[Applause] thanks for coming out on this snowy night when you could be skiing and fresh powder and thank you for having me and for that generous introduction and for the sponsorship of the donor and for all the members of the history department the philosophy department who brought me here I really appreciate it I want to talk tonight about the Chernobyl accident and how we frame it and and how while I was researching this story over about four years I came to think about how we do history in a different way a little bit about the accident it occurred April 26 1986 a reactor number for the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukrainian Republic of the Soviet Union exploded and then it exploded again the accident release released 20 to 50 million Curie's of radioactive contaminants into the atmosphere that is an awful lot of destructive energy within 36 hours Soviet officials drew a circle on the map and they isolated a first a 10 kilometer sphere around the plant and then later a 30 kilometer and they called it the Chernobyl zone of alienation and removed about 120,000 people who lived in that territory and you hear a lot about the accident especially recently the HBO featured a big world that so far the world's most watched television show about the Chernobyl accident and you are a lot of dramatic stories and so when I sort of reach in researching this this history I was surprised to find out that we know very little for certain about the consequences of the accident there's a great deal of debate so I tried to figure out what I can about it and at first I did what historians do I went to the archives and I walked into the archives first in Kiev and I asked archivists I said you know do I'd like the files on the the medical files Ministry of Health and the Chernobyl accident and they laughed at me I said what are you talking about this was a banned topic during the Soviet Union you're not gonna find anything but you know I had worked in this archive before and I knew these ladies didn't like to get off their stools so I said well let's just take a look you know you never know what you'll find and within it didn't take a great sleuth within about three minutes we found a whole document collections big you know bound volumes labeled very clearly the medical consequences of the Chernobyl catastrophe so these volumes were piled up in front of me and as I looked at them I realized I was going to be at this job for years there was so much I'd found a Klondike of records the reason that archivists told me that they didn't exist it's not because they were trying to deceive me but because nobody had ever asked for these records before and that's how arc of his work if it you know they don't pull the files they don't exist for them so what so strangely I was the first person to have this question to go to the archives and ask this question the documents tell some pretty surprising stories that sort of call into question first of the Moscow narrative and then the international the narrative of international experts of the story the first story is that Moscow leaders said you know that they had created this this zone and the church and the radiation was was safely contained inside the zone and they set up you know guard posts and things like that to protect it but a few days after the accident a big storm front was brewing a big you know thunderstorm was brewing it was heading to the North East from the Chernobyl zone and along the path for all these big Russian cities you vote erroneous Yodas level and Moscow and so in a triage operation they sent a pilot to manipulate the weather and they seeded the clouds to make it rain on rural bill aru's in order to save Reuben Russia now and you can see that in this map there is the Chernobyl plant is down there there was a big city Gomel in between the pilots held off and they let it rain in that part of yellow ruse now this was probably as in terms of triage not a bad thing to do two hundred thousand people live there farmers as opposed to millions of people who lived in those big cities the only problem was they didn't tell anyone and Belarus they had done this not even the leader of the Belarusian Communist Party so these people lived here in this area with terrifically hot levels of radioactivity for until 1999 and then it was finally depopulated so when you hear about tourists going to the Chernobyl zone they're always going down there but there are very few journalists and very few disaster tourists who go to the second depopulated Chernobyl zone that's pretty much off the radar in terms of the public but a whole huge swath and so you know some of these stories I'm gonna tell today have to do with that territory that was fully populated for a good 15 years after the accident the another narrative Soviet officials said that they tested the food and they found it safe safe to eat go right ahead working through the Ministry of Agriculture records I found vectors of contaminated food spreading especially in places where humans congregated because humans are are greedy and so we take all the food we want to eat and we bring it to places where we live animals grazing in the fields under those radioactive clouds started to lose hair get sick and weak right after the accident so I took a hundred thousand AK animals and killed them and then you know as the Soviet Union it was a poor country and they hated to waste all that meat so they they wrote up I call this a manual for survival because I find all these instruction manuals in there cuz so they wrote an instruction manual for meatpackers okay you've got all this radioactive meets what you should do is grade it high level high medium and low levels of meat and the low and the medium levels of meat take that meat mix it with clean meat and make sausage and send that meat all over the Soviet Union label it as you normally would but just don't send it to Moscow the people who wrote the manual they lived in Moscow the high level meat put the high level meat in freezers and wait till it decays and then we'll use it later so pretty soon the meatpacking plant and Gomel they're writing to say we need more freezers they keep writing the same letter we need more freezers they