This paper discusses using the Chernobyl Incident as a case study in engineering ethics instruction. Groups of students are asked to take on the role of a faction involved in the Chernobyl disaster and to defend their decisions in a mock debate. The results of student surveys and the Engineering and Science Issues Test indicate that the approach is very popular with students and has a positive impact on moral reasoning. The approach incorporates technical, communication and teamwork skills (...) and has many of the features suggested by recent literature. (shrink)

The almost immediate Western detection and news reportage of the Chernobyl nuclear accident underscored the urgency of Gorbachev's call for glasnost and perestroika. While state-sanctioned church leaders played a minimal role in the coming of glasnost, other believers, through clandestine samizdat, figure prominently in the launching of the Soviet information revolution. In contrast to the USSR, the churches and the media, especially television, played an immediate, transparent, and successful part in the East European upheavals of 1989.

Every year, the number of tourists in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is increasing. The most numerous visitors are journalists who come to perform theirofficial duties. At the same time, researchers have not yet shown interest in such an interesting and important tourist phenomenon. The purpose of this article is to de- scribe a new phenomenon of media tourism in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and its features. The study was conducted with a help of a qualitative case study analysis (...) method. The websites of the state and private enterprises and mass media publications based on the results of trips to the territory for 2013-2017 were analyzed. As a result, the specific features of journalists who visit the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone were identified. Such journalists mainly have confidence in the absence of a threat to health (55%), developed empathy (45%) and imagination of thinking (45%). Consequently, the tragedy of history and the gloomy appearance of the territory, the suffering of local residents make it attractive to journalists. In addition, due to personal interest, the voluntary travel motive (61,5%) prevails over conditional forced travel (38,5%). At the same time, the attention of journalists to the territory is attracted due to the activities of tourists. The authors describe the so-called «compensation effect», when the reduction of tourists' attention to the territory is balanced by an increase in the attention of the mass media. The presence of risk explains the predominance of men among journalists in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (54%). For example, women can better assess the risk due to greater vulnerability. The peculiarity of journalists' work in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is the risk of radiation exposure and ethical controversy. The study shows that journalists' inherent positive world perception and profound sense of professional duty can successfully overcome these obstacles. The results of the study can be used by the following researchers to identify ways and strategies for promoting media tourism in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. The benefit of this study is to draw attention to a new unexplored tourist phenomenon. Mass media have a great influence on the formation of a positive attitude towards the territory and attracting the attention of tourists. Taking into account the specific features of media tourism will help to attract more tourists and improve the quality of rendering service to journalists. (shrink)

From Chernobyl to Fukushima, it became clear that the technology is a system evolutionary factor, and the consequences of man-made disasters, as the actualization of risk related to changes in the social heredity (cultural transmission) elements. The uniqueness of the human phenomenon is a characteristic of the system arising out of the nonlinear interaction of biological, cultural and techno-rationalistic adaptive modules. Distribution emerging adaptive innovation within each module is in accordance with the two algorithms that are characterized by the (...) dominance of vertical (transgenerational) and horizontal (infection, contagion) adaptive streams of information, respectively. Evolutionary risk is the result of an imbalance of autonomous adaptive systems have an essential attribute of adaptibe strategy of Homo. Technological civilization inherent predisposition to overcome their dependence on biological and physical components. This feature serves as an enhancer of the evolutionary generating conjugate with the scientific and technological development risk We can assume the existence of an intention of Western mentality to a high priority (positive or negative) of technological modifications micro-social environment and post- Soviet (East Slavic) mentality to modification of macro-social system. (shrink)

