Whitney Espich: Hi, I'm Whitney Espich, the
CEO of the MIT Alumni Association and I hope
you enjoy this digital production created
for alumni and friends like you.
Alyssa: good afternoon, everyone.
Thank you very much for joining us virtually
at MIT.
I'm Alyssa Holland, the director for student
and alumni relations at the alumni Association.
It's my pleasure to welcome our speaker, Kate
Brown, a professor of science, technology
and Society at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology.
She's the author of several prize-winning
histories, including blue Topia, nuclear families
and atomic cities and they great American
and Soviet nuclear disasters.
Her latest book, a manual for survival, a
Chernobyl guide to the future translated into
nine languages was the finalist for the 2020
National book critics Circle award.
Before we get started, I want to point out
we will have time saved at the end of our
session for a Q and A. That said, I encourage
everyone to put in your questions in the Q
box.
Without further ado, welcome Professor Brown.
Kate: thank you very much.
I'm going to try to share my screen, but now
I don't see the button for that.
Here we go.
Thank you for joining us today, those of you
who are out there.
This is a new experience for us all to lecture
on zoom.
But I want to talk today about this book I
published last year called a manual for survival.
Lately, I've been getting a lot of phone calls
from journalists asking me how is the pandemic
like a Chernobyl?
Most of the journalists are thinking about
leadership and truth telling.
What we see is that in the face of a public
health disaster, some leaders first instinct
is to downplay and minimize the risk because
they fear public hysteria.
They basically don't trust their citizens.
And we see that in the Soviet response to
the Chernobyl accident, we saw that in China
this past winter and the American administration
has been downplaying the disaster, at least
at first.
But I think there are other actions we also
see between the pandemic and Chernobyl.
One day this spring, we woke up and realized
our surroundings were intentional vectors
of contagion.
Overnight, our world became strange and alienating.
Because you can't see this hazard -- you can't
see radioactive isotopes or a virus, it becomes
hard to know what and whom to believe.
The certainties of our former world crumble.
So in many ways, we have a better ability
to understand an accident like Chernobyl and,
in some ways, looking at the accident like
Chernobyl helps us get a better grasp on what
is going on right now during this pandemic.
But first, let me tell you about this accident.
It occurred April 26, 1986 in the Ukrainian
Republic of the Soviet Union.
The Chernobyl nuclear power plant, reactor
number four blew up, then it exploded again,
releasing between 50 and 200 jurors of radioactive
isotopes.
I don't think I need to tell this audience
that's an awful lot of destructive energy.
Within 36 hours, Soviet leaders had created,
had drawn a circle around the plant and created
what they called the zone of alienation.
Over the next couple of weeks, they resettled
120,000 people from their homes.
We hear a lot of dramatic stories about the
Chernobyl accident and may be some of you
saw the HBO show that came out last spring.
I found as I started researching this story
in 2014 that we know very little about the
aftermath, what the consequences of this accident
was.
How many people died?
How may people got sick and what did they
get sick of?
These questions are very much disputed, so
I figure I would do what historians do -- I
would go to the archives and figure out what
I can.
I went to Kiev first and went to the archives
and set I would like the files from the Ministry
of health on the trouble accident.
The women there laughed at me.
They said this was a band, censored -- a banned,
censored topic.
It did not take a great sleuth.
Within a couple of minutes, we found whole
document, bound document collections labeled
in Ukrainian, the medical consequences of
the Chernobyl disaster.
I started reading those files and I was blown
away by what I found.
I was so concerned by what I was finding that
I figured I could not the wrong.
I ended up going up to other archives.
I worked my way down to the county archives,
the federal archives, I got research assistance
and ended up working in 27 different archives
over three years to write this book.
What I found in this Klondike of records is
a lot of surprises, a lot of things I didn't
know.
For instance, Moscow leaders said right after
the accident, they created this zone of alienation
and radioactivity was safely contained inside
the Chernobyl zone.
What I found was illiterate exposures outside
the Chernobyl zone.
Three days after the accident, there's a big
storm front ruing heading northeast toward
the big Russian cities, including Osco.
So they sent up pilots to manipulate the weather
so radioactive fallout rained on rural Belarus
to save urban Russia.
That was probably an OK triage decision to
make -- 200,000 people lived in that rural
area.
It spared aliens of people who lived in the
big Russian cities.
The only problem was they didn't tell anybody
in Belarus they had done this, not even the
head of the Baylor's Communist Party.
So what we find down here on the left, where
my arrow is, this is the Chernobyl plant and
you see these angry red Spotify levels of
radioactive contamination.
