Plutopia [electronic resource] : nuclear families, atomic cities, and the great Soviet and American plutonium disasters / Kate Brown.
Brown, Kate (Kathryn L.)
2013
HD9539.P583 S62 2013eb
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Title Plutopia [electronic resource] : nuclear families, atomic cities, and the great Soviet and American plutonium disasters / Kate Brown.
Author Brown, Kate (Kathryn L.)
ISBN 9780199855773 (electronic book)
9780199855766
0199855765
Publication Details Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2013.
Language English
Description 1 online resource (x, 406 p.) : ill.
Call Number HD9539.P583 S62 2013eb
Summary In Plutopia, Brown draws on official records and dozens of interviews to tell the stories of Richland, Washington and Ozersk, Russia-the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium. To contain secrets, American and Soviet leaders created plutopias--communities of nuclear families living in highly-subsidized, limited-access atomic cities. Brown shows that the plants' segregation of permanent and temporary workers and of nuclear and non-nuclear zones created a bubble of immunity, where dumps and accidents were glossed over and plant managers freely embezzled and polluted. In four decades, the Hanford plant near Richland and the Maiak plant near Ozersk each issued at least 200 million curies of radioactive isotopes into the surrounding environment--equaling four Chernobyls--laying waste to hundreds of square miles and contaminating rivers, fields, forests, and food supplies. Because of the decades of secrecy, downwind and downriver neighbors of the plutonium plants had difficulty proving what they suspected, that the rash of illnesses, cancers, and birth defects in their communities were caused by the plants' radioactive emissions. Plutopia was successful because in its zoned-off isolation it appeared to deliver the promises of the American dream and Soviet communism; in reality, it concealed disasters that remain highly unstable and threatening today. --from publisher description
Bibliography, etc. Note Includes bibliographical references and index.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
Source of Description Description based on print version record.
Available in Other Form Print version: Brown, Kate (Kathryn L.) Oxford : Oxford University Press, [2013] 9780199855766
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Part One. Incarcerated space and Western nuclear frontiers
Mr. Matthias goes to Washington
Labor on the lam
"Labor shortage"
Defending the nation
The city plutonium built
Work and the women left holding plutonium
Hazards
The food chain
Of flies, mice and men
Part Two. The Soviet working class atom and the American response
The arrest of a journal
The Gulag and the bomb
The Bronze Age atom
Keeping secrets
Beria's visit
Reporting for duty
Empire of calamity
"A few good men" in pursuit of America's permanent war economy
Stalin's rocket engine : rewarding the plutonium people
Big Brother in the American heartland
Neighbors
The vodka society
Part Three. The plutonium disasters
Managing a risk society
The walking wounded
Two autopsies
Wahluke Slope : into harm's way
Quiet flows the Techa
Resettlement
The zone of immunity
The socialist consumers' republic
The uses of an open society
The Kyshtym belch, 1957
Karabolka, beyond the zone
Private parts
"From crabs to caviar, we had everything"
Part Four. Dismantling the plutonium curtain
Plutonium into portfolio shares
Chernobyl redux
1984
The forsaken
Sick people
Cassandra in coveralls
Nuclear glasnost
All the kings' men
Futures.

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