The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone has evolved from the site of the world's worst nuclear disaster into one of Europe's most significant wildlife refuges. However, Russia's war against Ukraine has introduced new environmental threats, including military disturbance, radioactive forest fires, habitat destruction, landmine contamination, and pollution. These challenges endanger not only the wildlife of Chernobyl but also the ecological security of Europe as a whole. This paper examines the environmental consequences of the conflict on the Chernobyl ecosystem and (...) evaluates the role that the European Union can play in mitigating these impacts. It argues that the EU should adopt a comprehensive strategy combining emergency wildlife protection, environmental monitoring, wildfire prevention, demining operations, ecosystem restoration, scientific cooperation, and environmental accountability mechanisms. The paper further warns that failure to act promptly may result in long-term biodiversity loss, the spread of radioactive contamination, and irreversible ecological damage. Protecting the wildlife of Chernobyl is therefore not only a conservation imperative but also a matter of European environmental security and intergenerational responsibility. (shrink)

The study uncovers the drama of Stei Baita (Romania), a former uranium mine, which experienced during the communism period, an intensive industrialization. This shaped the territorial pattern, cultural, economic and social relationships, with a tremendous impact on the quality of the environment which was sacrificed against a rapid of a so-called economic growth. Stei Baita is a classic example of legacy mine land and the authors aim is to capture and assess all important aspects of sustainable development within this study-case (...) of disadvantaged community living in a radon prone area. More specifically, authors introduce their responses to several questions: (1) What do we know about social, economic and environmental capital of the selected settlement?; (2) Is the legacy of a uranium mine the platform of debate for negotiating for sustainable development?; and (3) What is the role of ethics in the current context of Stei Baita? Within the framework of analysis, equity, seen as part of ethics, is valued both as the premise of the debate and mandatory requirement for human development that should target sustainability. Authors have not discussed truths, but positions on identified problems by investigating community members’ perceptions. Thus, peculiarities of this community are dealt within a thematic context (e.g., resources and environment, individual development, social system). Finally, ethics is valued as social construct built by negotiating interpretations of morally desirable situations and behaviors accepted in a particular society at a certain historical moment. This view is consistent with ethical relativism which denies the existence of a unique moral truth and which sets the understanding of Stei Baita context on the path of the “new ethics”. The “new ethics” depicts the world in nuances, allowing society to surpass obstacles to the progress of understanding. (shrink)

In response to the catastrophes of the twentieth century, contemporary writers were often led to revolutionize inherited forms of philosophical presentation. And now, in an age of Anthropocene extinction, such experiments have become necessary once again. To comprehend this most recent of disasters, the present essay develops a practice of the philosophical fragment which, by returning to contemporaneous accounts of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Chernobyl, seeks to demonstrate what was both anticipated by and wholly unforeseen from within the perspective of (...) earlier attempts at contending with natural and societal disasters. By tracking the changing status of the skies in such writers as Robert Antelme, Marguerite Duras, Günther Anders, Svetlana Alexievich, and Greta Thunberg, the present essay distinguishes this longer twentieth-century history of destruction from the work of extermination now underway. (shrink)

This chapter “Wildlife in the Exclusion Zone in Chernobyl” explores the state of wildlife in Chernobyl three decades after the nuclear disaster, as a comparative reference for the wildlife in Fukushima in the near future. Wildlife appears to be thriving in Chernobyl, which is evidenced by the rebound of the population of gray wolves that are the top predators in the area. However, scientific studies of the population thus far are inconclusive regarding the effects of low-level, long-term (...) radiation on their health. The wildlife in Chernobyl also gives insight into the possibility of rewilding projects in Fukushima and elsewhere. (shrink)

Chapter 4 argues that atomic energy is also costly in terms of human health, scientific data, and practical reliability. Because of industry cover-ups, scientific misrepresentation, and violation of conflict-of-interest guidelines, this chapter shows that industry's atomic-energy-accident data are grossly flawed. These data significantly undercount harmful nuclear consequences. As a result, the chapter shows the public has been seriously misled about atomic energy, as medical journals confirm. In particular, industry PR caused many people to erroneously believe that the 1979 Three Mile (...) Island (TMI), Pennsylvania, nuclear accident and core melt was a minor mishap that killed no one. In fact, there was a documented, 64-percent cancer increase, especially in childhood cancers. This chapter argues that the dominant or accepted scientific position about what has caused post-accident, TMI-related health problems fails. The most likely explanation is that TMI radiation caused these health harms. Flawed inductive methods help explain why the dominant or accepted causal hypothesis about TMI health effects—that nuclear-accident-related _stress_, not radiation, is the culprit—errs. Many scientists erroneously reject the radiation cause, partly because they fall into conflicts of interest and also misunderstand randomization requirements in statistics; thus they misuse classical-statistical tests to draw causal inferences from non-experimental data. However, given actual, non-experimental data from TMI, inference to the best explanation, especially contrastive explanation, better reveals the cause of TMI health harms. Once scientists use correct statistical methods, it is easy to show that nuclear fission is an extremely risky technology, thus a questionable way to address climate change. (shrink)

