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August 2 - August 4, 2023
he also believed that the best protection was psychological. Those men who allowed themselves to fear radiation were most at risk. But those who came to love and appreciate its spectral presence, to understand its caprices, could endure even the most intense gamma bombardment and emerge as healthy as before.
Each spring, the river gave up another grim harvest, as the thaw revealed the bodies of drunks who had blundered through the ice and drowned in midwinter.56
The bomb itself was extremely inefficient: just one kilogram of the uranium underwent fission, and only seven hundred milligrams of mass—the weight of a butterfly—was converted into energy.6 But it was enough to obliterate an entire city in a fraction of a second.
The granite used to build the US Capitol is so radioactive that the building would fail federal safety codes regulating nuclear power plants. All living tissue is radioactive to some degree: human beings, like bananas, emit radiation because both contain small amounts of the radioisotope potassium 40; muscle contains more potassium 40 than other tissue, so men are generally more radioactive than women. Brazil nuts, with a thousand times the average concentration of radium of any organic product, are the world’s most radioactive food.
The Chernobyl plant was constructed with a utilitarian disregard for high-minded notions of architecture: its form followed function in the most economical ways the station’s designers could conceive.
every accident that did occur at a nuclear station in the Soviet Union continued to be regarded as a state secret, kept even from the specialists at the installations where they occurred.
The graphite and nuclear fuel were burning at such high temperatures that neither water nor foam could possibly quench them: so hot that water would not only evaporate instantly into steam, further distributing radioactive aerosols in a cloud of toxic vapor, but also could separate into its constituent elements, oxygen and hydrogen, creating the possibility of a further explosion.
capital was spared. But three hundred kilometers to the south, peasants
The liquidators who lived on did so with the fear that they’d returned from the battlefield with fatal wounds no one could ever see. “We know that the invisible enemy is eating away inside us like a worm,”
“Satan sleeps beside the Pripyat.41 “He lies, damn him, in the guise of a dry willow on the bank of the Pripyat, on the bank of a river that was once blue and clear.”