don't I presume they don't get any freezers because they keep asking for freezers or maybe they just get more freezers but they have that much meat so thinking creatively they found a refrigerated train car and they stopped 60 tons of radioactive meat in this train car and they sent it to Baku and Baku the geiger counters went off at the train station and they sent the meat on to Yerevan in Armenia and then they send it out you know and so this ghost train circulated the Soviet Union for four years filled with radioactive meat finally in 1990 the KGB buried that me where it should have been buried in the first place in the Chernobyl zone as radioactive waste as I worked through the Ministry of Agriculture records I found that almost all agricultural food products were contaminated with radioactivity and so Soviet officials started to get requests that well you know can we eat this bread can we eat this butter this is butter and so they came up with permissible levels they sort of guessed you know how radioactive can your honey be how radioactive can your tea be that kind of thing they didn't really know the answers but they made up these answers as they went along and what you find is that in places like that Mogilev you know ii Chernobyl zone that was just talking about three-quarters of all milk was over permissible levels in 1986 just as radioactive in 1987 in 1988 22% of all mother's milk was over permissible levels imagine trying to come up with a permissible level of radioactivity for Mother's Milk so the food is moving around this this landscape and and other agricultural products as well and so I started to see patterns of contamination that just it makes sense and is there a pointer here I don't think there was a pointer in areas where that were not very radioactive I've found that the people were coming up with the status of Liquidators and I found specifically in this town of Chernigov and you can see there it's outside of the high levels of radioactivity I found that there were 200 wool workers who were given status as Liquidators and liquidators for people who got special subsidies and medical monitoring because they had helped out liquidating the accident and so I was like that's funny what you know what would female textile workers be doing to get that kind of dose to be qualified as Liquidators so I looked around more in the archives and finally I get I got a rental car and I drove up to Chernigov and I had this list of these 200 women and I find 10 of them still at their posts their job is to sort and then clean dirty will that comes up from the fields and I showed them this you know list and well first I went to the management and the management said yeah we had a problem with radioactivity in 1986 and we called it an Commission came from Moscow and we changed our process and problem was solved you know there's no problem but when I went to talk to the women they're like yeah yeah there's my name on the list and there was my name and and I said well where's everybody else and they said Oh they've all either died or they've been invalided out on pensions and I you know so you know what happened how did they happen and it turns out and I've verified this in the archives that every time they picked up a bale of wool and they had to do that many times a day it was that the wool measured 3.2 micro Road engine an hour and that's like picking up a an x-ray machine while it's turned on that's how radioactive it is and the women knew a great deal more than the management about this event you know they they pointed to different parts of their body that were diseased or ached and they knew which radioactive isotopes of the many that came out of the from the fallout of the accident went to which parts of their body they had a very good understanding of radio of health physics for the most part they also know they said you know what do you think happened to the you know we got this wool pretty clean but what do you think happened to the wastewater that came out of the plant that was of course radioactive I said yeah what did happen to it they said well it went into the municipal drinking water reservoir I didn't believe that but again I looked it up and sure enough in the archives these women were right so I could tell from from the archival record that these women knew a lot more than the managers or that at least what the managers were willing to concede to me now the other story that the Soviets told is that they gave medical exams to 900,000 people after the accident and they saw no change in health statistics they also Moscow said that they had three three hundred people who were hospitalized because of the accident and these were mostly firemen and nuclear plant operators and you if you watch the HBO especially you saw a lot about that what I found in the archives is not three hundred people hospitalized that was just the nut count from one Hospital in Moscow but if you counted all the hospitals that took Chernobyl patients 40,000 people were hospitalized in the summer after the accident 11,000 of them children records showed that immediately after the accident doctors treated sick kids and adults they recorded an increase in thyroid complications at birth birth defects and infant mortality children and pregnant women that first summer were especially hard-hit but in 1987 and 1988 in 89 the problems persisted in 1987 in contaminated regions half of the children had enlarged thyroids perinatal deaths doubled in 1987 that's children who died within 28 days of birth and they tripled in 1988 in one County for instance of 103 pregnancies and this is a pretty typical number 63 of these pregnancies amounted to a viable baby the rest died mostly of birth defects among adults cases of heart disease and large thyroids gastrointestinal urinary tract disorders cataracts liver blood diseases doubled and/or tripled between 1984 and 1988 cancer rates climbed from 1986 to 1989 five times higher per capita again in that area that second Chernobyl zone than in the rest of Belarus and here's here's a couple of a young an older man and a boy both with thyroid cancer and you can see with this boy that the larger had in the smaller body that before the thyroid problems