Half-Life - Kate Brown - Plutonium’s Fatal Attraction

Plutonium’s Fatal Attraction

Kate Brown

Arc_Hlf_KB_03

Project ALE (Arid Land Ecology) is an intensive, long-term study being conducted on the AEC's Hanford Works reservation near Richland, Washington. c. 1972. Source: U.S. Department of Energy.

Half-Life
December 2022










Notes
1

Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 65.

2

As quoted in Stephane Groueff, Manhattan Project (Boston: Little & Brown, 1967).

3

Brown, Plutopia, 50-57.

4

Maria Gallucci, “A Glass Nightmare: Cleaning Up the Cold War’s Nuclear Legacy at Hanford,” IEEE Spectrum, April 28, 2020.

5

V. N. Novoselov and V. S. Tolstikov, Atomnyi sled na Urale (Cheliabinsk: Rifei, 1997), 35.

6

Leonid Timonin, Pis’ma iz zony: Atomnyi vek v sud’bakh tol’iattintsev (Samara: Samarskoe knizhnoe izd-vo, 2006), 14.

7

D. Kossenko, M. Burmistrov, and R. Wilson, “Radioactive Contamination of the Techa River and Its Effects,” Technology 7 (2000): 553–75.

8

E. Ostroumova, M. Kossenko, L. Kresinina, and O. Vyushkova, “Late Radiation Effects in Population Exposed in the Techa Riverside Villages (Carcinogenic Effects),” paper presented at the 2nd International Symposium on Chronic Radiation Exposure, Cheliabinsk, March 14–16, 2000.

9

Brown, Plutopia, 231-9.

10

Brown, Plutopia; Peter Bacon Hales, Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); and Matthew Farish, The Contours of America’s Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

11

John M. Findlay and Bruce W. Hevly, Atomic Frontier Days: Hanford and the American West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 137-160.

12

ANS Nuclear Café, “The case of the Pu-powered pacemaker,” Nuclear News Wire, Jan 20, 2022, .

13

Jacob Darwin Hamblin, The Wretched Atom: America’s Global Gamble with Peaceful Nuclear Technology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).

14

Sonja Schmid, Producing Power: The Pre-Chornobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 144-45.

15

Lars-Erik De Geer et al., “A Nuclear Jet at Chornobyl Around 21:23:45 UTC on April 25, 1986,” Nuclear Technology (2017).

16

Kate Brown, Manual for Survival: A Chornobyl Guide to the Future (New York: Norton, 2019): 91.

17

Brown, Manual for Survival, 310.