Kate Brown (professor)
Her A Biography of No Place (2004), a study of community and identity in eastern Europe's forgotten borderlands, received the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association (AHA), given for outstanding writing in European international history.
Over the next three decades, this mosaic of cultures was modernized and homogenized out of existence by the ruling might of the Soviet Union, then Nazi Germany, and finally, Polish and Ukrainian nationalism.
In telling these previously unknown stories, Brown examines the making and unmaking of place, and the lives of the people who remain in the fragile landscapes that are left behind.
According to Brown, the plants at Hanford and Mayak, over a period of four decades, "both released more than 200 million curies of radioactive isotopes into the surrounding environment -- twice the amount expelled in the Chernobyl disaster in each instance.
"[2] Brown says that most of this radioactive contamination over the years at Hanford and Mayak were part of normal operations, but unforeseen accidents did occur and plant management kept this secret, as the pollution continued unabated.
[2] Noah Sneider of The Economist praises the book as "a magisterial blend of historical research, investigative journalism and poetic reportage, Kate Brown sets out to uncover Chernobyl's true medical and environmental effects.
"[1] Philip Ball in the New Statesman speaks about the depth about her research: "She has obtained documents and records that seemingly no one else had ever read, including some that were plainly meant to stay as buried as the contaminated Chernobyl waste.
and comments on the effort to downplay the effects: "Let's face it: the minimisation and even trimming-up of history's worst nuclear catastrophe has become a popular sport with some Western intellectuals, among whom I can count some deluded colleagues and friends.
The publishers of ‘Manual for Survival’ rightly suggest in the jacket blurb that the motivation for “(Western) scientists and diplomats from international organisations ... to bury and discredit the evidence” is that they were “worried that this evidence would blow the lid on the effects of massive radiation, released from weapons testing during the Cold War.”[4] Serhii Plokhy considers Browns research impressive and due to her 25 years of research in Ukraine, "Brown knows her landscape exceptionally well.
You would be expecting them to argue for larger effects of radiation as the more serious the health consequences the more the money flows.”[7] Brown published a response to Smith's critique in the Journal of Radiological Protection [JRP].
A recent article in the JRP about the Kyshtym reserve in Siberia (the result of an explosion in an underground waste storage tank that released 20 million curies) ruled that 70 years later the affected forests have failed to recover to their pre-accident state; that the numbers of soil animals were 15%–77% of those observed in similar but uncontaminated sites.
[10] For one, he points out that she has dismissed evidence he presented to her and characterized him as a desk-bound physicist in her book, even though he has done regular field work in the Chernobyl exclusion zone over the decades.