created all these comes with growth and development but these are the kind of stuff charts that come out of the archive this one says of fifteen hundred and fifty-one children that we looked at in this one County eleven hundred and thirty-two had one chronic disease or another and and this is what you find before the Soviets you know they had a socialized medical system so they did this sort of normalized epidemiology all the time you know local public health officials had to send in charts and normally they had this category healthy and normally before eighty six in these region regions 90 to 80 percent of the children would be categorized as healthy with basically no health problems and ten to twenty percent would have something this flips after 1986 so you see here we're like 80 percent of the kids have something the categories are you know have a lot to do with end system respiratory system circulation and and then birth defects here's another one from Belarus this is the kids and again in one County that had furnishes anemia numbers go up you know we're thirty percent of the population of the childhood population would have these problems with anemia the simple questions of fatalities is hard to answer you and websites give the number if you check today you'll get this number between 33 and 54 people died from the Chernobyl accident the Chernobyl forum report projects four thousand to nine thousand eventual cancer deaths over time from Chernobyl Greenpeace gives a number of 90,000 eventual tests from Chernobyl the lower numbers are most often cited in the New York Times Washington Post so I was like fifty four people you know is that I mean really fifty four people in Ukraine alone thirty five thousand women get compensation for their spouses having died from a Chernobyl related accident I'm a health problem now that's just that's a very limited number that that only counts men who were old enough to marry and who were married so that's a that thirty five thousand is the low end Chernobyl radiate radiation mostly went to Western Russia and Belarus Ukraine even though it occurred in Ukraine Ukraine only got about thirty percent of that fallout Belarus and western Russia have not been brave enough to make a count and at least to publicize it officially so so we don't know so the minimum number is thirty-five thousand dead off the record Ukrainian officials say 150 thousand I think so far already from Chernobyl so we have this big range 35 150 thousand I was really working to sort out this confusing record who was right was there really a public health disaster on this scale that we just overlooked four million people were exposed to Chernobyl radioactivity can this be right how does the story of that dimension slip beneath the radar if if there really was a public health disaster now the textural records reveal many contradictions as I've pointed out and and conflicting measurements plus some strange occurrences in 1990 as this public health disaster story was starting to break in the press and go abroad for hard drives in the Soviet Union medical Institute's that had this valuable data of dose estimates that they had made of individuals they recorded from people who had been exposed these hard drives were went missing and the floppy disks also went missing from four different in one summer of 1990 so something was up and we they've never been recovered so we don't really know what the how much what kind of radioactivity the people were exposed to I found in the archives that Soviet officials falsified accounts while KGB agents planted fake stories in the newspaper I also noticed that consultants for UN agencies who came in in 1990 to make an independent assessment of the problems disappeared evidence and dismissed about half of the research they got from these local Soviet researchers who are on the ground thinking of WikiLeaks and the 2016 elections I and this is what new in the context in which I was researching this I grasped that information from archives and reports could have been planted in the archives for me to find later like you know how do I know it was clear that people were lying in this story it was clear that the archives were lying so how could I fact check this story and then I thought maybe I somehow I could locate more reliable sources and I really thought over this for lunch you know how do I find more reliable sources you know people I archives lie but maybe I thought trees don't lie so I went to get another kind of education to figure out if I could learn something about the local ecology of this region to try to see if I could get sort of a material archive to figure out what happened now one thing to know about the Chernobyl region is that it took place that the plant was built in Europe's largest swamp which is called the Pripet marshes and this swamp is absolutely gorgeous and amazing it seven it's a it's a bowl of land vast bowl of land we're intersected by 17 rivers and hundreds of streams and ponds and lakes and a lot of boggy areas and in the flood season whole areas of this place have traditionally been sort of you know would just be flooded out for several months and inaccessible for several months out of the year now reactors need a lot of water and they they're better they're best put in places with sparse population so the swamp was chosen as a place to build what was projected to be Europe's largest nuclear power plant they were they had four plan four reactors up and running in 1986 and they were planning they were building a couple more and they were planning eventually to have 10 reactors so I seeking to find out something about the local ecology of this swamp I had to go about 200 kilometres away because in the 1960s the big part of the swamp was dried up they drained it put irrigation canals in in order to make more land available to put this plant in place and also for farming so but on the you know over in the Belarus side pretty far by tunak kilometers away was this still this part of the swamp that was still still swampy and that's called the Omani swamp and the reason it wasn't dried up in the 60s is because the Soviets turned it into an Air Force bombing range so I asked a local Forester if you'd give me