Download Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters AudioBook Free
In Plutopia, Kate Dark brown draws on official records and dozens of interviews to share with the extraordinary tales of Richland, Washington, and Ozersk, Russia - the first two towns on earth to create plutonium. To contain secrets, American and Soviet leaders created plutopias - areas of nuclear families living in highly subsidized, limited-access atomic towns. Fully utilized and medically supervised, the residents of Richland and Ozersk appreciated all the pleasures of consumer modern culture while near by, migrants, prisoners, and soldiers were restricted from plutopia - they lived in momentary "staging grounds" and often performed the most dangerous work at the plant. Brown shows that the crops' segregation of permanent and temporary workers and of nuclear and non-nuclear zones created a bubble of immunity where dumps and mishaps were glossed over and seed managers openly embezzled and polluted. In four decades the Hanford seed near Richland and the Maiak seed near Ozersk each released at least 200 million curies of radioactive isotopes into the surrounding environment. An untold and profoundly important piece of Cold War background, Plutopia invites listeners to consider the nuclear footprint remaining by the hands competition and the substantial price of spending money on it.
