Manual for Survival. A Chernobyl Guide to the Future - book review

Click here to access the review by Elaine Graham-Leigh of Manual for Survival. A Chernobyl Guide to the Future authored by Kate Brown posted on Counterfire.

Because of the wide disparity in the reporting of deaths and health problems caused by the 1986 disaster to a nuclear plant in Chernobyl, a city located in Ukraine on the border with Belarus, and other accidents to nuclear facilities, the book's author examines the research done by these disparate sources. She finds considerable bias among official sources in numerous countries that is causing the under-reporting of health problems and fatalities due to the fundamental fact that the material necessary for nuclear weapons are produced in these plants, and other contaminating, largely economic factors. The reviewer, Graham-Leigh, writes:

Remarkably, although it has been more than thirty years since Chernobyl, the mainstream position is still that, aside from the 54 confirmed fatalities, ‘the final death toll will never be known’. We have apparently learnt so little from Chernobyl that scientists managing the aftermath of the Fukushima accident in 2011 were still saying that ‘they had no certain knowledge of the effects of low-dose exposures to radiation in human beings’, as if such a thing had never happened before. Kate Brown’s measured and well-informed study is an attempt to provide some of that missing certainty.