Foucault appears to challenge traditional views of truth, reason, and knowledge in the doctrine of power/knowledge developed in his post‐1970 writings. This doctrine applies to all the sciences (and to non‐scientific and non‐discursive practices that are not discussed here). Foucault's notions of discourse (1) and power (3) are sufficiently discussed to set out his explanatory theory of the cause of our discourses and their change. In (4) three theses concerning the power/knowledge link are distinguished, of which the more important is (...) called the ‘Primacy Thesis’, namely the causal priority of power over knowledge. Various formulations of this thesis are investigated, some of which are contrasted with Francis Bacon's more plausible account of the link between power and knowledge. In (5), six criticisms of the thesis are discussed. Foucault's notion of truth is explored on the way, more particularly in (6). The outcome of the discussion is that Foucault's doctrine of power/knowledge, apart from some insights for an empirically based sociological investigation into the causes of some of our scientific beliefs, is generally false; for philosophical theories of truth and knowledge it has nothing to say. In fact if Foucault is to be a critic of the beliefs which circulate as a result of power, he needs the traditional account of truth and knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper, I predict a reaction within the English literary world if Ukrainian poets head to England owing to war. I also identify two reasons for pastiche. I attempt to do so by means of a pastiche of a notable writer from the Indian sub-continent, for a version of one of these reasons.

This study aims to diagnose how the cinema of cruelty has been inserted into mainstream culture through the current streaming series, analysing the elements of the eroticism of perversity and the c...

후쿠시마 원전 사고 이후 한국 사회에서도 이전과 달리 원전 위험 인식이 확실히 증가하고 있다. 여론 조사에 의하면 원전 필요성 인식에서는 큰 차이를 보이지 않고 있지만 원전 위험 인식은 높아진 것이 사실이다. 유사한 원전 사고였던 체르노빌 원전 사고 이후에는 한국 사회는 원전 위험을 둘러싼 논쟁은 거의 진행되고 있지 않았다고 할 수 있다. 사고에 대한 보도도 제한적으로 이루어졌고 정부의 위험 관리에 대한 비판의 목소리도 낮았다. 시민단체들에 의한 반핵 운동이 아직 출현하지 않으면서 원전 위험에 대한 사회적 증폭 현상이 제한적이었던 것이다. 이에 비해 후쿠시마 (...) 사고는 언론을 통한 보도의 양 자체가 증가하였고 핵폐기장 반대 운동 과정을 통해 학습을 한 시민 단체들이 늘어나면서 정부의 위험 관리 능력은 비판에 직면하게 되었다. 이런 여러 사회적 요인들에 의해 후쿠시마 원전 사고 이후 한국 사회의 원전 위험 인식은 강화될 수 있었던 것이다. 위험의 사회적 구성을 잘 보여주고 있다. (shrink)

