8 Quotes by Andrew Leatherbarrow

During the first few minutes of the accident, more than 100 alarms went off, and there was no system for suppressing the unimportant signals so that operators could concentrate on the significant alarms.

For those first months, futile attempts to avoid a mass panic took precedent over people’s lives. As.

Radiation had made any ordinary course of action impossible, pushing them to acknowledge that the use of even one nuclear bomb – let alone the 65,000 in existence in 1986 – was unconscionable. Five.

Those whose bodies were recovered are buried in welded zinc coffins, to prevent their radioactive remains from contaminating the soil. Even.

NASA scientists calculated in 2013 that nuclear power has actually prevented an average of 1.84 million air pollution-related deaths and 64 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions that would have resulted from fossil fuel burning between 1971 and 2009.68.

Watch and clock faces, fingernails, military instrument panels, gun sights and even children’s toys glowed with radium, hand-painted in factories by young women working for the United States Radium Corporation. The unsuspecting artisans would lick their brushes – ingesting radium particles each time – to keep the tips pointed during the precision work, but years later their teeth and skulls began to disintegrate.

Radiation’s most well-known pioneering researcher, Marie Curie, died in 1934 from aplastic anaemia brought on by her decades of unprotected exposure to the faint, glowing substances in her pockets and desk drawers.

Soldiers handling reactor graphite by hand shows how uninformed people were in the early days of the clean-up operation.