a tour of the swamp so I could get sort of a baseline of what these ecologies like and and so we went off and you know there's a lot of spent ordnance sitting around and there was a tower that the generals used to you know watch the flight path of their pilots and I climbed to the top of the the tower in this swamp area there had been about 10 villages but those villages had been removed when they made it the bombing range and so we went to some of the sites of the old villages and all that was left were cemeteries and we're looking at an old cemetery and standing there I I saw this this bomb crater there's lots of bomb craters all around because it's been a bombing range and I saw this pine tree growing out of out of the bomb crater and I took a close look at the the pine tree it looked funny to me and it had these weird mutations now pine needles are supposed to all grow straight and go in the same direction that's what pine needles want to do and when they do this when they curl that's biologists say that they're they get disorganized and that's a sign of a mutation now there are a number of things that can cause Pines to mutate but radioactivity is is they're very vulnerable to radioactivity and here this I looked around there were other pine trees no mutations and there are other craters but no other pine trees growing out of craters and so this was the only thing is you know right in this crater was this pine tree in it I took that this photo and I and I put in a file I had because I had seen in the archives some references that people had made to testing of small strategic nuclear weapons in this bombing range in the 1960s and I couldn't verify that because the record of nuclear testing is in a archive that's closed to me in Moscow and that's the nature of power if you know people in power want to cordon off knowledge they can should they deem that to be classified record but I thought you know what there's got to be another way to verify this and I kept looking and I found that other things that led me to believe that there might be something to this nuclear testing of nuclear weapons in that swamp this map comes out of a 1974 public in the Soviet Union and in the translation from Russian is of the book was called a global fallout of caesium-137 of radioactive cesium and it turns out that for four years in 1960s a team of Russian scientists who were specialists in nuclear emergency x' and these are the kind of guys that if they showed up at your backdoor you would probably want to just go out the front door and keep on walking because they showed up everywhere there was a nuclear emergency in the Soviet Union and there were a number of nuclear emergencies the secret ones in the Soviet Union so they were like the grim reapers of nuclear accident since they show up in the swamp in 1962 to 1965 and did this study and they produced this map that strangely looks a lot like this map this later Chernobyl map but this map was produced before they'd even broken ground to the Chernobyl plant I found that really fascinating what they found is that that black spot is where it's most radioactive the red spots are also levels of radioactivity and they found radioactivity in this soils in the water in the flora and fauna of the swamp and in the bodies of the people who lived in the swamp they found that people living in the swamp had 10 to 30 times more radioactivity in their bodies than people who lived in Minsk and in Kiev so that's pretty interesting what I was realizing I couldn't really solve this problem if they're testing nuclear weapons but looking at that crooked tree I was reminded of the persistence of radioactive radioactive contaminants in this part of the world and I started to think that maybe you know that this swamp maybe they would chose it for the Chernobyl plant because it was already radioactive that it was already a sacrifice song and I started to think you know this swamp was radioactive before the Chernobyl accident and so maybe we shouldn't think of Chernobyl as a one-off accident with the beginning a middle and the end because clearly this accident began before Chernobyl and maybe we should adopt the term of the environmental historian John McNeil and culture Nobel and acceleration rather than an accident and I think the reason that is important is because if Chernobyl is an accident then it's a discrete event that begins and ends but seen Chernobyl as part of a as a point of acceleration on a timeline of destruction of of great spreads of radioactive contamination I began to visualize a much larger succession of events that are ongoing and in flux a set of occurrences that shape the present and the future as I try to write about them and and in many ways that makes it a difficult job of trying to write about Chernobyl and figuring out the time and the scale of it and genomics for especially slippery historical subject especially because of these problems of time and scale it let's take time for instance physicists have been saying for over a hundred years for almost a hundred years that the time as we measured out in seconds and hours and years is a human construct that actually time expands and contracts in unpredictable ways Chernobyl brings that insight into sharp focus people who were exposed to Chernobyl radioactivity experienced a rapid Chernobyl or radioactive radiation aging is called so like a 25 year old has the organs and the and you know sort of functioning biological function of somebody who's in their sixties so for these people time sped up now the place in the Chernobyl zone word that took the hardest hit of radioactivity is called the red forest and there after the cloud passed over the pine trees turned red and they died and then forest just came in and they cut these pine trees down and so here is this photograph was taken 25 years after that those trees should have long turned to dust but they didn't there were the microbes the beetles the insects to do the job of decomposition and so that's kind of strange if Van Winkle had fallen asleep in the red forest and woken up 25 years later he would have known how much time had passed for an historian to find a place where time sort of halts it's kind of like your fantasy you