The pilot flew over the big city here and
let it rain in this area, nearly as hot as
the Chernobyl area.
People lived in this territory, it was not
fully depopulated until 1999.
It basically a second Chernobyl zone that
nobody really knows about, no journalists
visit, no disaster tourists wonder around
in there.
That was a real major point of contamination.
Another narrative is that the Soviet officials
tested the food and found the food to be safe.
Working through the Minister of agriculture
records, I found vectors of contaminated food,
especially in places where humans congregate.
Right after the accident, clouds of radioactive
fallout passed over cows and sheep in the
fields.
100,000 head of livestock contaminated, soldiers
came in and killed these animals right after
the accident.
Then they didn't know what to do.
They were loath to throw away good meat and
what was a pretty poor country at the time.
So there was a manual, an instruction manual
that went to the meatpackers and it said grade
the meat, low, medium, high levels of radiation.
Take the low and medium levels, mix them with
clean meat and make sausage.
Label a sausage as you normally would, just
don't distributed to Moscow.
Then they took the high level meat and they
said take that and shove it in a freezer and
wait till it decays a bit.
Pretty soon that meat packing plant and other
meatpacking plants started to ask for more
freezers.
They keep asking for more freezers.
They obviously don't get enough and finally,
they find refridgerated train cars and shove
high-level radioactive meat in those train
cars and send the cars away where the Geiger
counter's went off and they sent it to our
media -- sent it off to Armenia.
This ghost train circled the Soviet Union
and till four years when in the 1990, the
KGB buried the train in the Chernobyl zone
where it probably should have gone in the
first place.
Meet was not the only contaminated food produce.
In the secret second Chernobyl zone in Belarus,
three quarters of milk was over permissible
levels in 1987.
22% of all mothers milk hat higher than permissible
levels of radioactivity, and I think that
is an astounding thing to think about how
do you get a permissible level of radioactivity
from mothers milk?
You can see the typical map of radioactive
fallout did not make sense in terms of where
people were getting sick.
Take this area right here.
I found records that say there were 200 quid
aiders working in this town in a factory.
These were female textile workers.
I thought of liquidators as people who got
documented exposures from helping out with
the cleanup.
Those are normally firefighters fighting the
radioactive raise, not wool workers, female
textile workers in a clean town 50 miles away
from Chernobyl.
I worked through the archives and found what
I could.
Then I drove there and at first I talked to
the managers and they said we had a problem
in 1986 with dirty wool.
But we changed the process.
A commission came from Moscow, problem solved.
I asked to go down the line and talk to some
of the workers.
I went down and found of this list of 200
women, I found 10 were still there at their
jobs.
I asked them -- they look at my list and they
said there's my name, there's my name.
I said where's everybody else?
They said they died or they have been out
on pensions.
What were these women doing to get such an
exposure?
I found their job was to take dirty wool and
sorted into different categories.
Many times a day, they picked up these big
tales of all that measured 3.2 micro Road
and Jen an hour.
That's like picking up an x-ray machine while
it is turned on.
These women said we were able to get the wool
pretty clean with this new process.
But what about the wastewater that left the
plant?
If you ask where that went?
They said it went into the town's drinking
reservoir.
I didn't believe that but I went back to the
archives and what these women who had no more
than a high school education told me was absolutely
correct.
That radioactive water went into the drinking
reservoir.
Officially, Soviet leaders said they gave
900,000 people medical exams and they sought
no change in health statistics.
Moscow officials also said they hospitalized
only 300 people Fortune mobile exposures.
That was the official number we still have
today.
300 hospitalizations.
What I found working through 27 archives was
not 300, but 40,000 people were hospitalized
in the summer after the accident.
11,000 of those people were kids.
Records show immediately after the accident,
doctors treated six kids and sick adults.
-- sick kids and sick adults.
Thyroid problems come up birth defects, infant
mortality.
In 1987, and contaminated regions, half the
children have enlarged thyroid's from radioactive
iodine soaked up.
Paranasal deaths with in a 28 days of birth
doubled in 1987 and tripled in 1988.
Among adults, heart disease, enlarged by Roys,
gastrointestinal, blood disease doubled and
or tripled between 1986 and 1988.
Cancer rates climbed in that second Chernobyl
zone in Belarus, five times higher in the
province than Baylor's as a whole.
Finally, in 1989, leaders in Baylor resend
Ukraine declared they had a public health
disaster on their hands.
-- Baylor Ruth's and you crane said they had
a -- and Ukraine said they had a public health
crisis.
Here are a couple of visualizations that help
understand this accident.
This record says they looked at 1531 children
in one county and of those kids, 1130 to have
one chronic disease or another.
