and sullied them in ways that we have yet to fully digest and i learned as i started this story that both both places that the hand for plant eastern washington in the my plant in siberia emitted about three hundred fifty million curius of radioactivity into the environment you know that's just like a lot of radioactivity a lot of destructive energy and i wondered about that as i started the project like how that happened you know these aren't small bomb labs these are big factories and tens of thousands of workers went through them of the four decades of production of plutonium and look why don't you say anything you know here they are these workers they're going to work on the watch and you know radioactive emissions go up the stacks and into the river and into the ground and these are environments in which they lived where their families lived and all i could find is like a couple of k g b agents who spoke up in one thousand sixty seven and said if we wait a minute there's some something awful is going on here everybody else kept silent and i couldn't really figure out what that was about and as i started work on this book i realized that both of these  had one feature and well many features in common but one specific feature is that they both had these limited access cities where the plant workers lived and and i found that all these big important generals and gen who were building the world's first nuclear reactors were also you know they were interested in of course and in reactors and processing plants but they also spent a lot of time in the correspondence talking about frozen chickens softball games and bus services and i realize that the focus was on what this word i created making pluto be a nice these are plutonium utopias and if they could have these these beautiful  towns where working class people were paid and lived like their professional class bosses that bought a great deal of peachy tism and loyalty submission and silence and so so that was  solution to making food tony m was to employ the nuclear family and put them in these atomic cities and that's how i think that these disasters could occur because you know big part of these the hanford plant the disaster is there were a lot of big accidents and the same thing in the russian plant they just did this as part of the daily operating order was to spill these hundreds of millions of curious into the environment these were disasters by one for building plutonium plane is put it someplace where there's a lot of water and secondly put in a place where there's not a lot of people so these were sparsely populated territories with mostly farmers living around them and the farmers would you know in eastern washington and in siberia would tell me the same stories about their family's health problems and they would talk about this whole ok of health problems that they had and cancers and birth defects but also auto immune disorders and the current problems digestive problems that ran through their families this guy bailey was one of my informants and he told me the crazy crazy stories and i just thought you know he's a conspiracy theorist he's listening to too much midnight radio but as i worked my way through the archives over about six years everything tom told me panned out in the archives and has a family riddled with cancers and time with children is eighteen and he was infertile and he introduced me to this woman who kept sort of a map about all the farmers in the area around them and i had a grad student put the map and run it on google maps and  is what you know which is this is death or illness and you can see over there the chemical processing area that's the columbia river going right down there on the other side is this up slope and so the winds from the stacks would hit that hillside and i showed it t farmers in eastern washington they said yeah that's the death mile we've known about that forever and then so very of the similar stories of people telling me about their their health records  so you know i i wrote about that problem and i wrote about the phenomenon but i couldn't really get too many health records because these were military sites and they were behind cycling fencing and and i found especially in the american case that the people who ran hanford weren't terribly curious about what was going on outside of the nuclear reservation so they didn't really monitor they didn't inquire how people were fairing who were farming these fields right downwind from the plant so i thought period you won't find anything but i knew these ladies i'd worked there before and i knew they didn't like to get off their stools so i said well why don't i just go over here and look at the finding aids and see what i find and it didn't take much of a researcher in a couple of seconds i found whole document collections and titled the medical consequences of the chernobyl disaster and sort of a klondike of records and i sat down and i'm going to be at this three years reading  records and i realized that these archivist weren't trying to lie to me that it's just that nobody had ever asked for them before an archivist really read files they just pull files a historian hadn't come in and asked for those records they presume they didn't exist and i went out and i worked in twenty seven archives for this project we had a couple of research assistants and we started at the federal level we were down to the state and the county level and we got down to the county hospital records and  it was a sort of colossal amount of documentation and so i'll give you a little bit of a rundown of what i found but but but the short answer is that most of what we've been told and led to believe about chernobyl is incorrect over or incomplete or just plain wrong so for instance moscow leaders and here's what the issues with the original book look like now they changed the  cover moscow leaders said that the disaster was safely contained within charitable the zone of alienation that's a thirty kilometer circle that was created right after the accident and depopulated within a couple of weeks but i found records that pointed to a deliberate contamination