This article considers what it means to give plants a voice as witnesses to nuclear events. It examines two texts that attempt to represent the nonverbal testimony of irradiated plants through a hybrid approach of text and image: Sugihara Rieko’s Pilgrimage to the A-Bombed Trees (Hibakuju junrei, 2015) and Michael Marder and Anaïs Tondeur’s The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness (2016). Published a year apart, both texts focus on the afterlife of nuclear catastrophes: the atomic bombing of (...) Hiroshima in 1945 and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986. Sugihara’s book is an account of the hibakujumoku – trees that survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and continue to produce new growth to this day. Combining maps, photographs, interviews, and short essays, Pilgrimage to the A-Bombed Trees is intended as an immersive guidebook to the nearly 170 irradiated trees located within a two-kilometer radius around Hiroshima’s ground zero. It presents these trees as “living witnesses” whose subsequent flourishing has provided human survivors with a conceptual figuration of destructive plasticity. Marder and Tondeur’s The Chernobyl Herbarium formally resembles Sugihara’s Pilgrimage to the A-Bombed Trees, and likewise combines text (a combination of short theoretical essays and personal remembrances of the Chernobyl meltdown) and images (Tondeur’s photograms of plants grown in the exclusion zone) into a slim volume that calls for a rejection of language as the sole means of bearing witness. According to Marder, Tondeur’s photograms “bring out the testimony of the plant,” and yet the same procedure renders these plant witnesses “specimens,” full of radioactivity but devoid of life (something Sugihara’s book avoids through the medium of photography). The Chernobyl Herbarium is an attempt to capture, in fragmentary form, the limits of language in the conceptualization of plant life and in the proper conceptualization of the Chernobyl disaster. Ultimately, both texts are experiments to “think the unthinkable and represent the unrepresentable,” to borrow Marder’s words, through a deep, speculative engagement with the botanical realm. As wordless testimony is given voice through human–botanical intra-action, the plasticity of plant life (its capacity to adapt and change) is highlighted, and this allows us to locate moments of phytomorphism – the attribution of vegetal qualities to the human – in these two self-proclaimed “guidebooks.”. (shrink)

The nuclear disaster that Japan suffered at Fukushima in the months following March 11, 2011 has been compared with other major nuclear disasters, especially, Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986). It is more like Chernobyl in severity, the only other 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale; more like Three Mile Island in long-term effects. Yet Fukushima is not just another nuclear disaster. In ways important to engineering ethics, it is much more like Katrina’s destruction of New (...) Orleans than like any nuclear disaster. It is (primarily) a consequence of a natural disaster, the enormous earthquake and tsunami that wrecked much of northeast Japan. One lesson of Fukushima, one shared with Katrina, concerns the different roles engineers have at different stages in an engineering project (planning, designing, management, and operations). In the planning stage, engineers seem to have relatively little power to affect certain early large-scale trade-offs between public safety and public welfare. Another lesson may be the importance of not leaving complex technical systems untended. The events that made the disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl inevitable lasted only a few minutes or hours; the events that made the disasters in New Orleans and Fukushima inevitable were spread over several days. Fukushima avoided a more serious disaster because the plants were not abandoned in the way New Orleans was. A third lesson concerns our ideas of heroism, especially our sense that heroism is sometimes one’s duty. An engineer’s duty sometimes includes protecting others from harm even at the risk of the engineer’s life. (shrink)

More than 10,000 people have died in the Japanese tsunami, and the survivors are cold and hungry. But the media concentrate on nuclear radiation from which no one has died—and is unlikely to. Nuclear radiation at very high levels is dangerous, but the scale of concern that it evokes is misplaced. Nuclear technology cures countless cancer patients everyday—and a radiation dose given for radiotherapy in hospital is no different in principle to a similar dose received in the environment. What of (...) Three Mile Island? There were no known deaths there. And Chernobyl? The most recent UN report confirms the known death toll—28 fatalities among emergency workers plus 15 fatal cases of child thyroid cancer—which would have been avoided if iodine tablets had been taken. And in each case, the numbers are minute compared with the 3,800 people at Bhopal in 1984 who died as a result of a leak of chemicals from the Union Carbide pesticide plant. (shrink)

This is a response to an article by Wade Allison in which he argues that we should accept drastically higher doses of ionizing radiation than what we currently do. He employs four arguments in defence of his position: comparisons with background radiation, the positive experiences of radiotherapy, the presence of biological defence mechanisms against radiation, and a concession by Swedish authorities that their approach to reindeer meat after the Chernobyl fallout was unnecessarily strict. It is shown that each of (...) the four arguments is fallacious. In conclusion, the traditional weighing of risks against benefits in radiation protection is defended. (shrink)

