Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters

by Kate Brown

disaster tourist.

transformed independent merchants and farmers into landless wage laborers,

Hamilton reported optimistically that it was quite easy with relatively small amounts of radioactive substances inserted into the proper environmental conditions to incapacitate or even kill whole communities.34

bioaccumulation, concentrating in organs and insinuating itself into the biochemical processes the body uses to thrive.

The scientists found that these radioactive particles migrated outdoors, to the grasslands, into the rivers, and into air currents.

pattern of immunological weakness.

With poor housing and slim food rations, Rapoport had to house soldiers and prisoners in tents and mud dugouts and so had tremendous trouble keeping them healthy and meeting production targets.

dachas

He was offering nothing less than a nuclear Big Deal: middle-class urban affluence for working-class operators in exchange for the risks of plutonium production.

the more disquieting as this was the first generation of Russian working-class kids freed from work, their childhood suddenly prolonged an extra decade.

highly subsidized

This exchange shows the power of zoning space by class, race, and occupation.

appeared to naturalize difference, as

They believed Richland had a particular problem with delinquents because the city had few grandparents to watch children while parents worked swing shifts.

Across the nation, white men won federal subsidies via the GI bill and FHA loans.

Seventy percent of local whites said they agreed with fair employment and housing laws, but at the same time nearly half said they would not want to work with or live next to a black person.16 Respondents cheered laws that guaranteed equality yet supported zoning that made equality impossible.

people who had choices left and people who didn’t stayed.

Rainwater, Parker noted, had three times more radioactivity than permissible.4 Worried,

The animals’ thyroids had more than a thousand times the permissible exposure.

Parker estimated there were eight hundred million flakes, which, if sucked into workers’ lungs or eaten on a french fry at Richland’s Hi-Spot Drive-In, could lodge in soft organs and remain in the body for years, a tiny time bomb that Parker feared would produce cancer.11

But the researchers weren’t sure of their readings because their equipment got clogged up with contamination and gave false readings or no readings at all.

Most residents of Richland and Ozersk had no idea how much plutonium their plants were producing, but enemy scientists halfway around the globe came to know plutonium quantities in elaborate detail.

Much of this waste was the product of economizing.

One of the services of modern states is not only to redistribute wealth but also to reapportion risk.33 In Ozersk, temporary workers shouldered the lion’s share of risk,

With no water to clean up before lunch, they ate with contaminated hands.

Radioactive isotopes, so readily combining with biological forms, had no discrete boundaries. In time, they were no longer distinct from the local environment, from scientists’ bodies, or from human evolution.

monitoring was not an exact science.

During the Cold War, engineers did not figure out how to safely and permanently store radioactive waste.20 They have yet to find a solution.

Teenagers, growing rapidly, absorbed the largest doses.

In Ozersk, the post-Stalin power struggle caused a power vacuum for a critical five years.

penal labor

most of the soldiers came from the troubled Baltics, Ukraine, and Belorussia, territories that had been annexed by the Soviet government in the war years and where dissent was still sharp.

management pressures workers to disregard safety regulations.”

This labor crisis inspired a new consideration for plutonium workers. “We

erudite

GE plant doctors regularly assured the surrounding population that home appliances and medical X-rays were more hazardous than plutonium production.

the number of fetal and infant deaths in Richland sprang to nearly twice the state average.

Richland, Pasco, and Kennewick had a higher number of congenital malformations than the state average. All

DDT, banned in 1972, is an endocrine-disrupting chemical that adversely affects reproduction by causing birth defects, increasing pregnancy complications, and decreasing fertility. In some studies DDT also induced chromosome mutations in humans and animals. DDT is also linked to lymphatic leukemia, liver cancer, and lymphoma.16

parents-to-be were exposed to great clouds of iodine-131, xenon-135, and strontium-90 from the plants’ unfiltered stacks and in intentional releases such as the Green Run.

Medical studies have shown that parents exposed at low levels who have no obvious radiation-induced injuries can pass mutated genes to their offspring.18

lab work, where all factors could be controlled, over epidemiology, which looks at the interaction of variable risk factors in an environment.

nation’s most beloved rivers was safe. Using the rituals and appearance of open

She smelled of age and illness.

The source of the blast was an underground storage tank holding highly radioactive waste that overheated and blew, belching up a 160-ton cement cap buried twenty-four feet below the ground and tossing it seventy-five feet in the air.

becoming the first children to serve as liquidators of nuclear disaster.2

the cows, eating grass contaminated with fallout, surpassed all other creatures.

disaster tourist

Disaster tourism was one of only a few career paths in Karabolka.

Of the half dozen families in Ringold, the E-series family alone subsisted nearly exclusively off the land.1