outside the zone a few days after the accident a storm front was building up and powerful winds were blowing from chernobyl to the north east and they were in a rural area rather than in big cities the only problem is that they didn't tell anyone and deliver this that they had done that not even the bill of a communist party leader two hundred thousand people lived in that territory for middle and the pilot sort of skipped over golmaal and let it rain just past global to the north east and you see these angry hot red spots that are almost as radioactive as right around the plant now that's a second  they told people that they tested the food and they found it was safe working in the ministry of agriculture records i found vectors of contaminated food spreading especially where humans congregated animals grazed under these clouds and they got heavily contaminated and soviet soldiers went in they confiscated these animals fifty thousand of them and they slaughtered them and they probably should have taken those bodies and buried them inside the church noble zone as radioactive waste but they couldn't stand to do that in the soviet union was a hungry country was a poor country so they wrote manuals that's why i called this book manual for survival i came across a lot of manuals if you're going to farm this is how you farm in radioactive conditions if you're going to produce milk this is how you filter the radioactivity out of milk hopefully and so i found a manual for butchers this is what you do with the radioactive me you take the highest level of radioactive meat and you see the stuff in in a freezer and you wait for it to slowly decay and the medium and low levels of radioactive meat you mix with clean me and you make sausage and you don't you label it as you normally would it says in the directions and you distribute it across the great soviet union but please don't send any to moscow and better just get leningrad to now that quickly from the goal meet factory there was letters going out saying we need more freezer we need more freezers they had so much high level radioactive me and they keep asking for freezers and they don't get any freezers so finally they find a train car that's refrigerated and they of six tons of radioactive meat in the train car and they sent it to baku they took out their geiger counters and they said we don't want this to me and they sent it to armenia and armenia sent it to police the and for four years this car stuffed with radioactive meat circled the western half of the soviet union until finally the k us i find that most of the food sources of people a and drink were contaminated three quarters of milk was over permissible levels they raised the principle levels for the emergency even with those higher levels three quarters of the milk was over miscible levels twenty two percent of mothers milk was over permissible levels and i think we're talking about a new era in human history when we have permissible levels for mother's milk hundred eight a quarter of milk was all still too hot to drink and of fifty nine wild boars samples forty seven were above permissible levels all mushrooms were in that category i could also see from the radiation map and this is the map later on about eighty nine that the map made no sense in that hot spots of health problems occurred not just in the red zones on the map but in places where it was low levels of radiation where no one expected to see any problems in one case i found that there were two hundred liquidators and liquidators were chernobyl people who were given credited from the plant and these were workers women workers for the most part and i know i was used to thinking of liquidators as a fireman who rushed at me you know you know shoulders first and fatah's radioactive flames not will workers fifty miles away and pretty clean town i couldn't figure out what had happened so i finally just got in the car and i drove there and i wanted to go find these workers and i first i talked to the management and the management said yeah we had a this woman from the factory line soon as we're out of hearing of the of the bosses she said you know i came here i was twenty one with my friend and within eighteen months after nine hundred eighty six my friend had died of leukemia and went on these women in there was ten left from this list of two hundred and they said they found themselves on the list and they said oh there was maria she died and and there was you know all about yeah she had a problem and she had to be invalid it out and so ten left in adjourns out that what they are are doing to get this dose was just cleaning and sorting dirty will and so every time they picked up a bale of dirty wool they were hugging something that had three point two million rads of radioactivity coming from and that's like hugging an x ray machine while it's turned on doing it over and over all day long these women were pretty interesting they they had no more than a high school degree yet i was impressed by their knowledge of radio biology they pointed to parts of their bodies that a to or diseased and they related to me which isotopes that lodged there and i found that their knowledge of radio biology was pretty good  they knew where the factories radioactive waste water went into the municipal drinking reservoir i had asked the management about it they had no memory of it but these women knew it quite well and they were right ferret out from the archives now officially soviet leaders said they gave medical exams to nine hundred thousand people after the accident and they found no change in health status officially basco says in the u says the day that three hundred people were hospitalized from after the accident and these were firemen and nuclear cleanup workers i counted in the ministry of health records forty thousand people hospitalized in the summer after the accident because of their children bill exposures a quarter of whom were children the records show that immediately after the accident doctors treated sick children and adults there recorded an increase in thyroid problems complications birth birth defects and infant