Kate Brown (professor)


Kate Brown is a Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future, Dispatches from Dystopia, Plutopia, and A Biography of No Place. Brown has received many research grants and written many articles.

Plutopia

, was the first city established to support plutonium production at the nearby Hanford nuclear site, to power the American nuclear weapons arsenals. Ozersk, Russia, supported plutonium production to power the Soviet nuclear arsenals at the Mayak nuclear plant. These were the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium for use in cold war atomic bombs.
In the 2013 book on a history of these two cities, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters, Kate Brown explores the health of affected citizens in both the United States and Russia, and the "slow-motion disasters" that still threaten the environments where the plants are located. 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".
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. Even today, as pollution threats to health and the environment persist, the government keeps knowledge about the associated risks from the public.

''Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future''

Based on a decade of archival and on-the-ground research, Manual for Survival is a gripping exposé of the consequences of nuclear radiation in the wake of Chernobyl. As Brown discovers, Soviet scientists, bureaucrats, and civilians documented stunning increases in cases of birth defects, child mortality, cancers and a multitude of more prosaic but still life-altering diseases. Worried that this evidence would blow the lid on the effects of massive radiation release from weapons-testing during the Cold War, scientists and diplomats from international organizations, including the UN, tried to bury or discredit it. Yet Brown also encounters many everyday heroes, often women, who fought to bring attention to the ballooning health disaster, and adapt to life in a post-nuclear landscape, where dangerously radioactive agricultural produce and distorted trees still persist today.

Reviews

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."
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. The result is an extraordinary and important – if controversial – book."
Vitali Vitaliev of The Institution of Engineering and Technology calls the book "a magnificent monograph that stands out among the multiple books on Chernobyl simply because it tells us the truth – the whole unadulterated truth – about one of the worst disasters in history." 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. They keep repeating like a mantra the ‘magic’ number 62, the official death toll immediately after the 1986 explosion. By doing so, not only do they ignore the plight of tens of thousands of victims of the disaster, many of them children, who have since died of different forms of radiation sickness and cancer, they overlook the treacherous nature of the nuclear contamination and residual radiation capable of manifesting themselves years and even centuries after the tragic event. As Brown, a distinguished American scholar, herself remarks in the final part of her book: “Ignorance about low-dose exposure is, I have argued, partly deliberate.” and goes on to note: "Why were – and are – they doing it? The publishers of ‘Manual for Survival’ rightly suggest in the jacket blurb that the motivation for “ 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.”"
Serhii Plokhy considers Browns research impressive and due to her 25 years of research in Ukraine, "Brown knows her landscape exceptionally well".
Writing in the Journal of Radiological Protection, Jim T. Smith, mentioned negatively in the work, criticized many aspects of Brown's Manual for Survival. He describes Brown's book as "deeply flawed and clearly biased history of the health and environmental impacts of Chernobyl" He criticized Brown for cherry picking writing "One of the major failings of this book is that the vast body of knowledge in the international scientific literature is almost completely ignored - except where it coincides with Brown’s thesis."
Sophie Pinkham writes in The New York Review of Books: "Brown writes about anticipating outraged letters from nuclear scientists and plant workers, oncology clinic staff, and others whose jobs require exposure to radiation. She details her scrupulous efforts to check and double-check her data, consult with scientists from many fields, and account for factors that might skew results. I suspect that she may be accused of alarmism nonetheless." She comments that the book is about more than Chernobyl: "Brown’s careful mapping of the path isotopes take is highly relevant to other industrial toxins, and to plastic waste. When we put a substance into our environment, we have to understand that it will likely remain with us for a very long time, and that it may behave in ways we never anticipated. Chernobyl should not be seen as an isolated accident or as a unique disaster, Brown argues, but as an “exclamation point” that draws our attention to the new world we are creating."
Nick Slater of Current Affairs criticized flaws in Brown's research methods writing: "Although Brown’s aims are certainly admirable—the arguments she uses to support them are not."

Books