On April 26, 1986, Unit Four of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded in then Soviet Ukraine. More than 3.5 million people in Ukraine alone, not to mention many citizens of surrounding countries, ...are still suffering the effects.Life Exposedis the first book to comprehensively examine the vexed political, scientific, and social circumstances that followed the disaster. Tracing the story from an initial lack of disclosure to post-Soviet democratizing attempts to compensate sufferers, Adriana Petryna uses anthropological tools to take us into a world whose social realities are far more immediate and stark than those described by policymakers and scientists. She asks: What happens to politics when state officials fail to inform their fellow citizens of real threats to life? What are the moral and political consequences of remedies available in the wake of technological disasters?
Through extensive research in state institutions, clinics, laboratories, and with affected families and workers of the so-called Zone, Petryna illustrates how the event and its aftermath have not only shaped the course of an independent nation but have made health a negotiated realm of entitlement. She tracks the emergence of a "biological citizenship" in which assaults on health become the coinage through which sufferers stake claims for biomedical resources, social equity, and human rights.Life Exposedprovides an anthropological framework for understanding the politics of emergent democracies, the nature of citizenship claims, and everyday forms of survival as they are interwoven with the profound changes that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Before Fukushima, the most notorious large-scale nuclear accident the world had seen was Chernobyl in 1986. The fallout from Chernobyl covered vast areas in the Northern Hemisphere, especially in ...Europe. Belarus, at the time a Soviet republic, suffered heavily: nearly a quarter of its territory was covered with long-lasting radionuclides. Yet the damage from the massive fallout was largely imperceptible; contaminated communities looked exactly like noncontaminated ones. It could be known only through constructed representations of it. InThe Politics of Invisibility, Olga Kuchinskaya explores how we know what we know about Chernobyl, describing how the consequences of a nuclear accident were made invisible. Her analysis sheds valuable light on how we deal with other modern hazards -- toxins or global warming -- that are largely imperceptible to the human senses.Kuchinskaya describes the production of invisibility of Chernobyl's consequences in Belarus -- practices that limit public attention to radiation and make its health effects impossible to observe. Just as mitigating radiological contamination requires infrastructural solutions, she argues, the production and propagation of invisibility also involves infrastructural efforts, from redefining the scope and nature of the accident's consequences to reshaping research and protection practices. Kuchinskaya finds vast fluctuations in recognition, tracing varyingly successful efforts to conceal or reveal Chernobyl's consequences at different levels -- among affected populations, scientists, government, media, and international organizations. The production of invisibility, she argues, is a function of power relations.
Havingexploded on the margins of Europe, Chornobyl marked the end of the Soviet Unionand tied the era of postmodernism in Western Europe with nuclear consciousness.The Post-Chornobyl Library becomes ...a metaphor of a new Ukrainian literature of the 1990s,which emerges out of the Chornobyl nuclear trauma.
The 1983shootdown of KAL 007 and the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident dramatically changedthe Soviet Union in unpredictable ways. The Communist Party, which struggled tomaintain control of political ...messaging after the KAL crisis, lost control inthe aftermath of Chernobyl.
The environmental impacts of the nuclear accidents of Chernobyl and Fukushima are compared. In almost every respect, the consequences of the Chernobyl accident clearly exceeded those of the Fukushima ...accident. In both accidents, most of the radioactivity released was due to volatile radionuclides (noble gases, iodine, cesium, tellurium). However, the amount of refractory elements (including actinides) emitted in the course of the Chernobyl accident was approximately four orders of magnitude higher than during the Fukushima accident. For Chernobyl, a total release of 5300PBq (excluding noble gases) has been established as the most cited source term. For Fukushima, we estimated a total source term of 520 (340–800) PBq. In the course of the Fukushima accident, the majority of the radionuclides (more than 80%) was transported offshore and deposited in the Pacific Ocean. Monitoring campaigns after both accidents reveal that the environmental impact of the Chernobyl accident was much greater than of the Fukushima accident. Both the highly contaminated areas and the evacuated areas are smaller around Fukushima and the projected health effects in Japan are significantly lower than after the Chernobyl accident. This is mainly due to the fact that food safety campaigns and evacuations worked quickly and efficiently after the Fukushima accident. In contrast to Chernobyl, no fatalities due to acute radiation effects occurred in Fukushima.
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•The environmental effects of Chernobyl and Fukushima are compared.•Releases of radionuclides from Chernobyl exceeded Fukushima by an order of magnitude.•Chernobyl caused more severe radiation-related health effects.•Overall, Chernobyl was a much more severe nuclear accident than Fukushima.•Psychological effects are neglected but important consequences of nuclear accidents.
Parameterization of dry deposition is key for modelling of atmospheric transport and deposition of radioactive particles. Still, very simple parameterizations are often encountered in radioactive ...preparedness models such as the SNAP model (SNAP=Severe Nuclear Accident Program) of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. In SNAP a constant dry deposition velocity (=0.2 cm/s) neglecting aerodynamic and surface resistances, is presently used. Therefore, two new dry depositions schemes (the Emerson scheme and the EMEP (European Monitoring and Evaluation Programme) scheme) have been implemented in SNAP to evaluate the benefits of including aerodynamic and surface resistances codes with respect to model prediction skills. The three dry deposition schemes are evaluated using 137Cs total deposition from soil sample data (n = 540) for a 60 km radial zone out from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (ChNPP) collected during the months after the accident. The present study capitalizes on high resolution meteorological data (2.5 km horizontal resolution), a detailed land-use data set with 273 sub-classes and the hitherto most comprehensive source term description for the Chernobyl accident. Based on our findings it is recommended to replace the present simple SNAP scheme with the Emerson or EMEP dry deposition scheme.
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•New dry deposition codes evaluated for atmospheric dispersion modelling of 137Cs.•Comprehensive meteorological and land-use data as well as source term for Chernobyl accident.•Validation of model prediction skills using 540 soil sample data from near Chernobyl.•Advanced dry deposition schemes improved predictions compared to more simplistic approach.•Reduced dry deposition near Chernobyl and increased long-range transport with new schemes.