mortality children and pregnant women were especially hard hit in one thousand nine hundred eighty seven half of the children who they inspected had enlarged thyroids ten percent had a four times more than the year before and a year later thirty percent had anemia hard to doubled perinatal death death within twenty eight days of birth doubled and eighty seven tripled in eighty eight among adults there were cases increased frequencies of heart disease thyroid disease g i tract problems cataracts liver blood disease all of these numbers are usually doubled or tripled depending on the county between  those fifteen hundred fifty one kids eleven hundred thirty two had one chronic disease or another around about eighty percent in most of these regions kids that had some chronic disease after the accident here's another one this is the rates simple questions of fatalities is pretty hard to answer the u n web site say that between thirty three and fifty four people died from the accident greenpeace projected that nine hundred thousand people would eventually die from the acts and so we have a big difference between thirty three and one hundred thousand in ukraine alone i found that the ukrainian government has given compensation to thirty five thousand people whose spouses have died from a chernobyl related illness that's the minimum number that just encountered people who are old enough to marry people who were married the ukraine grainy officially the government counted on hundred fifty thousand people have died so far from the accident and that's just in ukraine far more radioactivity landed in once that story went public soviet international experts in radiation medicine scoffed at the reports of a wide scale health problems they thought that's impossible you know these doses that these people are getting are far too low and we know that because we have the hiroshima and nagasaki studies and those that lifespan study produced charts like this and even if you're not a scientist you might agree with me that this chart doesn't have a lot in  the way of variables but what it does is it says if you get a certain amount of sieverts this is your chance of getting an extra chance of getting cancer from this kind of dose and from these charts the international scientists didn't even really need to go to the zone they can say you know quite safely according to their medicine and to their science that there would be no detectable health effects from chernobyl level doses instead they said that people might be sick bed that's because they have poor diet they drink they smoke and they're stressed out because of their they're anxious that they're getting something from chernobyl they have what they called radio phobia now facing angry crowds soviet officials didn't know what to do that all these people who are striking protesting in the streets in one thousand nine hundred nine and so they asked the international atomic energy agency in one thousand nine hundred eighty nine to come in and do an independent assessment and you know these foreign experts were going to come in and tell us what was really wrong and so about two hundred international atomic energy agency consultants came in and they worked for about eighteen months and he looked at about twelve hundred people and  they said the same thing that the soviet government at the doses are too low these we found a lot of extra illness in these areas but it can't be from chernobyl now i work to sort out this confusing record who was right there really a public health disaster among four hundred four million people that we don't really know anything about how could a story of that scale have slipped beneath the radar for thirty years the textur records revealed a lot of contradictions and disagreements and conflicting measurements plus some strange occurrences i noticed that there was three computers and different institutes in the soviet union that held the really valuable  measurements of the doses that people were getting right after the accidents and i looked for those records but i found that all three of those computers had had their hard drive stolen and all the floppy to with them right in one thousand nine hundred when these international experts were coming in and i see correspondents in the k g b saying we have to make sure that those capitalists don't get our valuable scientific data so i'm pretty sure the  b took those records and did something with them and we haven't yet found them i also found that soviet officials falsified accounts while k g b agents planted fake news in the media and  i know that when i was researching the story the wiki leaks and problems with the two thousand and sixteen elections were going on in this country and i couldn't help that you know being influenced by that night i started to worry that people had planted things in the archives you know way back thirty years ago that i was supposed to find now and that this is you know worried archives law so how do i get around that how do i cross check my sources and so i try to figure out how do i do seventeen rivers transect this territory and there's hundreds of lakes and streams and for two months out of the year when it floods traditionally there is villages in there the villages of be cut off from the rest of civilization because of so be so much water hundred sixty is the soviet dried up the swamp parts of it in order for have more place for fields to grow crops and also to have this what was going to be europe's largest nuclear power reactor with ten reactors at this plant and that's th will plant with the water all around it and there was just one part of the swamp that was still really swampy and that's on the bill russian side it's called the omani swamp and i asked a forester to take me in and the reason this swap is still swampy is because in one thousand sixty one the soviets made an air force bombing range there and they didn't need it to be dried up to bomb it and so the force it took me and we you know we looked at we saw a lot of ordinance that was just sitting there and there was this big tower that the generals used to stand and watch the flight