![]() ![]() In four decades, the Hanford plant near Richland and the Maiak plant near Ozersk each issued at leastĢ00 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. 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. Fully employed and medically monitored, the residents of Richland and Ozersk enjoyed all the pleasures of consumer society, while nearby, migrants, prisoners, and soldiers were banned from plutopia-they lived in temporary "staging grounds" and often performed the most dangerous work at the plant. ![]() To contain secrets, American and Soviet leaders created plutopias-communities of nuclear families living in highly-subsidized, limited-access atomic cities. In Plutopia, Brown draws on official records and dozens of interviews to tell the extraordinary stories of Richland, Washington and Ozersk, Russia-the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium. While many transnational histories of the nuclear arms race have been written, Kate Brown provides the first definitive account of the great plutonium disasters of the United States and the Soviet Union. ![]()
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