Review by Choice Review
On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant's No. 4 reactor--located in the Ukrainian Republic of the USSR--exploded and propelled a massive amount of radioactive material into the atmosphere. What naturally happened next was a widespread nuclear fallout. Brown (MIT) has produced an exceptional study of that event, combining years of research in archives and numerous interviews with people ranging from scientists to bureaucrats to factory workers. Her research traces how various Soviet citizens managed, covered up, and lived (or not) with the consequences of a nuclear fallout that caused long-term damage to the environment and to the health of the surrounding populations. Particularly striking is the amount of information, analysis, and previously untold secrets Brown provides on this subject and her gripping, accessible approach. For example, Brown visits a wool factory in the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv where workers had received significant doses of radioactivity even though the factory was located far from the Chernobyl blast. She then reveals that people became sick when radioactive sheep wool arrived in their city. Brown's narrative compellingly demonstrates the far-reaching and often unexpected consequences of the disaster. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. --Melissa Chakars, Saint Joseph's University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
CATASTROPHES HAPPEN when a large system gets so out of sync with its environment that a tiny tweak can crash it to the ground. It's happened to oil rigs, spacecraft and mines. Afterward, committees blame the people who did the tweaking. But what matters is how the system became unstable and crashed, the atmosphere that caused it and the aftereffects. In these two books about the April 1986 explosion of the No. 4 reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, "Midnight in Chernobyl" focuses on the first and second, "Manual for Survival" on the third. Electricity is easy to create in small amounts. A hamster on an exercise wheel can make a little light bulb flicker. A generator and some gas powers a house. But the vast quantities of energy demanded by modern cities require huge steam turbines that operate 24 hours a day. One way to heat the water to create the steam is to burn fossil fuels. Another is using heat created by nuclear fission. The Soviets, who built the first nuclear power plant in 1954, considered themselves the finest reactor engineers in the world, and masters of gigantic engineering projects. Their rapidly expanding infrastructure desperately needed electrical power, especially in the Soviet Union's industrialized western region, far away from Siberia's fossil fuel deposits. Planners thus decided to build colossal reactors. These included a set of four at Chernobyl, about 100 miles north of Kiev, intended to be "the greatest nuclear power station on earth." Its No. 1 reactor was completed in 1977, No. 4 in 1983. Adam Higginbotham's "Midnight in Chernobyl" is a gripping, miss-your-subway-stop read. The details of the disaster pile up inexorably. They include worn control rod switches, the 2,000-ton reactor lid nicknamed Elena, a core so huge that understanding its behavior was impossible. Politicians lacked the technical knowledge to take action, while scientists who had the knowledge feared to provide it lest they lose their jobs or lives. Higginbotham captures the nerve-racked Soviet atmosphere brilliantly, mostly through vivid details about the participants. Schedules were impossible, production quotas demanding, workers sloppy, budgets insufficient, rules disregarded. Warnings that the design was unsound were ignored. While the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island prompted American engineers to re-examine reactor designs, the Soviets did not bother. In 1957, one Soviet reactor had a radioactive contamination accident, as did Chernobyl No. 1 in 1982. These and other accidents were covered up. A design fix was planned, but implementation at No. 4 was postponed until its first safety test in April 1986. Higginbotham, who has written for such publications as The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, follows the postponed safety test minute by minute. A neglected step caused the reactor's power to plunge, and frantic attempts to revive it created an unexpected power surge. Poorly trained operators panicked. An explosion of hydrogen and oxygen sent Elena into the air "like a flipped coin" and destroyed the reactor. Operators vainly tried to stop a meltdown by planning to shove control rods in by hand. Escaping radiation shot a pillar of blue-white phosphorescent light into the air. The explosion occurs less than 100 pages into this 366-page book (plus more than 100 pages of notes, glossary, cast of characters and explanation of radiation units). But what follows is equally gripping. Radio-controlled repair bulldozers became stuck in the rubble. Exposure to radiation made voices grow high and squeaky. A dying man whispered to his nurse to step back because he was too radioactive. A workman's radioactive shoe was the first sign in Sweden of a nuclear accident 1,000 miles upwind. Soviet bigwigs entered the area with high-tech dosimeters they didn't know how to turn on. Investigations blamed the accident