NH #461: Chernobyl Fire, Chernobyl Anniversary, Covid19/Nuclear: Author Kate Brown, Timothy Mousseau

Chernobyl Fire – representation of radioactive smoke dispersion over Europe
from the 3+ week wildfire in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone

This Week’s Featured Interviews:

• Kate Brown is the author of Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future. She is an historian of environmental and nuclear history at MIT and the author of Plutopia, which won seven major awards. Her research has been funded by the American Academy in Berlin and by Carnegie and Guggenheim fellowships. In this season of Chernobyl commemorations, she made time in her daunting schedule to talk with us about what’s in her new book.  We spoke on Monday, April 15, 2019.

• Professor Timothy Mousseau is an evolutionary biologist and faculty member of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of South Carolina since 1991. Beginning in 1999, Professor Mousseau and his collaborators have explored the ecological, genetic and evolutionary consequences of low-dose radiation in populations of plants, animals and people inhabiting the Chernobyl region of Ukraine and Belarus. More recently, he initiated a second research program in Fukushima, Japan.  This is an excerpt from a much longer interview from February 16, 2016, which will be shared on an upcoming Nuclear Hotseat.
  

Chernobyl Fire Visuals:

Chernobyl Fire – Most Recent Smoke Dispersion Animation:  The red triangle represents the location of the fires, the time stated is in UTC. The discharge used was evaluated by reverse modeling (exploitation of the available measurements) over the period from April 3 to 12, 2020.

This is a dispersion model of radiation from April-May, 1986.  It’s included to show the initial impact of Chernobyl’s radiation on the world. 

 

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

Covid19 decimating health and threatening the work force at nuclear power plants.  So of course, it’s a perfect time for the NRC to consider permitting so-called “low level” radioactive waste in regular landfills.  Just because we’re so distracted, they think they can get away with it…!

Activist Links:

War in Space: Weaponizing the ‘Final Frontier’ – full video of webinar by Space4Peace.org:

–