That happens from 10 to 20% of kids for 1986,
that flips to 80% to 90% of kids in contaminated
areas having chronic health problems.
Here's another visualization -- this is the
levels of anemia among children aged four
to six between 1986 and 1989 and this is just
an arrow shooting off to infinity.
Just a question of fatalities is difficult
to answer.
U.N. websites give numbers ranging from 33
to 54 people dead.
I find that number hard to believe.
As I traveled around, lots of people told
me anecdotally my mother died, my child died,
my friends died, etc..
Way more than 55 people.
In Ukraine alone, I found 35,000 women received
compensation because their husbands died of
documented exposure illnesses.
That just counts men, men who had -- no women
are in that count, no single people, no children,
no people with undocumented exposure.
I worked to sort out this confusing record.
Who was right?
Was there really a public health disaster
involving 4.5 million people that we know
next to nothing about?
How could a story of that dimension slipped
beneath the radar?
While I was working the story, elections happened
in the U.S., the Russians possibly meddling
in the U.S., and I understand that information
in the archives could have been planted there
for me to find later.
I understood that people lie, so archives
life.
-- archives lie.
How could I fact check the story?
I sought to locate sources that are more reliable.
I thought about what about the landscape?
Trees don't lie.
I called a Forrester to give me a tour and
an understanding of the local ecology of the
zone.
There's one thing to understand about the
Chernobyl zone.
Chernobyl is right down in this corner here
and this greater area is Europe cost largest
marsh.
-- Europe's largest marsh.
It's a gorgeous area.
A big sandy bowl transected by 17 rivers and
breaks up into hundreds of ponds, lakes, and
streams.
In the 1960's, Soviet hydrologists dried up
most of this swamp for agriculture and to
make room for Europe's largest protected nuclear
power plant that would have 10 reactors.
As you know, reactors need a lot of water.
Here's a picture of the turn noble plant.
There was one area that was very swampy in
southern Belarus.
The reason it was not dried up is because
in 1960, Soviet generals turned it into an
Air Force bombing range.
I asked a Forrester to give me a tour of this
part of the swamp and we went in and looked
at a lot of spent ordinance and saw the generals
powers.
There had been about 10 villages in this area
before it was turned into a bombing range
and they resettled these people.
But there's still some remnant of these villages
and we went and saw this old cemetery.
We are standing around and I take a look and
there's a bomb crater.
Some pine trees growing out of the bomb crater.
I look a little closer and I see these strange
mutations on these needles of the pine trees.
Pine needles are supposed to all grow straight
in one direction.
When they do this, biologists call them disorganized.
There are a couple of reasons why pine trees
have mutations like this, but radiation is
one major reason.
I asked the Forrester how old he think this
tree is and he said about 40 or 50 years.
I fit dates before Chernobyl and he said yes.
We looked around and didn't see any -- there
were other craters but we did not see any
other pine trees growing out of craters and
we didn't see any other you Tatian's.
-- any other mutations.
Looking at this crooked pine tree, I was reminded
of the persistence of radioactive contamination
in this part of the world and I placed a photo
of it in unverified accounts of the Soviets
testing small, strategic nuclear weapons in
this bombing range in the 1960's.
I could not find archival confirmation because
those records are off-limits to researchers
and that's the nature of power.
They can make evidence go away if they so
care to.
We have other evidence and I found this very
obscure study called radioactive cesium from
global fallout.
A big team of Soviet scientists toward the
marshes for four years in the 1960's and did
a study.
They tested radioactive cesium in the soil,
water, and in the bodies of people who lived
near there.
They found all the levels of cesium were elevated
among people 10 to 30 times higher than people
who lived in Minsk and in Kyiv.
You see this dark spot, that is where I was
standing.
These red spots indicate high levels of radioactivity.
This map was created -- this map that looks
like the Chernobyl maps I have been showing
you, this map was created five years before
they even broke ground on the turn noble plant.
So more -- on the Chernobyl plant.
I realize the perforations of radioactive
isotopes into organisms of the swamp long
predated the day of the Chernobyl explosions
and April 1986.
With that, I started to conceive of turn noble
rather than a one-off accident, we might better
think of it as an acceleration.
The reason this is important is if you just
see Chernobyl as an accident, it has a clear
beginning and ending.
Seeing Chernobyl as a point of acceleration
on a timeline, I began to visualize a much
larger succession of events that are ongoing
and in flux.
With it, a strange distortion of time.
Physicists have been saying for 100 years
at time as we measure it in hours and years
is a human construct.
Actually time expands and contracts in unpredictable
ways.
Chernobyl pairs that out.
