Search Results

This book examines how government and scientific interventions have recast the Chernobyl aftermath as a complex political and health experience with its own bureaucratic and legal ramifications. In Ukraine, a decade after the Chernobyl disaster, waves of citizens poured into medical offices for care and compensation. Their “idiosyncratic” diseases would now encode different kinds of treatment discriminations and different kinds of neglect. The book shows how the Chernobyl explosion has been shaped as a tekhnohenna katastrofa, or technogenic catastrophe, and how Ukraine's response to the disaster combines humanism with strategies of governance and state building, market strategies with forms of economic and political corruption. The book focuses on the emergence of a collective and individual survival strategy known as biological citizenship, which it argues reflects a failure of politics and science to account for human welfare, particularly the welfare of Chernobyl sufferers.

This chapter explores some of the prehistory of reception of the Chernobyl disaster in various aspects of Soviet-era life from the perspective of individuals and families living outside state-designated zones. The discussion focuses on events in a time when bureaucratic lines between sufferers and nonsufferers were just beginning to be drawn, and when other informal structures of accountability regarding state-related abuses were in place. From the perspective of one family, the chapter shows how individuals reached the limits of their ability to reason, narrate, and project futures in the context of an invisible nuclear hazard. It explains how life narratives and family histories reflected a vexed and complex history of Ukraine, but also how these histories informed interpretations of the Chernobyl experience.

This chapter summarizes the book's main findings and their implications. It describes the Chernobyl aftermath as a prism that reflects, contains, and reconfigures the vexed political-economic, scientific, legal, and social circumstances in post-Soviet Ukraine. It emphasizes the disharmony among lawmakers, radiation scientists, health professionals, and sufferers as they stood along the continuum of knowledge production, power, moral sensibility, and self-disclosure. It considers how the radiation research process facilitated the naturalization of illnesses in bodies as a matter of “social health.” The chapter also discusses a number of ethical issues that bear on the fate of Chernobyl sufferers; for example, how future changes in social and economic contexts will affect the legitimacy of compensation mechanisms and categories of suffering. Biological citizenship, it argues, represents a complex intersection of social institutions and the intense vulnerabilities of populations exposed to the determinations of the international political economy.

This chapter discusses methods to determine dissolved and sediment-sorbed radionuclides in rivers, estuaries, coastal waters, oceans, and lakes under accidental and routine radionuclide releases. It provides simple but robust analytical solution models to determine site-specific radionuclide concentrations with minimum site-specific data. It has step-by-step instructions with all required information supplied by accompanying tables and figures. The chapter contains many sample calculations. It also discusses a theory of radionuclide transport and fate mechanisms in surface water. The Chernobyl nuclear accident is used to illustrate important mechanisms, radionuclide migration and accumulation, transport and fate modeling, aquatic impacts, and human health effects through aquatic pathways. Thus, this chapter connects the theory to its applications and to the actual Chernobyl nuclear accident assessment.

This chapter examines the sciences, politics, and international cooperations that informed Soviet state responses to the Chernobyl disaster and how they produced an image of control over unpredictable and largely unassessed circumstances of risk. More specifically, it investigates the relationship between individual suffering caused by the Chernobyl accident and the technical measures and scales of expertise used to assess radiation-related biological injury in Ukraine. To this end, the chapter considers the work of international scientific networks in patterning initial Soviet remediation strategies and public health responses. It highlights key aspects of the initial Soviet management of the Chernobyl disaster and shows how ambiguities related to the interpretation of radiation-related physical damage subjected post-Chernobyl state interventions and medical surveillance to a variety of competing scientific and political interests. It also considers the so-called Safe Living Concept regarding radiation dose exposure and Soviet-American bioscientific collaboration report on radioactive fallout.

This chapter examines the “epidemic” of disability in post-Soviet Ukraine, and more specifically how state laws on the social protection of Chernobyl sufferers have turned suffering and disability into a resource affecting family, work, and social identity. It shows how the line between sickness and health becomes a highly politicized one as traditional forms of Soviet social organization, particularly the labor collective, are being replaced by a new architecture of welfare claims, privileges, laws, and identities. It also discusses the role of the Exclusion Zone in an informal Soviet economy and capitalist transition, as well as the ways in which workers micromanage inflation with a sick role sociality in their everyday lives. Finally, it considers the establishment of medical-labor committees to handle the growing number of disability claims related to the Chernobyl explosion and highlights a city of sufferers where so many individuals have gained their illnesses for life.