path of the pilots and like land at the tower and took a picture and there was a couple of villages that have been evacuated when they created the bombing range and the only thing left of the villages were graveyards so he showed me some graveyards and standing around and i see this one it's this picture is that they're not it's pretty bright in here but i see this bomb crater and these pine trees growing out of the  crater and i was looking at the pine trees and i looked a little closer and i see this one pine tree looks really funny you know pine needles are supposed to grow straight there are they all pine needles agreed to grow in the right direction at the right time  and this this pine needle they didn't get it you know you can see it sort of curly round and biologist would call that sort of a disorderly pine needles that they were and they knew that pint lots of things can cause mutations in pine trees but photograph of the twisty pine needle in my file that i had about rumors of testing of small strategic nuclear weapons in that bombing range in the one nine hundred sixty s after the soviet union collapsed some big leaders talked about that i couldn't get into the you know into moscow into the records of nuclear testing because that's off limits to researchers and and that's the nature of power is that if you know somebody decides they want part of history to disappear they can as that history is constitute an archive but i had other evidence and one was in this published book that was called the global fallout of cesium one thirty seven pretty boring title but i course read it with great fascination and in the one nine hundred sixty s this team of researchers when around the pre taped marshes especially where that bombing range was and they tested everything the soil of vegetables fruits and from the blueberry bushes water and the bodies of villagers and they produced this map that looks and it's this map was produced in one thousand nine hundred five five years before they even started to build the chernobyl plant but it sure looks a lot like later radiation from the chernobyl accident and what these researchers were were special so nuclear emergencies in the soviet union like if these guys showed up in your backyard you should just walk out your front door and never return because they showed up like the grim reaper wherever there was a nuclear emergency and so they did this for years studying the prepaid marshes in the one nine hundred sixty s and produces a map so we're generally looking at this map i realize that radioactive contamination predated that even building of the chernobyl plant and that to me was a pretty disturbing realisation and i thought that thinking about that  maybe we should bird were doing something wrong by calling chernobyl an accident because when you call something an accident it implies that there is a beginning a middle and an end and that with that end there's some closure but if you think about different and slippery topic to write about take time for instance scientists have been saying for a hundred years that time is a human construct that time the way we constitute tipped off in seconds is really quite right that time expands and contracts in unpredictable ways and the general story sort of validates that and that you know there was a big forest let me get to that forest this is called the red forest and they called the red force because it took the hardest hit of radioactivity after the accident and the pine trees which are very vulnerable to radioactivity they died they turned red and died and then came in and they chopped down the the pine trees and the pine trees fell over twenty five years later when some biologists showed up in the red for us they found that those pine trees are still sitting there they hadn't decompose they should have turned to dust in about ten years but they couldn't turn to dust because there wasn't enough microbes and bugs to do the work of decomposition so for a historian that was really sort of striking that you know of rumplestiltskin to falling asleep with woken up twenty five years later he would have known how much time had passed there were stories i was trying to freeze frame the past in order to get a fix on it and here i was finally time and frozen i was not filled with joy but with dread at experiencing that contracting so these problems of time lead me to continue to search for other ways other than tax to try to understand this accident so i asked these two biologists to move so of the only two biologists i could find to work consistently in the zone they've been going there since two thousand they were every june and every september and i asked if i could join them there are research trips to try to figure out if i could learn more about radio college and they were generous enough to take me along on their trips and i learned a lot from the what you most often hear like if you're if you're a fan of nat geo specials is that the  thriving it's filled with animals that animals prefer radiation to humans and you know but i don't find that to be the case in fact here we have a poor b b c reporter told to go get that story the charitable zone is thriving story and she can't find any animals to photograph in while but that's ok because they have some penned up animals and you can just take a picture of it and then you can that can appear in your special story right but as  we worked our way through this is what i i found was all kinds of interesting things that these biologists taught me what they found is that the chernobyl zone is not sort of uniformly radioactive area that radioactivity differs in four orders of magnitude and in the really hot spots they found that insects and especially pollinators completely disappeared without pollinators the fruit the blossoms on the fruit trees weren't pollinated and so there was less fruit with less fruit there are fewer fruit of or so they found sixty percent depression in the populations of birds in these hot areas without seeds to be spread around so they found all of three fruit trees had seeded after one thousand nine hundred eighty six so what they