People and animals exposed to high levels
of radioactivity experience a rapid radiation
aging.
For them, time speeds up.
In the red forest that took the hardest hit
of radiation right after the accident, time
has slowed down.
These trees, this photo was taken 25 years
after the accident.
The pine trees took such a hit of radioactivity
that they turned red and died.
Forrester's came in and mowed the trees down
and here they are.
If there had been enough microbes and bugs,
these trees would have decomposed within 10
years, but here they are, 25 years later.
If Rumpelstiltskin had fallen asleep here,
he would not have been able to tell how much
time had passed.
Thinking about these issues, I called up the
only two biologists I could find who have
regularly worked in the zone for the last
20 years.
They invited me along on there twice annual
trips and I went along as a participant observer.
I learned a lot from them.
Most often hear in the media that nature is
thriving in the Chernobyl zone.
That is a portrait created by journalists
who make quick trips , flyby trips into the
zone and there editors say get those pictures
and there are cages in case a photo journal
and -- photojournalists can't find any wildlife.
I've only seen one horse since I've been going
there in 2004.
The biologists taught me that nature is thriving
story is too simple.
There is no singular zone of radioactivity
in the turn noble zone.
It is very much a Mozaic where -- in the Chernobyl
zone.
It's a Mozaic where things vary by orders
of magnitude.
Biologists taught me about the interconnectedness
of the ecosystem and documented a decline
in pollinators which led to a decline in fruit
of wars.
With fewer birds, seeds did not spread.
They counted all of the fruit trees that had
seated after 1986 and a whole cascade of extinction.
Every rock we turn over, he said you find
damage.
In 2017, while I was following them, we went
to the red forest and I was hoping to avoid
going to the red forest.
It is not a very pretty forest.
You can see these crazy mutations of this
pine tree that was planted to grow bored straight
for lumber construction.
This plant tree is not getting that message.
These are trying to become trees but they
only managed to be struck -- to be shrubs,
only because of the mutations.
Groundcover is very scarce, birch trees are
struggling to grow.
But what really not me going was my Geiger
counter started screeching.
I expected 50 to 100 micro sieverts in our
and that's plenty.
It was almost to 1000 and I asked the biologists
what's going on?
They said about eight months ago, we had a
forest fire here and earned the leaf litter
and that turned volatile radioactivity stored
in the leaf litter and branches into radioactive
ash and smoke.
I checked and there was no media coverage.
This was a pretty big event big release of
radioactivity and those fires have occurred
every year in the Chernobyl zone as Ukraine
is getting hotter and drier.
This year, the fires were so bad that they
did reach the U.S. media.
And I think the problem this shows with the
long lives of radioactivity is the same with
the long lines of chemical toxins.
The timescale stretched beyond the capacity
of social memory and human attention.
If that crooked tree in the swamp shows how
radiation predated Chernobyl, these forest
fires show how radiation events occur long
after the accident.
This ongoing quality plagues Soviet leaders.
As much as a try, they could not close the
chapter on Chernobyl.
In 1990, admitting the biological load was
too much, leaders in the Soviet Union announced
plans to resettle 200,000 more people from
the contaminated areas.
But just as they made that announcement, the
Soviet Union fell apart one year later and
there was no money nor political organization
to move people.
Just as that happened, U.N. agencies came
over to manage the assessment of the disaster.
The Ukrainian and Belarusian leaders were
asking for a billion dollars to do two things.
One was to resettle these 2000 people and
the other to do a long-term health study on
Chernobyl survivors because this is an interesting
case of low doses of radiation, not high doses
like the one big x-ray calculated for Hiroshima
survivors.
But these IAEA experts said there is no reason
to remove any more people, there's no reason
to do a health study because the doses these
people are getting are too low compared to
our studies in Hiroshima.
Just as they said that, the U.N., consequently,
voted down this grant for $1 billion for a
long-term study.
As the post-Soviet economic crisis deepened,
subsidies for clean food and medical knowledge
withered.
Residents were abandoned to their own fate
on contaminated ground.
As most of them were farmers, they were just
left to eat what they produced.
I think we see this globally.
We certainly see it perhaps during this pandemic,
that has more and more people live in environments
saturated with toxins, risk has been privatized.
In one of the few studies of Chernobyl birth
defects, a researcher at the University of
Alabama found six times higher neurological
birth disorders like spina bifida than the
European norm in northern Ukraine.
He also found his subjects had more radioactive
cesium and their bodies than other people
in other parts of the Ukraine.
This jump and birth defects could be from
Chernobyl exposures.