This chapter examines the experiential and political aspects of biological citizenship in post-Soviet Ukraine, with particular emphasis on the relationship between an emerging medical classification of the ill effects of the Chernobyl disaster and the social process of distribution of disability entitlements. Drawing on the experiences of three sufferers, the chapter considers the kind of experiences and social initiatives that have emerged between state medical classification and the redistribution of social welfare goods. It also explores the importance that Soviet administrators placed on the environment as a political tool to “normalize” catastrophe, and how that normalized environment influenced life stories and medical case histories. Finally, it discusses the ways that law, medicine, and corruption intersected with respect to the processing of disability claims.

This chapter examines the ethical positions of local scientists and clinicians from the perspective of Soviet and post-Soviet scientific trajectories as well as in relation to international scientific influences. More specifically, it considers how the radiation research process makes connections between ailments and the Chernobyl disaster real—that is, organic. It also explores how scientific and political pressures at the international level restrict local discourses on the health effects of radiation from the Chernobyl disaster and influence the processes through which the biology of such effects becomes an object of contested scientific understanding and research. Finally, it shows how patients become captives of a new sociality in Ukraine and describes the changing doctor–patient relations, along with the in utero research carried out, at the Radiation Research Center.

This chapter examines how the self and social identity have been transformed in post-Soviet Ukraine within the legal and medical context of claiming illness from radiation dose exposure. It shows how the political and bureaucratic aspects of Chernobyl pervaded sufferers' lives, bringing to the fore the complexity of life's disruption by unstable parental and marital relations, unpredictable physical symptoms and emotional stress, patterns of hospitalization, unemployment, and bureaucratic transactions. The chapter tells the story of an elderly couple, using the concept of lichnost', or personhood, to shed light on some of the social and personal dynamics that influenced their life. It explains how the husband's pains, truths, instincts, and acts became key components in realization of his biological citizenship. It also considers how the deep intrusion of illness into personal lives fostered a type of violence that went beyond the line of what could be policed.

This chapter, building on Chs. 4 and 5, focuses on two German novels about the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, Christa Wolf’s Accident: A Day’s News and Gabriele Wohmann’s Sound of the Flute. Both texts portray this transnational risk scenario in its impact on the local, ordinary lives of protagonists in East Germany and West Germany, respectively. Wolf emphasizes the way in which transnational technological risk of the kind instantiated by Chernobyl transcends disrupts and alters the experience of the local, which cannot offer adequate linguistic and cultural resources to imagine and describe this kind of hazard. Modernist literary innovations, in Wolf’s approach, become a way of bridging this gap. Wohmann, by contrast, emphasizes how even the most dangerous and large-scale risk scenarios are gradually integrated into the texture of everyday language and experience, challenging established modes of inhabitation but also giving rise to new ones. The chapter concludes with a brief summary of how Chernobyl itself has been normalized by becoming a popular tourist destination.

Sounds from Dangerous Places is a long-term, multi-sited project to explore the soundscapes of sites of major environmental damage. This composition takes the form of a poetic reverie about the human and environmental legacies of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which is played out resonantly at a multi-species level as well as through voice and song. It asks the questions: ‘What can we learn of dangerous places by listening to their sounds?’ and ‘What insights can sound offer into the relationship between the environment and the social and political contexts of a ‘dangerous place’?

In 1986 a major meltdown occurred at a nuclear reactor in Chernobyl, in the Ukraine. The impact on health was disastrous, and hundreds of thousands of people were affected. Cuba responded by offering to treat child victims of the nuclear explosion at a camp outside Havana, in Tarará. In all some 25,000 people came to Cuba for medical treatment. This chapter analyzes the nature of the medical treatment provided (at no charge) to the children. It also assesses the reasons for the Cuban government to undertake this mission at a time when its economy was crumbling.