Biobanks are vital for diagnostic, epidemiological and research purposes following radiation disasters, but there is a history of delays in this type of research and specifically in setting up important resources including tissue repositories following the rare occurrence of these events. Here, we argue that one key lesson from Chernobyl and Fukushima has still not been learned: it is essential to agree on a proactive international plan for a radiation disaster biobank and accompanying data collection before the next disaster (...) occurs. (shrink)

Bob and Ulf say logic should make explicit / The kinds of inference we take as licit. / They give a formalism that’s classically complete, / But in which an extra premise may defeat / An inference that seems a reasonable fact. / Thus reason’s made explicit but is it exact? / For reason in the sense of Brandom and Hlobil, / May explode like a logical Chernobyl. / This is the point on which I’d like to push back, (...) / And keep the game of giving reasons exact. / So with the help of fancy formal antics, / I’ll give nonmonotonic truthmaker semantics. (shrink)

STS research has devoted relatively little attention to the promotion and reception of science and technology by non-scientific actors and institutions. One consequence is that the relationship of science and technology to political power has tended to remain undertheorized. This article aims to fill that gap by introducing the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries. Through a comparative examination of the development and regulation of nuclear power in the US and South Korea, the article demonstrates the analytic potential of the imaginaries concept. (...) Although nuclear power and nationhood have long been imagined together in both countries, the nature of those imaginations has remained strikingly different. In the US, the state’s central move was to present itself as a responsible regulator of a potentially runaway technology that demands effective containment. In South Korea, the dominant imaginary was of atoms for development which the state not only imported but incorporated into its scientific, technological and political practices. In turn, these disparate imaginaries have underwritten very different responses to a variety of nuclear shocks and challenges, such as Three Mile Island (TMI), Chernobyl, and the spread of the anti-nuclear movement. (shrink)

Our world is enormously sophisticated and nature's complexity is literally inexhaustible. As a result, projects to describe and explain natural science can never be completed. This volume explores the nature of complexity and considers its bearing on our world and how we manage our affairs within it.Rescher's overall lesson is that the management of our affairs within a socially, technologically, and cognitively complex environment is plagued with vast management problems and risks of mishap. In primitive societies, failure to understand how (...) things work can endanger a family or, at worst, a clan or tribe. In the modern world, man-made catastrophes on the model of Chernobyl can endanger millions, possibly even risking the totality of human life on our planet. Rescher explains "technological escalation" as a sort of arms race against nature in which scientific progress requires more powerful technology for observation and experimentation, and, conversely, scientific progress requires the continual enhancement of technology. The increasing complexity of science and technology (and, in consequence, of social systems) along with problems growing faster than solutions confront us with major management and decision problems.This study is the first of its kind. There have been many specialized studies of complexity in physics and computation theory, but no overall analysis of the phenomenon. Although Rescher offers a sobering outlook, he also believes that complexity entails mixed blessings: our imperfect knowledge provides a rationale for putting forth our best efforts. Rescher urges us to gear the conduct of life's practical affairs to the demands of a complex world. This highly readable and accessible volume will be of interest to those interested in philosophy, the philosophy of science, science policy studies, and future studies. (shrink)

In this post-apocalyptic rollercoaster ride, philosopher Srećko Horvat invites us to explore the Apocalypse in terms of ‘revelation’ (rather than as the ‘end’ itself). He argues that the only way to prevent the end – i.e., extinction – is to engage in a close reading of various interconnected threats, such as climate crisis, the nuclear age and the ongoing pandemic. Drawing on the work of neglected philosopher Günther Anders, this book outlines a philosophical approach to deal with what Horvat, borrowing (...) a term from climate science and giving it a theological twist, calls ‘eschatological tipping points’. These are no longer just the nuclear age or climate crisis, but their collision, conjoined with various other major threats – not only pandemics, but also the viruses of capitalism and fascism. In his investigation of the future of places such as Chernobyl, the Mediterranean and the Marshall Islands, as well as many others affected by COVID-19, Horvat contends that the ‘revelation’ appears simple and unprecedented: the alternatives are no longer socialism or barbarism – our only alternatives today are a radical reinvention of the world, or mass extinction. _ After the Apocalypse_ is an urgent call not only to mourn tomorrow’s dead today but to struggle for our future while we can. (shrink)