know as a mystery like freeze-frame the paths but then when it actually happens I was filled with dread just to come to this realization and what about scale now you spill a thousand Curie's like that happened in Brazil in 1987 and the International Atomic Energy Agency ranks thousand curie spill a level five nuclear emergency you spill 900,000 times more radioactivity in the Chernobyl accident and the same agency ranks at 11 level 7 emergency now what does that mean what's the difference between a 5 and a 7 the Chernobyl records show that people quickly lost track of how to account for the volume of destructive energy let loose from the plant after the accident and I think we see this today as scientists try to deal with the planetary scope of climate change that the scaling up of catastrophe to these vast extents is paralyzing to for human society we can't deal with it so these problems of time and scale led me to continue to search for ways other than text to and numbers to try to understand Chernobyl as a political economic as well as an environmental event so I called up two biologists who have been working and the only these the only two scientists I've could find who've been consistently working in the Chernobyl zone for over two decades now and that's um Tim Mousseau and Anders molar and I asked him if I could follow them as like as a participant observer and and I did that while I was was research and they go two times a year in June in September and I learned a lot from following them on their trips into the zone now often you hear in the you know the stories if you follow this that nature and the Chernobyl zone is thriving and that's a story that is puzzles very puzzling if you spend any time normal zone you know editors and journalists often zoom in and scientists zoom in to get this story and zoom out now if you're like this BBC reporter and you can't get that picture that your editor wants of a thriving nature in the Chernobyl zone don't worry they've got some caged animals you can get the picture but what let me assure you that it doesn't it's it's not like that nature is not thriving in the Chernobyl zone as much as we would like to - that's a beautiful story right you just walk kyumin's walk away from nature and it restores itself when I found following the biologist is that there was no singular zone of radioactivity that levels of radioactivity differ by four orders of magnitude inside the Chernobyl zone they taught me about the interconnections of the ecosystem they documented for instance of decline in pollinators bees and butterflies that led to a loss of frugivores that's fruit eating birds for the most part with less fruit and fewer birds seeds didn't spread so they count on all of three new fruit trees planted in the hottest areas since after 1986 see didn't night after 1986 so what the recording is basically a cascade of extinction every rock we turn over who so said we find damage now in 2017 I was you know following them as I as I was doing in there and one of the biologists said well we're gonna go to the red forest today I was like I'd hoped to not have go to the red forest because the levels of radioactivity they were quite high and you know and it's not a very pretty forest you know we went there and you see these trees with really wild mutations like this one you know these pine trees were planted commercially to grow bored straight so they can make good lumber for our houses and you can see this one this treat and get that message these trees are trying to be pine trees but they could only manage to be bushes and you see they're you know not much of ground you know this should be a lush forested ground cover and you see there this sort of burned out thing but what most disturbed me why we were there was my Geiger counter which was screeching crazily yet I had expected about fifty microsieverts an hour that that's already pretty high it's uncomfortably high for me but here my Geiger counter was almost at a thousand mic receivers almost a milli so I I turned to Tim one of the biologists I said what's going on he goes oh yeah yeah we had a fire last fall here as a forest fire that went through here and it took all the radioactivity that was stored in the leaf litter and in the branches and it revolves it now I checked the press there was no coverage of this release of resuspension of radioactivity this would have been the ia would have ranked at about a level five emergency but I think that's part of the problem we have with these long lasting contaminants is that the human attention spans are too short for the twenty five thousand twenty four thousand half life of something like plutonium so if the Crooked Tree in the swamp shows how radiation predated Chernobyl in the Pripet marshes the red forest shows how radiation events continued long after and this ongoing quality really plagued Soviet leaders in the nineteen late 1980s and early 1990s as much as they tried they could not close the chapter on Chernobyl in 1990 admitting that the biological load was too much leaders in Ukraine and Belarus resolved to move 200 thousand more people especially from that second Chernobyl zone around the you know in the Mogilev in southern PA Larousse but before these new round of evacuations got underway the soviet union fell apart and there was no longer any money or any political will to move people and at that point the UN agencies came in and started sort of managing the Chernobyl disaster and making the sort of assessments about what was going on there first the World Health Organization was invited in to have an independent assessment by experts they sent in three physicists and in ten days they said there's no problem here you could double or triple the doses that was the World Health Organization in 1989 no one believed them what can three scientists do in ten days so then the Soviets asked the Moscow leaders asked the International Atomic Energy Agency to come in and they came in and did a longer study for 18 months 200 scientists came and made these quick short trips and they said the same thing we see no health problems you could double or triple the dose and you certainly don't need to move these 200,000 people they can stay where they are and they how could they make those statements they were no sort of basing it off of the chernobyl of the Hiroshima's studies that the Americans had financed since 1950 and they said you know if you look at Chernobyl and you look at Hiroshima the doses and Hiroshima were so much higher these doses in Chernobyl should be fine but what they didn't take into account was that you know Hiroshi mo was like was counted as like one big x-ray the the doses were calculated as doses that persisted for less than a second Chernobyl is a very different nuclear event people got not one high one big x-ray one high dose but chronic low doses over time it wasn't 1x dose like a repent like an x-ray it was doses that they were taking through mostly ingesting radioactivity in their food and in dust particles in the air so they had radioactivity in their bodies so what a lot of scientists had said since Chernobyl occurred is what we need is we don't know anything about chronic low doses of radioactivity we need to take Chernobyl unfortunate accident and emit and use it as an opportunity and do a long-term epidemiological health study on a large scale like the Hiroshima's studies and then we'll know and scientists were calling from it from 1986 to this present day scientists have been calling for that study and that's the one thing that did not happen in large part because the the UN consultants said there's no need either to move those 200,000 people and there's no need to do a study you're not going to find anything so we don't have that study we don't really know at this point meanwhile the economic crisis deepened in Ukraine and Belarus and people who had received subsidies and medical monitoring those services went away and in the new neoliberal orientation in the post Soviet Union people were basically abandoned to their own fates on contaminated ground and I think we see this globally in many ways as more and more people live in environments saturated with toxins risk has been privatized the constriction of the social welfare state and the planet in a state of ecological crisis is a correlation whether there is a causation between those two factors is something I think we should not leave to scientists alone to decide I think humanists should get involved in that debate so as commentators in the West announced the end of history the 1990s the people in Chernobyl contaminated ground were left to carry on alone and they eat what they produced having few other options and there are a few doctors to monitor their health to see what effects there were if any in one of the few studies of Chernobyl birth defects Vladimir Vitter lucky at the University of South Alabama found six times more neuro to birth defects and Assefa Lee babies born without brains and spina bifida among these people who lived about two hundred you know kilometers from the Chernobyl zone six times higher than the European norm you also found cesium radioactive cesium in the bodies of the mothers and the parents now this jump in birth defects could be from Chernobyl radio radioactive contaminants it could be from Chernobyl contaminants and nitrates that were put you know spread liberally around after the accident to try to soak up to fertilize the soils it could be from Chernobyl radioactivity and preacher noble radioactivity that was already existed in that swamp my tour through the Pripet marshes shows that these areas that these scientists are working in and studying their living laboratories are charred with the remnants pitted with deposits of spent ammunition heavy metals chemical toxins and radioactive waste distributed at a frenetic pace in the 20th century and I think that's part of the problem why we don't have many studies is that the the scientists sort of throw up their hands and can't deal with the complexities of these layered toxic layers on the landscape so you might respond to this information by by feeling empathy for the people out there live in Ukraine a discrete part of the world over there and that's how I was trained to think of history as something that plays out largely inside national borders except now we have an awareness of the planetary scale of human actions a cognizance that diminishes the importance of of national boundaries those that events out there make it home and let me tell you what I mean by that as I worked I traveled a lot through northern Ukraine and southern ble in one summer and I think this 2016 I noticed there was just hundreds of berry pickers going through the forest this is about 150 kilometers from the Chernobyl site and they were mostly women and children picked berries and then they would be met on the roads a forested roads by these buyers who had vans and they would buy these berries right from the Pickers as they came out of the forest and I asked the Pickers I said what we buy about each individually by about two tonnes a day so my research assistant and I we decided to go undercover berry picking and then Here I am selling hopefully selling my berries to the buyer on the road and then we follow the the buyers to the warehouse where they're you know reselling these berries and and there was this nice lady at the warehouse he was buying berries but before she bought the berries she measured them for radioactivity when I said you know how many of these berries are radioactive and she said all the berries are radioactive but some are really radioactive I said how worried if she goes like 3,000 she didn't know the measurement but it was 3,000 beccarose a kilogram that's a lot that's a lot so we stood around and and she bought our berries and and our berries were under the permissible limit which is 450 beccarose a kilogram but I noticed that she you know that she bought all the berries the the dirtier berries went over here and the cleaner berries went over there and I said why are you buying the dirty berries you can't use them they're above the permissible levels well it was just like the sausage you just mix the clean ones and the dirty ones I mean cleaner they're all radioactive cleaner and the dirtier and you get to the average now after 2014 Ukraine joined the European Union Association and they have the right to sell their agricultural produce to Pollan and that's what caused this big uptick an industrial scale picking a bit wild organic berries in the deep yet marshes was to sell them to pole and where they enter the EU markets now you're probably thinking oh shoot I had my vacation in Europe last summer I eat really delicious while organic berries but don't worry for those of you who didn't have your European vacation last summer why I was you know checking through the homeland security records and I found that there was a report about a truck crossing from Canada into the United States and inside the truck was a radiating mass and the border security guards looked in the truck and no problem just berries from Ukraine and I so I called up the guy who wrote the report I said well what did you do with those berries he goes well I'm within the permissible limits of permissible limits for the United States is 1250 becquerels a kilogram so we let him go in it so now those berries are a little closer to your breakfast please and I I think that that's something that we we need to take into consideration now I mean I'm not trying to get you alarmed if you ask a specialist in health physics or radiation medicine they'll tell you that those that not to worry that since the period of global testing all humans have radioactivity in their bodies and I think this point underlines what I found that the Chernobyl accident serves as only an exclamation point in a chain of toxic exposures that have remastered landscapes societies politics and bodies our bodies describing Chernobyl as an accident is a broom to sweep away this larger story around the Chernobyl accident which is more important I think one reason as I said there's so little research on Chernobyl is the complexity and the other reason I think for the paucity of research on Chernobyl health effects is that I found working through five UN agency archives is that UN agents were colluding with Moscow leaders to make this Chernobyl public health story go away and I was like wow I know and I found them like they had biopsies of kids with cancers and they took them back to University of New Mexico checked him out yes they were really where cancer and what did that scientists do he forgot about that evidence and in his report he said there were just anecdotal rumors of pediatric thyroid cancer I found you know they took all this you know really good material that the Belarusian scientists had gathered case control studies and they looked at nago so this is just Soviet hogwash these Soviets they have bad politics bad economics bad science and tossed it out now why would they do that why does the UN you know what what pony did they have in that race when I found looking at the politics of the UN is that the UN serves their client states and their biggest clients are the big nuclear powers the US France Great Britain and Russia these countries were in the 1990s on the line for billions of dollars in liability as the record of the production and testing of nuclear weapons was Declassified from archives at the end of the Cold War the Americans were the biggest transgressors Americans had blown up bombs in the Marshall Islands and blown up bombs most countries blew up bombs in their colonial peripheries the Americans did that in the Marshall Islands but they also blew up bombs right in the continental United States and Nevada and you hear a lot about Nevada and Utah and Idaho down winders but if you look at the the the maps that were reconstructed in 1990s of Nevada fall out there are hotspots in Minnesota and Rochester and Tennessee that were as hot is at Ground Zero and Nevada that was that bomb fallout went sky-high and he traveled really quickly with the trade winds and came down with the precipitation mostly in the agricultural Midwest let's look at let's compare curious of one isotope alone radioactive iodine which is a fairly print issue aside a radioactive isotope that goes to human thyroids cause thyroid disease thyroid cancer and a host of other endocrine problems Chernobyl emitted 45 million Curie's of radioactive iodine just testing from the Soviets and Americans alone in the 1960s before the test ban treaty in 1963 20 billion Curie's again that scale is so big we have trouble imagining it but the global fallout from nuclear testing mostly spread in the northern hemisphere and in the same decades what we see are some really troubling health statistics again in the northern hemisphere since the 1950 one we've seen cancer rates climb steadily thyroid cancer is still growing cancer rates for children cancer and children in the 1930s used to be a medical rarity but scientists would come running to see kid with leukemia because it was so rare now bald kids undergoing your advertising chemotherapies on the buses that I ride in Boston and DC cancer is among people born after 1952 are still on the rise here's an interesting statistic again only in the northern hemisphere we find that male sperm counts since 1945 have dropped in half now these diminished human health indicators have become a background against which Chernobyl statistics were measured we have what scientists call a shifting background syndrome in other words the scale of possible damage from global testing that released at least 20 billion Curie's of radioactive iodine is to oversized for us to even see it's a huge fact saturating our daily existence so I just want you to take one last look at this this girl here with blue lips from eating berries as she picks and I hope you see how she is also a nuclear waste worker like these soldiers that she's there to make a living off the toxic debt richest left behind a territory that was abandoned by others but maybe there's also another way to think about this those berries and later they go back to get cranberries in August and mushrooms in the fall they're doing the work of what an army of Soviet cleanup workers could not do and and tons of chemicals couldn't do they're taking up from the soils radioactive contaminants they do it really efficiently and really well so what if we've rather than deny that these problems exist rather than forget that this this radioactivity still is in those soils and is circulating the globe and food products why don't we