Triumphalists make no effort to understand why the Soviets disarmed, reformed, and collapsed. They simply assume the Reagan administration caused these policy changes. Chapters 4 and 5 correct this misperception. Drawing upon Soviet sources, these chapters examine decision making within the Kremlin and the causes of Soviet behavior. Chapter 4 discredits the claim that the Soviet Union became more cooperative with the West and withdrew from its war in Afghanistan because the Reagan administration compelled it to do so. It demonstrates that a reform movement had been growing in the USSR since the 1950s. Soviet reformers sought to modernize the economy, end the arms race, and improve relations with the West. Moreover, within weeks of launching the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, Soviet leaders concluded that it was a mistake and began looking for a face-saving way out. Thus, these policies were rooted in domestic needs and debates and were not examples of Moscow acquiescing to American demands, as triumphalists claim. In short, the Reagan administration did not compel Moscow to adopt democratic reforms and withdraw from Afghanistan.

This chapter starts with a question which contains a play on words: Civilization of the irremediable or an irremediable civilization? Freud then comes into the picture with terms he used more or less in what he describes as nearing malaise or discontent. Though the energy of the atom had not yet been discovered in 1929, Freud augured that humanity will destroy itself as it is able to overcome nature in so many ways. Camus would have described Hiroshima as the brutal suicidal act of civilization. Maybe, what is meant is not civilization in its entirety since the atom has many non-military uses. But Nishitani could only describe the utilization of the atom as a “war without enemy,” because it is a war against humanity. This is exemplified after Hiroshima by Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and then Fukushima. What can happen next is an apocalypse or revelation and unveiling. But, more probably a satori or awakening to nothingness and with no understanding is what will follow.

This chapter examines the social and political impact of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor explosion from the perspective of radiation monitoring, clinical practices of radiation medicine, and compensation strategies. The experiences of workers of the contaminated zone and their transit through scientific research centers, public health bureaucracies, and activist organizations are documented. Together, these institutions mediate an informal economy of illness and claims to “biological citizenship”—a massive demand for, but selective access to, a form of social welfare based on scientific and legal criteria that both acknowledges injury and compensates for it. In the effort to map environmental contamination, to measure individual and population-wide exposures, and to arbitrate claims of illness, public health policies have recast the Chernobyl aftermath as a complex political and technical experience, with its own bureaucratic and legal contours which contributes to an increase of illness claims and social suffering.

This chapter describes the decline of the communist party and its attempts to salvage major disasters, such as the Chernobyl fallout. Unlike in the preceding decades of communist rule, when they could supplement a Marxist interpretation of their conditions with references to looming threats to national security, Cold War tensions, and economic perils, the credibility of these rationales had faded. This is not to say that opponents of significant change were equally disadvantaged in other parts of the communist world. In the case of China, the chapter highlights, the regime managed to defend its rule. But China's leaders faced a different type of party crisis and responded with a different remedy—the use of brute force—that neither the Soviet Union's leader nor his Eastern European allies dared to implement. Otherwise, the need for the vanguard that had made sense in its original European and Russian contexts vanished.

On 26 April 1986, in the Ukrainian town of Chernobyl, reactor number four in an aging and poorly designed nuclear power plant blew up. Fire in the graphite moderators produced radioactive gases and aerosols that over the next ten days contaminated thirty-five hundred square miles. Illness today is often environmental illness. In recognizing the connections between illness and the environment reshaped by human enterprise, people can begin to recover something of the biocultural heritage that modernist medicine has mostly rejected or ignored in pursuing a science focused on the interior of the body. Medicine is still slow to recognize and to address the complicated environmental sources of contemporary illness. The wider, even global contexts of environmental damage and its links to public health have not found a place within biomedical curricula that focus attention on internal organs and on bodily systems.

This chapter examines crises and disasters that resulted from environmental pollution. It deals with pollution related to radioactivity and chemical wastes. In each of the pollution crises, people evacuated their homes temporarily or permanently, voluntarily or by force, but only after a lengthy exposure to the hazard. It describes key examples of these types of environmental pollution disasters, which include the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster in Ukraine, the Nevada Test Site, and the Love Canal in New York. This chapter provides tips for preventing disasters and crises from environmental pollution.

In estimating the dangers of radiation to large population groups, the survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will be the most important basis. It supplied the best available epidemiological data on the effects of radiation on humans. Epidemiological studies of persons exposed to radiation in their jobs or in medical treatments were even more inconclusive. For further explanation about the radiation effects, there is a series of investigations in areas near Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and other nuclear plants, and a variety of other epidemiological analyses of radiation hazards did not produce clear results. The Three Mile Island accident created enormous public fear that it would cause a heavy toll in cancer deaths in the areas around the plant.