on six tweakers, portrayed them as "hooligans" and convicted them. The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (Unscear), which is to radiation studies something like what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (I.P.C.C.) is to assessing human-induced climate effects, struggled to make sense of changing and confusing information. Kate Brown's "Manual for Survival" has a different style and emphasis. Its aim is to be an exposé of the attempts to minimize the impact of Chernobyl. The disaster was less an accident, says Brown, a historian at M.I.T., than "an exclamation point in a chain of toxic exposures that restructured the landscape, bodies and politics." Unscear's publications were cover-ups, and radiation-related maladies are "a dark horseman riding wild across the Chernobyl territories." Brown undertook the book so as not to become "one of those duped comrades who found out too late that the survival manual contained a pack of lies." Around 2014, Brown began interviewing people in the affected areas, and sought measurements of radioactivity in such things as wool, livestock and swamps. Her stories are affecting, yet it is hard to evaluate memories and anecdotes. It is also hard to evaluate measurements. These are meaningful only within the tangled web of factors that radiation epidemiologists consider - including type and time-span of dose, pathways through the body, susceptibility of individual tissues and background radiation - as well as health issues like alcohol, obesity and stress. Radioactivity is present in different amounts in everything from muscles to masonry. Higginbotham notes that the granite in the United States Capitol "is so radioactive that the building would fail federal safety codes regulating nuclear power plants." Brown writes that permitting an annual dose of five millisieverts (a dose unit) in one Chernobyl region is "cruel" and implies that its inhabitants should be relocated. Yet that's less than the background radiation in many populated areas. According to a recent study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, the average annual radiation dose in the United States (including medical diagnostics) is 6.2 mSv, while many studies put the annual dose in Denver at over 10 mSv, with no noticeable increase in cancer rates. Brown plays down reports of relocation's psychological and social effects. Immigrants and refugees may have a different perspective. One wonders about Brown's suggestions of conspiracies. She writes darkly that "the medical section of the U.S. Army report on physical damage in Hiroshima is missing in the U.S. National Archives." Given that so much data is now available online, isn't it possible this is due to incompetence or sloppiness? Are Unscear's sometimes flawed publications cover-ups, or do they indicate the difficulties of incorporating changing data of varying degrees of reliability into the best available models? Brown endorses the work of antinuclear activists like Ernest Sternglass, many of whose claims that radiation causes everything from high infant mortality and crime rates to low SAT scores have been discredited. Brown is credulous of sources that share her opinions, skeptical of those that don't. This gives the book the flavor of a polemic. Not all accusers of the scientific infrastructure are holy. Their claims need to be evaluated with the same diligence that scientists do theirs. Neither book is about nuclear power. The Chernobyl story is indeed as little about nuclear power as the Bhopal catastrophe is about the pesticide industry. Yet the issue looms, for the fossil fuel alternative has disastrous long-term effects. Brown notes that the founders of Kiev built the city on a bluff to repel invaders. It's a haunting image. Today's threats are pollutants that cannot be stopped by bluffs, and we create these threats ourselves to drive the turbines that sustain our towns. To keep these modern invaders at bay requires separating fact from fiction, and depending on expert advice. Will we avert catastrophe by honestly judging the benefits and risks of each energy source without hiding their costs - and will politicians have the guts to act on those judgments? Not yet.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 21, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Why don't we know more? That is the haunting question at the heart of Brown's searing account of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which occurred in August 1986. For decades, she observes, scientists have called for a long-term study on the deadly effects of Chernobyl. This is her noble attempt to examine the accident and its devastating medical and environmental consequences. The official story from the Ukrainian government was that only 54 men died from acute radioactive poisoning and several thousand children had nonfatal thyroid cancer. But other sources claimed more frightening statistics: in 2005, the UN Chernobyl Forum forecast from 2,000 to 9,000 future cancer deaths; worse, Greenpeace stated that 200,000 people had already died and predicted an additional 93,000 fatalities. Brown's goal was to substantiate every claim, cross-reference it, and use the archives as my guide. In her exhaustive account of the tragedy, Brown profiles people who responded immediately to the accident and residents who were left behind in the contaminated zones while also exploring the environmental consequences. An important endeavor as this nuclear debacle recedes further into history.