects of Chernobyl’s radiation have been diffuse. “Everybody was making the record look better by the time it go to Moscow,” Brown says. “On the ground it was very clear, but at higher levels, there were ministers whose job was to report good health.” Soviet officials, Brown adds, would “massage the numbers” as the data ascended in the state bureaucracy. “Part of the problem is the Soviets lied to themselves,” says Brown. To see how the effects of Chernobyl could be much more widespread than previously acknowledged, consider a pattern Brown observed from her archival work: Scientists and officials at the local and regional levels examined the effects of Chernobyl on people quite extensively, even performing controlled studies and other robust techniques, but other Soviet officials minimized the evidence of major health consequences. “I wrote this book so it’s something we take a look at more seriously,” says Brown, a professor in MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society. Instead, through her archival research and on-the-ground reporting, she examines the full range of ways radiation has affected residents throughout the region, while explaining how Soviet politics helped limit our knowledge of the incident. In it, Brown brings new research to bear on the issue: She is the first historian to examine certain regional archives where the medical response to Chernobyl was most extensively chronicled, and has found reports and documents casting new light on the story.īrown does not pinpoint a death-toll number herself. The result is her new book, “Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future,” published this month by W.W. As a historian of science who has written extensively about both the Soviet Union and nuclear technology, she decided to explore the issue at length. But MIT Professor Kate Brown, for one, is skeptical about that figure. Which leads to the question: How bad was Chernobyl? A 2006 United Nations report contends Chernobyl caused 54 deaths. About 31,000 soldiers camped out near the reactor, where radioactivity reached about 1,000 times the normal levels within a week, and contaminated the drinking water. The Soviet republics of Ukraine and Belarus combined to treat about 40,000 patients in hospitals due to radiation exposure in the same period of time in Belarus, about half were children.Īnd while 120,000 residents were hastily evacuated from the “Zone of Alienation” around Chernobyl, about 600,000 emergency workers eventually went into the area, trying to seal the reactor and make the area safe again. And that was just one sliver of the population that wound up seeking medical care after Chernobyl.īy the end of the summer of 1986, Moscow hospitals alone had treated about 15,000 people exposed to Chernobyl radiation. By the time the outside world knew about it, 148 men who had been on the Chernobyl site - firefighters and other workers - were already being treated in the special radiation unit of a Moscow hospital. Notoriously, the Soviet Union kept news of the disaster quiet for a couple of days. 4 exploded, first blowing off its giant concrete lid, then letting a massive stream of radiation into the air. Unthinkably, the core of the plant’s reactor No. Workers were conducting a test at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine when their operations spun out of control. Not long after midnight on April 26, 1986, the world’s worst nuclear power accident began.
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