Kate Brown > Quotes

“In the transcripts, he described how the accident took place because of a “routine safety test.” Because the test put the reactor in a highly unstable state, Anatoly Diatlov, the second chief engineer at the plant, told two operators (both would die a few weeks later in Hospital No. 6) to turn off the reactor’s alarm system. They did and then proceeded to manually slow down the reactor to see if the turbines would generate electricity with the reactor coasting to a stop. Once they finished the test, Diatlov gave the order to activate the SCRAM button for a complete shutdown. Five seconds later the reactor blew.”
― Kate Brown, Manual for Survival: An Environmental History of the Chernobyl Disaster

“In eastern Washington, the territory around the Hanford reservation is promoted as the last stand of original shrub-sage habitat in the Columbia Basin, yet periodically deer and rabbits wander from the preserve and leave radioactive droppings on Richland’s lawns.”
― Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters

“Radioactive isotopes, so readily combining with biological forms, had no discrete boundaries. In time, they were no longer distinct from the local environment, from scientists’ bodies, or from human evolution.”
― Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters