Chernobyl Guide News Today

The world’s two worst nuclear accidents, in Ukraine and Japan, along with the human exclusion zones around them, are informing scientists about radiation effects, and how ecosystems evolve with less pressure from people.

Kate Brown is the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of several prize-winning histories, including <i>Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters</i> (Oxford 2013). Her latest book <i>Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future</i> (Norton 2019), translated into six languages, won the Marshall Shulman and Reginald Ze...

Kate Brown is a professor of science, technology and society at MIT. She is the author of “Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future.”

In 1624, English poet John Donne penned his famous poem ‘No Man Is an Island’, sublimely evoking the reality of human unity: ‘Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.’ Therefore, he concluded his poem, ‘never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.’ Robert j. Burrowes This report does two things. First, in the hope of generating greater consideration of the human condition and the state of the planet, I have presented in straightforward la...