were describing was a whole cascade of extinction that was occurring in these areas every rock we turned over m said we find damage in two thousand and seventeen i was with them and we went into the red forest and i have been hoping when i work with them that i would avoid having to go into the red forest it's it's still the most radioactive place in the chernobyl area but as i agree to do what they are doing so off i went and read forest is pretty ugly even today here's some pine trees down there they're trying to be pine trees but they're bushes they're pine bushes because they are have these mutations and they get confused this pine tree was planted to grow bored straight to make lumber for houses but it's not bored straight sleep so i'd expect it about fifty micro sieverts an hour that's it's already  counter going off like this and he said oh yeah last well there was a forest fire in the red forest and all the radioactivity that was stored in the leaf litter and enough in the trees and it would wind up eyes and created a nuclear event that i checked the media nobody really covered the story here is a very major nuclear event the international atomic energy agency would have ranked at a level five emergency but no one covered  it and i think that's a problem as long radioactive half lives the same with other chemical toxins that the scale the time scales stretched beyond the capacity of social memory and human attention if the tree in the swamp shows us how radioactivity pre dated journal this forest fire in two thousand and seventeen shows how it kept going and k g b agents reported dozens of accidents in ukraine at nuclear power reactors in the one nine after nine hundred eighty six the same k g b agents also fretted up about how to clean up nuclear accidents and clean up nuclear accidents is also environmentally environmentally toxins they poured having metals on the burning reactor that went up in plague nitrogen fertilizer the last of pesticides to deal with struggling crops they used chemical agents to spray down roads and buildings and to try to remove the radioactivity from them and unfortunately these engineered solutions to disaster mostly failed despite on fire in efforts to cleanse the landscape of radioactive isotopes by nine hundred ninety soviet leaders had to sort of cry uncle and say we can't handle this they had to admit that the biological was too much that people in these territories were getting too much radioactivity mostly in their food supplies so they said in one thousand and they're go resettle to two hundred thousand more people one hundred twenty thousand had originally been resettled but before these new rounds of resettlement could occur the soviet union collapsed and there was no money or political will to move anybody and just as that happened u n agencies came in to manage the disaster and they did the studies when i was just talking about and they said there was no problem these people are five we can't we looked we did a big study h study we can find any sign of disease and we won't find any in the future so there's no reason to move these people and they were also trying to raise money at the u n for a big long term epidemiological study of the chernobyl health effects sa opinion makers said no that's not necessary please don't fund in each or noble programs if you want to give money to east you're fine but not for chernobyl programs because it's not needed it's not necessary  now meanwhile these same u n researchers had created a study designed to find catastrophic results and they had found catastrophic results they found a big cancer epidemic among children and they were actually given all these and they didn't believe that these soviet doctors crappy doctors could really diagnosed diary cancer among children so they brought the thoughts of biopsies all one guy brought home to new mexico the biopsies checked out they were indeed thyroid cancer some rumors of iraq as among kids but those rumors turn out to be anecdotal so with that nothing happened there was no study and these people didn't get moved and as a pos fate uncontaminated ground and we see this globally as more and more people live in environments saturated with toxins risk has been privatized now the constriction of the social welfare state and the planet in a state of ecological stress is correlation whether there is a connection i think is something that we should not leave to scientists alone to decide that we should get involved in those issues now as scientists in the west announced the end of history in the one nine hundred ninety s the people in chernobyl continued ground were left to carry on alone they ate what they produced having few other options and one of the few studies of birth defects a researcher in northern ukraine led him over to lekki found six times more neuro to birth defects than the european norm in that northern region of ukraine right where that swamp was where i was there with the forester now that jump in birth defects could be and  plutonium plant was i don't know if you're aware but in eastern washington to this right now since two thousand and ten there has been this huge spike in babies born with and insufferably especially in the counties surrounding the hanford plant now the washington state health department did a study they spent a year doing a study and they thought maybe radiation was a problem but then they were told by the department of energy that radiation doesn't leave the site that somehow cyclon fencing holds radioactivity inside the nuclear reservation so they said well it can't be from that we don't know what the problem is and they close the case but so these same babies showed up in the chernobyl area and you know and who knows what that jump in birth defects was caused by it could be from chernobyl contamination it could be from chernobyl and nitrates that they poured into the soil to help the crops after the accident it could be from chernobyl and pre nine hundred eighty six china will explosions that were passed down at the genetically to the offspring my tour through the pretty tip marshes showed that these areas that these