It could be from Chernobyl exposures and chemical
pesticides and fertilizers dumped on crops
in this area, or it could be from three 1986
Chernobyl exposures.
My tour through the marshes show these living
laboratories, charred remnants with spent
ammunition and radioactive toxins distributed
at a frenetic pace in the course of the 20th
century.
You might hear this information and here -- and
feel empathy for the people in Ukraine and
the discrete part of the world.
That is how I was taught to think of history,
as something that plays out within national
borders.
Exit now, we have an awareness of the planetary
scale of human actions.
That cognizance diminishes the importance
of national boundaries.
Those events out there, as with this present
pandemic, make it home.
Thinking about the nuclear timeline, quite
a great acceleration came with nuclear tests
in the 1950's and 1960's.
Most countries tested nuclear weapons in other
people's territories.
The Soviets went to Kazakhstan and the polar
North.
The British went to Australia and the South
Pacific.
The French went to Algeria and the South Pacific.
But the Americans were different.
We tested in the Marshall Islands, but we
also tested in the continental interior of
the knighted state that the Nevada test site.
Chernobyl issued radioactive isotopes are
easy to count.
It's powerful and affects the human thyroid
and causes thyroid cancer.
The Nevada test site issued 150 billion curies
of radioactive iodine.
That fallout you might say, that's just Nevada
come out West.
But take a look at this map.
This is the national cancer Institute did
a dose reconstruction.
The brown spots are the hardest areas -- the
hottest areas.
Read and yellow are also hot and you see this
radioactive fallout skirting the Rocky Mountains
and heading with the tradewinds east.
In areas of high level of precipitation here
in the agricultural Midwest come Aware a good
part of our food is produced, dumping down
levels of radioactivity as hot as at Ground
Zero in the Fatah and you also's -- in Nevada.
You also see it in New York and little spots
here
in Tennessee.
In the 1990's, as Chernobyl health problems
were disclosed to the press, the big nuclear
powers, United States, Britain, France and
Russia were faced with lawsuits.
Thousands of atomic vets and down Wenders
claiming damage from their exposures to the
Cold War testing and production of nuclear
weapons.
In 1987, the department of energy officials
spoke to health physicists and said the biggest
threat to nuclear power is not and nuclear
accident like three mile Island or noble,
but lawsuits.
-- or noble, but lawsuits.
A few key officials at the International Atomic
Energy Agency and the U.N. the scientific
committee for atomic effects lobbied to defund
Chernobyl programs.
They buried biopsies given to them of children
from the territories with cancer.
They dismissed studies showing other health
problems Soviet researchers were giving them.
They found international scientists devised
a narrative that Chernobyl was the world's
worst nuclear accident and only 33 people
died.
That was manageable.
This is where the accident narrative was useful.
See Chernobyl as a one-off disaster and the
liabilities, the cost of cleanup, the ongoing
public health disaster dissolves.
That is indeed what happened.
Nearly all the lawsuits failed.
People around the world were left on their
own.
So to wear their environments.
We know however radioactivity does not just
go away.
Traveling in northern Ukraine and southern
Belarus during the summers I worked on this
project, I found thousands of people were
harvesting wild blueberries from the swampy
marshes and this was on an industrial scale
-- women and children would be met with a
person with a van who would immediately by
about two tons of Barry -- two tons of berries
a day.
So we decided we would go undercover berry
picking.
And we followed the buyers to the warehouse
where they resold the berries to the warehouse.
There was this nice lady buying the berries.
But before she bought the berries, she measured
them for radioactivity.
I asked her how many of these berries are
radioactive.
She said all the berries are radioactive,
but some are really radioactive, like 3000
per kilogram.
The Ukrainian norm is 400 50, so that is pretty
high.
We stood around and watched and found that
to my amazement, she bought all the berries,
the cleaner berries she put to the left and
the dirty berries to the right.
So I asked the pickers what are they going
to do with the berries that are over the permissible
levels.
The pickers told me they said it's like the
sausage.
He makes the cleaner ones and dirtier ones
and get to an average that is below the European
union norm of 1250 Beck roles a kilogram.
Then they are safe to go to Poland where they
are processed for the global market.
These dairies, I found looking through Homeland
Security documents, reach the United States
which also has a 1250 norm.
Now, this accident is getting closer to our
breakfast tables.
If you ask a specialist in radiation about
those berries in your own exposures, they
will tell you not to worry.
Since the onset of nuclear testing, we all
have some radioactive, man-made radioactive
isotopes and our bodies.
This point underlines what I have found, and
that is that the Chernobyl accident serves
as only an exclamation point in the same -- in
the chain that has changed our inscape, society,
politics and our bodies.