--June Sawyers Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In a gripping book part scientific exploration, part Cold War thriller, Brown (Dispatches from Dystopia), a University of Maryland historian of environmental and nuclear history, investigates the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and reveals why ferreting out the truth about it is so difficult. The Soviet government assured the world that the meltdown's repercussions weren't severe, with only 54 plant staff and firefighters dead from acute radiation sickness, and minimal exposure of families, who'd been swiftly evacuated to safety. But behind that optimistic lie, there were secrets on all sides. The Soviet government didn't want to reveal how much it actually knew about radiation effects, or how it had learned that information. The American government, meanwhile, refused to share information from its own medical study of Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims with the Soviets. As the crumbling Soviet Union fought to avoid blame, historians and scientists struggled to document data before it disappeared, and Chernobyl victims found their lives dropped into the hands of bureaucrats more interested in covering up the truth than in helping them. Brown's indepth research and clean, concise writing illuminate the reality behind decades of "halftruths and baldfaced lies." Readers will be fascinated by this provocative history of a deadly accident and its consequences. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Award-winning author Brown (history, Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore Cty.; A Biography of No Place) writes a new history of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster that begins with text from the first survival manual ever issued to a population after a nuclear incident. The author's research then uncovers terrible truths that the official account of the disaster chose to ignore. Using archival records and interviews with those living in Ukraine and Belarus, Brown explores the environmental devastation that resulted from the incident. International scientists who wanted to promote the safety of nuclear energy deliberately downplayed the danger to the people still living in the Chernobyl area and to the flora and fauna in that region. For example, the official record states that only 44 people died as a result of the tragedy. Brown's research shows the actual death toll from radioactive isotopes to be in the hundreds of thousands, and engaging and accessible writing makes for a page--turning read. VERDICT This important work should be read by those concerned about the environmental impacts of nuclear energy and climate change. [See Prepub Alert, 10/1/18.]-Jason L. Steagall, formerly with Gateway Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An award-winning historian challenges the notion that the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident had few consequences, arguing that the "public health disaster" killed at least 35,000 to 150,000 people and left most adults and children in affected areas sick with cancer, anemia, and other illnesses.In this explosive, exquisitely researched account, Brown (Environmental and Nuclear History/Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore County; Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters, 2013, etc.) draws on four years of fieldwork in Soviet and other archives27 total, some previously unvisitedand in towns and farms in contaminated territories to provide a powerful story of the devastating health and environmental effects of radioactive fallout in areas outside the 30-kilometer Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. "The accounts of unspecific, widespread, and chronic illness, reproductive problems, and acute increases in cancer resound like a lament across the area of Chernobyl fallout," she writes. The official death toll from the exploding nuclear power plant was 54, but there was never any long-term study of health consequences, including the effects of exposure to radiation over time. After interviewing workers, evacuees, and scientists; visiting affected factories, swamp ecosystems, and abandoned towns; and examining transcripts of secret Politburo meetings and other documents, the author concludes that Soviet officials hid the radiation's impact through "secrecy, censorship, counterespionage, and fabricated news." In the face of Soviet "half-truths and bald-faced lies," international scientists nodded agreeably. Like the Soviets, Western officials blamed stressnot radiationfor health issues, out of fear of Chernobyl's implications for other radiation exposures and possible lawsuits. Brown's prose is sometimes technical but largely accessible and even turns poetic when she describes changed lives. She offers horrifying descriptions of the processing of radioactive meat and other foods for shipment to large cities and towns and of the continuing sale abroad of contaminated berries.This sobering book should be readand studiedby policymakers and citizens; pair with Adam Higginbotham's Midnight in Chernobyl to spark a renewed debate over nuclear power. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