scientists explored are filled with charred remnants pitted with the deposits of spent a heavy metals and chemical toxins and radioactive waste distributed in a frenetic pace in the course of the twentieth century now you might respond to this information saying well i feel empathy for those people in ukraine those people out there in that other country far away and that's how i was trained to think of history as something that plays out largely within national borders but now that we have an awareness of the planetary scale of human actions a cognisant that cognisance diminishes the importance of national boundaries those events out there make it home and let me tell you what i what i haven't been talking about this i was traveling in northern ukraine a couple of years ago and i see all these people thousands of people collecting berries from the forests and the swamps and they were selling the berries was a big operation they had stayed come out of the forest with their baskets the very thing they'd sell them to these middle women who were on the streets and they would buy bread on the road the and so my research assistant and i we decided to go undercover to very picky probably the most dangerous thing i did my research is food and here i am happily selling my berries and then we  followed the buyers to the warehouse and got to the warehouse and there was this nice lady who was buying all the berries and and she bought our berries and our berries she measured and she measured all the berries that came in for radioactivity and i asked her you know how many of these berries are radioactive and she said that although there is a radioactive but some are really really radioactive three thousand barrels a kilogram and the norm the permissible level in ukraine at the time was four hundred fifty backroads per kilogram so the three thousand so iris were only three fifty and so she bought a very happily but we stood around and i noticed that she bought all the berries the ones that were cleaner and the ones that are over the permissible and there are two different piles them over here and over there and so i said you know i asked the pickers why are they buying all the berries and again it was like stupid american stupid american of course they buy all the berries they buy our dirtier berries  lower prices and then they mix them with the cleaner berries and they get to the norm so now the berries after they're purchased they go to the in two thousand and fourteen ukraine join the european union association so they have the right to ship their agricultural produce to you and they cross the border into the e u twenty thousand tonnes a year and that number grows each year then they the figures go back into that cranberries in august and mushrooms in the fall  and you still probably saying well that bully for the europeans they wake up in the morning they spend extra money and while there again it varies and they get one that's three thousand federals kilogram but i was talking to a guy  homeland nuclear security borland security and he's like yeah we had a truck coming over the border from canada us inside it was a radiating mass you know how those guys talk so really what was it barry's from chernobyl so what did you do ism goes well there within the permissible levels which in the us is twelve fifty girls a kilogram so we let him in so now you all have a problem and you're probably fine if you eat a berry with three thousand because a kilogram and that's what the health physicist would tell you is everybody's got a little bit of manmade radioactivity in their bodies you're fine  but i think this point underlies what i have found that the chernobyl accident serves as only an exclamation point in a chain of toxic exposures that have remaster the landscape and our societies and bodies including our bodies describe in general just as an accident is a broom that sweeps away this larger story around it which is more important and i think one reason there's been so little research on chernobyl health effects is that funding agencies and scientists have thrown up their hands at the complexity of solving of sorting out all these different layers of of toxins that are there in the environment since the  fifty s and i think another reason for the paucity of research i found working through five ewin archives u n agency archives is that un asians work to minimize the story of a public disaster i found the my hiding biopsies burying data slandering and discrediting and trying to fire opposing scientists when you might ask why would they try to do that but why would the u s france russia and in the one nine hundred ninety s these countries were facing big lawsuits from their own legacies of having produced nuclear weapons and tested them  now if you were un or or somebody working for the department of energy and you could say look chernobyl accident world's worst nuclear accident and only thirty three people died then those lawsuits could just disappear and that's indeed exactly what happened those big lawsuits and those deep you know people the marshall islands the americans were the only people the only country in the world that had the t a nuclear test nuclear weapons in the heartland everybody else put their weapons testing places in their colonies australia western australia was hit by british weapons south pacific in algeria by french forty five million curies of radioactive iodine that's what the chernobyl number is but twenty billion curies of radioactive iodine just from testing from those two countries alone no radioactive iodine goes to the thyroid and it causes cancers and thyroid disease hormonal problems and the consistent disorders and here again scale confounds the issue global fallout spread after nine hundred fifty one mostly in the northern and in the same decade rates of cancers especially childhood cancers once the medical rarity increased in the northern hemisphere so too did birth defects fertility problems cancer has continued to rise male sperm counts since one thousand nine hundred five again in the northern hemisphere have dropped in half and here's some charts that show these