Incredible book. Fascinating , thorough, deeply disturbing. While the book really strives to unlock the suppressed history of the Chernobyl accident, it reveals the world wide problem of motivated reasoning, and outright lying about nuclear fallout. From all of the bombs tested all over the world we are living in a minor nuclear disaster and have learned nothing to help us in the future. Also, don’t eat berries or mushrooms from Eastern Europe. At least not for the next few generations. Sigh.

My thoughts are mixed on this book. I really appreciate much of the book, but I can't quite fully buy into the author's conclusions regarding the wide-scale consequences of Chernobyl. I find the nuclear accident at Chernobyl fascinating and this book is not about what happened at the nuclear power plant, but rather the environment consequences of the accident. It's certainly interesting (although not nearly as good as Higginbottom's Midnight in Chernobyl, in my opinion), and Kate Brown has certainly dug into the archives and studies which surround Chernobyl. Still, after reading her descriptions of the problems surrounding Chernobyl scientific literature (and combined with other information on the health and environmental consequences I've encountered), I have trouble agreeing with the conclusions she draws. ( )

Investigation of the ways in which the longterm health consequences of Chernobyl were hidden—hundreds of thousands of people were affected, and mushrooms and berries being sold all over Europe are still highly contaminated. ( )

This book is about the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Russia in 1986. More specifically, it discusses the extent of the nuclear fallout from that disaster, how this fallout contamination has affected the local population, how the Russian authorities (mis)handled the problem and how the Western governments and aid agencies wilfully misread the situation and actively covered up the extent of the disaster for their own political ends. Overall, very few come out of this analysis smelling of roses.

Even though there had been hundreds of nuclear ‘test’ explosions in the 40 years since Hiroshima there were no detailed studies of the effects of nuclear fallout on human populations, or, at least, none that any government or agency on either side of the Iron Curtain was prepared to share. When the Chernobyl explosion blasted huge quantities of radioactive materials over large swathes of the Ukraine and Belarus there was no coordinated effort to understand the medium and long term impacts of this contamination on the people most affected. The only objective analysis came from the nuclear and medical staff closest to the event who saw the effects of radiation contamination on local populations as the years went by.

This book makes some devastating observations. Governments and NGOs in both Russia and the West ignored the scientific evidence, and this included scientists on both sides, preferring instead to stick with their own political and ideological prejudices. Authorities then and now refuse to acknowledge the huge suffering of thousands of people with horrific cancers, diseases and birth defects. Further, no attempt has been made to learn any lessons from this disaster in order to be better prepared for some future incident.

Kate Brown has clearly undertaken an enormous amount of research to develop this book. This has included not just archival research (much of this was original) and interviewing the great and the good, but also visiting many of the towns and villages affected and talking to the people who lived or still live there.

Brown writes well and drives the story forwards. The only failing, I think, is that the scope and detail is large as to sometimes overwhelm the central point. ( )

This book focuses not on the Chernobyl accident, but on the after-effects of radiation on humans and the environment. As with the accident itself, the Soviet government constantly downplayed the health consequences and environmental impact of the radiation releases--frequently increasing the dosages considered "safe" and often ignoring the health complaints of people residing in zones it said were safe. Surprisingly to me, both the US and the UN atomic/radiation experts also played this game, although perhaps I should not have been surprised since both are proponents of "safe" nuclear energy and don't want any inconvenient facts to discourage the continued growth of the nuclear energy industry.

One difference between the radiation exposures after Hiroshima as compared with Chernobyl is that Chernobyl victims received a constant barrage of lower level radiation on a daily ongoing basis. In addition, Chernobyl victims were eating contaminated food. I was amazed at the way that the government manipulated the radiation measurements of food so that dangerously radioactive food--meat, milk, berries--was miraculously deemed safe to eat, i.e. mix contaminated berries/milk/meat in with enough uncontaminated product so that the whole measures within safe levels. Then, when people started getting sick, the experts, including US and UN experts claimed that their illnesses were not caused by the radiation itself, but by people's stress resulting from their fear of radiation.

There were many interesting factoids in this book. For example, the Soviet government engaged in cloud seeding to ensure that radioactivity would not reach Moscow. Instead, the seeding caused the radioactive rain to fall in Belarus, so that areas of Belarus are much more radioactive than areas around Chernobyl. While 90,000 were relocated from areas of the Ukraine around Chernobyl, only 20,000 were relocated from the much more heavily contaminated southern Belarus.

Those involved in the Chernobyl cleanup are known as liquidators, and not surprisingly many of them received heavy doses of radiation. The author found records indicating that certain wool workers were designated as liquidators and wanted to know why. It turns out that after heavily contaminated sheep were slaughtered, the government couldn't bring itself to "waste" the wool, and so had the wool sheared. The workers who sorted the wool became contaminated. (The government also sent the hides to be processed into leather). The author also tells the story of train cars full of radioactive meat that station after station refused to accept, and which floated around for 3 years before ending up in a highly contaminated Ukrainian town. Railroad workers put a fence around the train and warning signs, but the train sat there for months in the middle of a transit hub. The KGB stepped in finally, four years after the meat had been slaughtered (and after the cooling equipment had failed) to bury the meat in a cement-lined trench.

There is a huge amount of information in this book that should be concerning to us all. As Dr. Robert Gale states, "A nuclear accident anywhere in the world is everywhere in the world." ( )