I hope now when you take a look at this girl,
a picker with her blue lips from picking some
and eating some, how she's not just a Barry
picker but a nuclear waste worker picking
up the toxic detritus left behind by others.
She's similar to these soldiers who cleaned
up the accident.
Maybe there's another way to think about this.
Those berries, and later when they come back
and pick mushrooms and cranberries in the
season, they are doing what an army of soldiers
and scientists could not accomplish.
They are cleaning radioactive isotopes from
the soils.
So rather than thinking of these berries is
produced to be spread -- to spread the problem
globally, we could see them as our allies.
Pay these swamp dwellers $25 a day as they
are now to pick berries and deposit the berries
in a radioactive waste dump.
Disaster tourists who visit the Chernobyl
zone might be delighted to pick radioactive
berries, take a picture of them eating one
with a selfie and then they would deposit
them as radioactive waste.
I think it just takes looking at our environmental
problems without denials, with our eyes wide
open, and I think we can picture a brave new
world.
Thank you very much.
Alyssa: thank you so much for that incredibly
interesting talk.
I will now go ahead and switch into our moderated
queue and day.
Thank you to everyone for your questions.
The first question we have is already straightforward.
Do you speak Ukrainian?
Kate: yes.
I speak Russian and Ukraine is a pretty interesting
country.
It's a filing will country, so I understand
Ukrainian, I've studied Polish, so people
would speak to me in Ukrainian and I would
answer them in Russian.
But there's also a dialect in northern Ukraine
and that's a special dialect that mixes Ukrainian,
Russian, and Polish.
I had a research assistant who helped me understand
some of this.
Alyssa: the second question is what was your
take on the HBO miniseries on Chernobyl that
was recently released?
Kate: I enjoyed watching that show.
It was very entertaining.
I got a lot of calls, dozens of journalists
called to say was it true?
Is this history?
And I thought that was a funny question because
it is a made-for-TV drama.
And it is fiction.
What I found interesting about it is the writer
kept saying this is lies and this is truth
and this is a true story and I worked close
to the sources.
But the sources he had available to him in
English were sources created by Soviet media.
About a month after the accident, Gorbachev
issued a circular that went out to the media
and said this is how we are going to handle
the Chernobyl disaster.
We are going to lionize the liquidators as
these people who altruistically risked their
lives to save the world from a greater disaster.
We are going to talk about the accident as
safely contained within the Chernobyl zone,
and we are going to talk about the patriotism
and selflessness of Soviet citizens in the
face of this disaster.
I think he got -- they were also going to
create scapegoats.
What I found was interesting about the depiction
is he pretty much followed that Soviet line.
He a the Soviet version of events.
Alyssa: another question came in -- when you
are approaching, interviewing a real person
instead of your archives, how would -- how
was your approach different and where you
met with resistance from people to share information
with you?
Kate: it's interesting, the people in residents
of turn noble and most of the Chernobyl-contaminated
territories are inhabited.
They are tired.
I can see from the archive that 30 years ago,
that's all anybody could talk about.
But 30 years later, when I arrived, people
were like not turn noble again.
They are tired of being stigmatized as Chernobyl
survivors, Chernobyl mutants.
One woman was like you people come, but we
don't have Chernobyl here.
But then she quickly switched and started
telling us about two women's cancers she had
had, the heart attack she had at the age of
45, and my research assistant and I did not
know what to say.
We just sat there silently and she finally
said maybe we do have Chernobyl here, but
it is our Chernobyl.
Alyssa: wow.
Another question and this is two-part -- were
you ever, when you are doing your studies,
afraid for your own personal safety in your
pursuits?
And also your personal health and your pursuits?
Kate: I did not love being in the red forest.
I got used to being in the Chernobyl zone.
A lot of it is very beautiful, forested areas
and I enjoyed that.
Maybe I'm a little bit of a risk taker but
I'm not that concerned about my health because
I thought I have already had children, I'm
an older person, I have a lot of time for
cancer to develop and I might die of other
things sooner.
I thought somebody had to tell this story
and take a risk.
And people live there full time all the time,
so I thought it was worth the risk.
I would not recommend going to the Chernobyl
zone as a tourist.
That's probably not worth it.
Alyssa: a specific question came in about
the fire.
What type of radiation is higher after a fire,
alpha or beta?
Kate: that's a good question and I'm not quite
sure.
What is coming up from those Geiger counters,
there's -- the counter was picking up alpha
and beta, but what is the real problem is
there are particles in the closer you are,
the closer the fires are to the expired plant,
the more plutonium is in the soils because
plutonium is heavy and landed closer to the
reactor.