sort of rises in you see these dramatic rises now these diminish human health indicators became the new background against which helps the districts were measured as sort of a sliding background problem in other words the the scale of possible damage from the chernobyl problems as as fully saturated our existence so that we can't even really see it any longer so let me leave you with this one thought i hope you see now how like these guys on the right were nuclear cleanup workers but also so is this girl with the blue lips picking berries in the forest is the nuclear waste worker one without any kind of medical monitoring or any kind of  symmetry and i think that's you know the sort of shame that these various go all around the world when the you know despite all kinds of efforts to use the engineering and chemicals to try to clean up radioactivity from the environment that didn't work but these berries are incredible and so are the mushrooms and so it is they have this ability to clean up radioactivity from the soil we could use them as our allies right we could take and rather than the around the globe for all of us to eat we could pay these pickers twenty five dollars a day and then bury them as radioactive which and the disaster tourists who love to go to the zone and have their state parties they might better be they might even love to go pick radioactive berries and take selfies with of themselves as they dump those radioactive berries nuclear waste repository what i'm trying to say is i think that if we approach this situation with our eyes wide open we can come up with much better solutions than pretending there is no problem at all thank you yeah you know the biologist i worked with of have done a little bit of that where they they see you know every year a new ring grows and what they see is a real slowing of the growth of the ring so they can usually like that they did you know look at the trees and the rings in the trees and they can say oh that's one thousand nine hundred six right there because you know the trees growing it's growing along pretty well then it just stops growing slowly like that but that's a great point to a great question which is where i think radio biology radiation medicine should go is rather than sort of take measurements of the environment and then extrapolate and do dose estimates and death how much radioactivity people got we could look for biomarkers and the rep russian science is actually soviet is really good at doing this looking at chromosome arcos and things like that to be able to calculate dose and so the doctors did that because they they didn't have access to the radiation levels because they were that was classified information so they learned to read body it's kind of like an archive and that i think it's actually pretty good science and that was all wiped away when the soviet union fell apart but i think it should be revived scientist james smith published an article as a two page article just the letter and then he published another article so two articles these guys i followed have published two thousand articles so there's far more evidence that is not thriving but i think the media just loves that story because you know it would be great if nature just took care of our problems for us without their humans just walk away and it's sort of like the you know the department of energy in united states makes wildlife preserves out of every former nuclear site and they know these are really strange wildlife preserves you know because it like at the fern old in ohio there was you go in there is cycling fence around it and you get a little brochure when you go in and says welcome enjoy nature this is a green site but please when you're here make sure you stay only on the gravel path your dog cannot go anywhere near that pond and if you find a piece of mortar or brick that looks like this or like this do not touch it so like something we have very strange  nature at these places but but that narrative that you know nature of these stories itself and in fact there was a hand for thank god for a hand for a big created this one last free flowing spot of the columbia river is you know i know in the north that meat is still highly contaminated you know i don't you know i tried to get to the into the global meat factory and the woman who answered the phone when i asked about contaminated chernobyl me when i russia so for climate change should we use nuclear power for climate change you know i just don't and doesn't make any sense to me you know to build a nuclear power plant takes twenty years at best the new fusion reactor is that you know they've been saying that's that's new technology is just around the corner but they've been saying that since the nine hundred fifty s right we need an estimated twelve thousand nuclear reactors to solve climate change twelve thousand we have four and eight plugged in right now so that's a big scale up so that means will be a nuclear reactor right there and there'd be another one on the other side of seattle and we'd all have to be live with nuclear reactors and you know in our environments and i don't see the public buying into that nuclear reactors are fine in theory if they're way out in idaho their own zone indian reservation in northern minnesota but none of them are next to my city and then the other problem is nuclear energy just you know without the safety and health problems is that they produce an awful lot of heat you know you you heat up water to generate electricity but there are about thirty percent efficient in the rest of it just goes up in heat so we want twelve thousand really hot things on the globe and they're really hot so it's a fake will work you know so i don't really understand i mean somebody could cogently explain to me why this makes sense and how it's going to solve the problems that we need to solve tomorrow i mean we  panels on this roof tomorrow but we could not put a nuclear reactor anywhere near here for the next twenty years at best if you could get the seattleites to agree to it and i have a feeling that's not going to happen easily so i don't know what i don't know what