just look at it with our eyes wide open and and once we do that we can start to come up with solutions for instance we could think of paying her that twenty five dollars that she makes a day picking blueberries and then take the blueberries and deposit them in a radioactive waste dump that's lined and protected and let those berries decay for the three hundred and twenty years they need they get rid of the strontium and cesium that's in it and the tourists that love to go to the Chernobyl zone I pay a lot of money to go to Chernobyl zone they would probably pay to pick radioactive berries and take a selfie the radioactive berry and then they could deposit them in a radioactive waste dump I think what I'm trying to say is that just taking without denial is just taking a look at this run with our eyes wide open I think we can start to picture a brave new world thank you [Applause] [Applause] [Music] some cardiac yeah they were doing autopsies in the 80s and and those are many of the records I found and and you know what they would find is you know organs with you know about 12 different radioactive isotopes in them depending on what the organ was and the function you know the minerals the reader active of isotopes mimic minerals that the body needs to function and so if it's something like radioactive cesium it goes to the flesh radioactive plutonium or strontium goes to bone marrow others other dusts and particles lodged in their lungs lots goes into through the digestive tract so yeah they were finding as they say about 12:2 and so those autopsies were that was part of the information that was forwarded on to the UN this one KGB general he had a clinic and goes my clinic is you know yet top secret classification so he was one of the rare Soviet doctors who could see how get to know how much radioactivity that the patients had been exposed to and you also had all the latest state-of-the-art equipment he wrote a letter to the Communist Party leadership in 1990 saying you know you need to extend the zone of alienation 120 kilometers from 30 to 120 that would have eclipsed to Kiev where he was living he goes this stuff is so you know like what I'm seeing in my clinic is that people who were functionally healthy become sort of invalids in no time with this kind of radioactivity in their bodies thank you yeah sir yeah you know we often are faced with this so the question is you know what now that we're facing this climate change problem you know what do we do between the small risk of a big blow up like this and you know the certain risk of climate change and I think what we're often presented with is this choice between carbon and nuclear and I think that's kind of a false choice right there's a lot there's a whole rainbow of alternative energy options and and certainly we can have nuclear in the mix and and the nuclear power plants that are going now probably should as long as they're safe and we have a big problem with aging nuclear power plants along our coasts with rising water you know so we have to think about that but if you're if we're gonna solve this climate problem we need to solve it today or this week or this month and so we could put solar panels on this roof within a week if we wanted to build a nuclear power plant in the parking lot that would take you take about five ten years to get you guys to agree to it if that ever happened and then I take another 15 years to build it and so just in terms of timing nuclear we would need 12,000 to replace fossil fuels we need 12,000 new nuclear power plants on the globe we have 400 today that's a big scale-up and we just don't have the time on top of that most nations are deciding that these building these new nuclear power plants it's too expensive it's about 50 percent higher in terms of you know cost in terms of the electricity produced then then the renewables so you know solar and wind is are great options they're affordable they can they need to be plugged in depending on you know it's not one of one-size-fits-all modernist solution I mean what we want is like the the Costco solution you know everybody gets the same thing but what we need to do is think about local climates local environments and that's a little bit more complicated but a far more efficient and then yeah nuclear there's this sort of bridge what happens when the Sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow or the ties aren't working then nuclear could be a great bridge the the nuclear engineers at MIT think like for about five to ten percent of the power as a bridge so it could be part of this portfolio but we we do need to think more creatively and think outside of this false choice between fossil fuels and nuclear we're being sold that false choice I don't know why and I well actually I think I do know why because as long as a corporation can can meter it you know dispersed economically dispersed sources of energy where you can have an you know with solar panels and and the farmers can have the wind turbines spreads out the profits for making producing that energy and corporations don't want to share the profits but I think we should think about what it means to democratize energy with that help in democratizing other features of our economic and political systems I have a feeling it would go a long way yeah it's quite clear you can see 1986 right there it's really pretty amazing yeah the biologists I worked with did that and what do you mean like yeah that's what's happening they're taking it up and so as they grow they grow more slowly with radioactivity these are birch so they know these are pine but yeah they've been working a fair amount with with how that is one one set of sampling I wish I had done and I only thought of it later after I finished publishing this book and worked with micro biologists is I wish I'd done a core sample of some of the outhouses in the abandoned territories and then you could see you know whether there was much mutations in the microbial of the feces of the humans and I think that would be sort of a good biomarker so if anybody wants to go do that please [Music] Deb can we eat some food and there's food and drinks on the lobby for exception and please let's thank dr. Brown again [Applause]