Plutonium that sticks little tiny isotopes
can stick to dust mites and at and start floating
away.
You breathe in just a tiny particle, you breathe
that in, it doesn't have to be terrifically
hot and that lodges in your lungs and starts
to decay and plutonium in your lungs is a
serious tocsin.
So that is part of the problem with these
fires.
Alyssa: another question that came in is what
is being done, if anything, outside of individual
researchers like yourself to prevent underreporting
from officials, both with previous disasters,
but also in things that are happening today
such as COVID-19?
Kate: science takes time and science takes
effort.
What I really dislike hearing, and during
this spring, the fires in the Chernobyl zone,
officials at the IEA and Russia rushed to
say and some Ukrainian officials rushed to
say there's no problem, the levels are too
low, don't worry about it.
But the problem is they don't know that.
When leaders rush to give us assurances of
safety, before anyone has gone to measure,
there's no way of knowing as the fires burn,
there's just little tiny pockets of radiation
here and there and you have to go measure.
The fires could burn across 50 acres, five
acres could be very hot.
The rest could be fine and it is such a patchy
mosaic that people who are saying there is
no problem, people were saying anything, it
was too early to know.
The problem in Ukraine right now is nobody
was out to measure those fires.
The firemen themselves had no protective equipment.
They were there shirtless, no respirators,
hacking away at the forest.
We need to invest more money.
I note from just pulled out of the WHO yesterday,
but we need these international organizations
as watchdog organizations and we need them
to be more effective and less politicized.
Alyssa: another question that just came in
-- given that U.S. nuclear testing resulted
in radiation spread in magnitudes greater
than from Chernobyl, are rates of various
diseases in the U.S. rater than in other parts
of the world?
Kate: let me share my screen with you again
and show you a slide.
This slide will -- sorry.
This one does not seem to be there.
I thought I had some more slides to show -- we
have phenomenal rates of cancer problems in
the United States.
Cancer rates started climbing in 1950 and
continue to climb, especially now.
There climbing among people born after 1952.
Gastric cancer is a big one, thyroid cancer
is a big one.
Gastric cancer climbed 6% in the last 10 years.
Birth defects have taken over as the biggest
killer of babies in the United States.
And the other really strange statistic is
in the northern hemisphere where this radioactive
fallout circulated during the Cold War, male's
perm counts have dropped in half since 1945.
-- male's permit counts have dropped in half.
These are troubling and if I had my charts,
you could see these arrows going upward.
What we need to do is study whether there
is a correlation or there is causation to
this correlation and that we don’'t know.
But we do have a troubling cancer epidemic
that we don't talk much about.
We are obsessed with the virus, but we have
other epidemics among us that we pay less
attention to because they are slow.
It's a slow illness, a slow epidemic.
I think we should get more curious and ask
our medical community to become more curious.
Alyssa: this is a great question that just
came in.
Do you feel you got to whatever the truth
is or do you still have many questions yourself
and do you think there are important things
that are still hidden and missing?
Kate: there's a lot more to do.
I was one person in 27 archives with two research
assistants.
We worked really hard for four years straight,
but there's so much more there.
There's information about how animals fair.
Different categories of children, babies,
pregnant women . What I found was troubling,
very alarming.
Whether I'm right, I think more people need
to go and go into those archives and use those
as a source.
We don't have any record like this.
The Hiroshima studies, and Hiroshima is a
very different event, is counted as one big
x-ray, less than a millisecond.
The Chernobyl explosions are a slow drip of
low doses that are internally ingested over
decades stop -- over decades.
But we don't have any good records about the
immediate aftereffect of a big accident like
this.
Hiroshima studies started in 1950.
The explosion was in 45.
So we don't know in those first five years
what happened to people, those Hiroshima survivors.
We don't know who died, who got sick, who
had fertility problems, who had miscarriages.
We have those records for this Soviet case
and what we need is epidemiologists to go
in and do the work.
The Lancet just a couple of weeks ago, several
doctors wrote an op-ed saying exactly that.
We need to use the Chernobyl records and go
back and do a serious study and find out once
and for all what we have been wondering about
for 50 years -- what happens when people are
chronically exposed to low doses of radioactivity
in their environments.
That's much more of a scenario we are probably
going to encounter than Hiroshima.
Let's hope to God we never have another Hiroshima,
but we probably will have more nuclear accidents,
spills and leaks.
Alyssa: the next question that came in said
I graduated with a BS and MS in nuclear engineering
in 1986.
Welcome.
We are happy to have you.
As this was happening.
The focus at the time was it can't happen
here because of the terrible design of the
Soviet designed reactors.
