I had the good fortune of meeting Dr. Kate Brown some years back at a conference. She is an amazing person and formidable intellect.
Her latest book A Manual For Survival sits on the table before me and I highly recommend it:
https://books.wwnorton.com/books/Manual-for-Survival/
Dear Comrades! Since the accident at the Chernobyl power plant, there has been a detailed analysis of the radioactivity of the food and territory of your population point. The results show that living and working in your village will cause no harm to adults or children.
So began a pamphlet issued by the Ukrainian Ministry of Health—which, despite its optimistic beginnings, went on to warn its readers against consuming local milk, berries, or mushrooms, or going into the surrounding forest. This was only one of many misleading bureaucratic manuals that, with apparent good intentions, seriously underestimated the far-reaching consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe.The PASSAGE that I find most significant in the book is excerpted below:
"I have argued that Chernobyl is not an accident but rather an acceleration on a time line of exposures that sped up in the second half of the twentieth century. Seeing Chernobyl as an acceleration helps to grasp how it is connected to many other events; pollutants accumulate and change the environment in which they roost, one mutated cell building on another, one set of decisions commanding yet more actions to create a terrain of such toxic complexity that humans have a hard time grasping it, much less fixing it"CHERNOBYL as ACCELERATION is exactly correct. What a great way of addressing the crisis of our time, which is far greater than "climate change" alone.
[The only note I would make is that radionuclides don't just "roost" as they are incorporated in as the building blocks of life, as illustrated so pointedly by tritium, which can be incorporated into DNA. I know Brown is getting at that process with her discussion of mutated cells.]
FUKUSHIMA DAIICHI - Another ACCELERATION