Have you found resistance in the U.S. and
non-Soviet union it -- non-Soviet Europe because
the West doesn't use anything similar to that
design?
Kate: it can't happen here -- that was a big
-- we kept hearing it after the HBO show.
It can't happen here.
The funny thing is, how did the Soviets get
their nuclear technology?
Through espionage.
The reactor is the same as the E reactor at
Hanford that was the first reactor to produce
plutonium for World War II.
That reactor had a positive void coefficient.
It can happen here.
Thank God it did not happen here, but we had
seven reactors that functioned until 1964
that were RB MK type reactors.
Researchers are going back to the three mile
Island event and starting to see it was probably
more serious than we were told at the time.
And the other thing I think about when I hear
it can't happen here, I think to myself it
already has happened here.
We had 150 million curies of radioactive iodine
alone deposited across the United States in
the 1950's from the Nevada test site.
On top of that, the atmospheric testing the
Soviets, Americans, the French, and the British
were doing around the world.
All of that circulated around the world.
So I don't think that kind of confidence makes
much sense.
After Fukushima, that was part American built
reactors.
It doesn't look so great.
Alyssa: speaking of Fukushima -- a question
just came in -- do you know if ongoing studies
around the Fukushima meltdown are ongoing
and do you see that as another ongoing incident
or different?
Kate: the same two biologists I worked with
went off in 2011 and started going twice a
year to Fukushima and they have found very
similar things among the plants and animals
and insect life of Fukushima.
There have been doctors working in iodine
in relation to thyroid cancer.
About 172 kids have gotten thyroid cancer
from much lower doses that they reportedly
received.
So there have been studies and there is medical
monitoring around Fukushima.
Alyssa: another question we received is do
you have any general advice for someone who
is taking an approach to try to uncover the
truth or discover in more depth what has happened
for a past event?
Kate: archival records, modern states leave
a huge written trail.
If you have the patience and time to work
through them, you can find a great deal of
information.
I go back and forth between working in archives
and interviewing people.
When I interview people, they tell me all
kinds of things that help me point to take
this mountain of records and make more pinpointed
study.
We can get at the truth.
We can get a very close version of the truth.
There is not one truth, but we can uncover
things that have been kept in secret.
It just takes some time and it takes for archives
to be declassified and then we have at it.
Alyssa: here is a specific question -- in
1992, I was part of a mission to Belarus to
work with health professionals and visit children
from the hot zone.
Are there records for those children now,
many years later, and their current status?
Kate: it really depends.
And that person say with the program was?
Was it part of the NIH study?
They can post that again into the queue and
day and find out.
Kate: one thing that happened that was puzzling
is that in 1990 when the international teams
came in, for hard drives in different parts
of the Soviet Union, Belarus, Ukraine, and
Russia, were stolen with their hard drives
and all of the floppy disks.
Those four computers -- computers were a very
rare thing in 1990 in the Soviet Union -- those
four computers held all of the most data that
they had taken of Soviet people who had been
exposed to Chernobyl.
There was some evidence that was destroyed,
there was a KGB operation to make sure Westerners
did not get it.
We have to make sure Westerners don't get
our intellectual data.
But there is an awful lot in the Belarusian
Academy of sciences, some excellent studies,
case-control studies that they studied secretly
in the summer of 1980 six and continued into
the 1990's.
They did a great deal of work, especially
in Baylor's, stuff that I think that it would
be great if there was money to have it translated
into English and have people work through
that data.
Alyssa: we did receive a follow-up -- it was
part of a British and U.S. effort, not a U.N.
effort, NGO funded and not institutionally.
Kate: probably whatever that NGO was might
have those records.
The first lab -- and all of this is in my
book, but the first lab that was not Soviet
to open up a Chernobyl children's clinic in
Soviet union was Greenpeace and I worked through
the Greenpeace archives to try to find exactly
that kind of material -- what kind of health
data they have?
What I found, unfortunately, is the KGB infiltrated
Greenpeace and sabotaged it from within so
they did not rather much information at all.
Sort of a failed mission.
Alyssa: time for our last question that came
in.
Where can we find out more about the work
you are doing and have done?
Kate: they are all in my books.
Please Topia is about the first two cities
to produce plutonium.
Then my manual for survival, you can find
them in any online bookstore.
You will learn a lot more.
Alyssa: fantastic.
Thank you, Professor Brown, for your time
this afternoon and thank you to all of our
attendees for tuning in.
We look forward to seeing you in some of our
other great tech reunion presentations.
Kate: goodbye.
Whitney Espich: Thanks for joining us and
for more information on how to connect with
the MIT Alumni Association please visit our
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