‘IB was one of the great affirmers of our time.’ John Banville, New York Review of Books The title of this final volume of Isaiah Berlin’s letters is echoed by John Banville’s verdict in his review of its predecessor, Building: Letters 1960–75, which saw Berlin publish some of his most important work, and create, in Oxford’s Wolfson College, an institutional and architectural legacy. In the period covered by this new volume (1975–97) he consolidates his intellectual legacy with a series of (...) essay collections. These generate many requests for clarification from his readers, and stimulate him to reaffirm and sometimes refine his ideas, throwing substantive new light on his thought as he grapples with human issues of enduring importance. Berlin’s comments on world affairs, especially the continuing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and the collapse of Communism, are characteristically acute. This is also the era of the Northern Ireland Troubles, the Iranian revolution, the rise of Solidarity in Poland, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, and wars in the Falkland Islands, the Persian Gulf and the Balkans. Berlin scrutinises the leading politicians of the day, including Reagan, Thatcher and Gorbachev, and draws illuminating sketches of public figures, notably contrasting the personas of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrey Sakharov. He declines a peerage, is awarded the Agnelli Prize for ethics, campaigns against philistine architecture in London and Jerusalem, helps run the National Gallery and Covent Garden, and talks at length to his biographer. He reflects on the ideas for which he is famous – especially liberty and pluralism – and there is a generous leavening of the conversational brilliance for which he is also renowned, as he corresponds with friends about politics, the academic world, music and musicians, art and artists, and writers and their work, always displaying a Shakespearean fascination with the variety of humankind. Affirming is the crowning achievement both of Berlin’s epistolary life and of the widely acclaimed edition of his letters whose first volume appeared in 2004. (shrink)

In this commentary, I reflect on the differences between two independent citizen approaches to monitoring radiological contamination, one in Belarus after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident and the other in Japan following the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi accident. I examine these approaches from the perspective of their contribution to making radiological contamination more publicly visible. The analysis is grounded in my earlier work, where I examined how we have come to know what we know about post–Chernobyl contamination and its (...) effects in Belarus, a former Soviet republic most heavily affected by the fallout. As I described in this study, much of what we know about the consequences of Chernobyl is based on the work of the Belarusian nonprofit Institute of Radiation Safety, “Belrad.” I compare Belrad’s approach to radiological monitoring with the work of the volunteer network Safecast, arguably one of the best-known citizen science projects in the world, which is working to monitor the scope of the post–Fukushima contamination. Through this comparison of approaches, I raise broader questions about a form of sensing practices—data-related practices of citizen science that make environmental hazards publicly in/visible. (shrink)

This book provides a current analysis of the legal and ethical challenges in preparing for and responding to chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive crises. From past events like the Chernobyl nuclear incident in Russia or the Bhopal chemical calamity in India, to the more recent tsunami and nuclear accident in Japan or the Ebola crisis in Africa, and with the on-going threat of bioterrorism, the need to be ready to respond to CBRNE crises is uncontroversial. What is controversial (...) is whether we are on a path that adequately prepares us for the next event. The ethical and legal scholars in this volume hold that much work remains to be done and offer this book to stimulate further reflection and dialogue around CBRNE crises. This is an indispensable book for both students and scholars of bioethics, international law, public health, as well as for regulators and administrators developing policy and legislation related to public health planning and emergency responses. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Women on the Global Market: Irigaray and the Democratic StateNicole Fermon (bio)Best known for her subtle interrogation of philosophy and psychoanalysis, Luce Irigaray clearly also conducts a dialogue with the political, proposing that women’s erasure from culture and society invalidates all economies, sexual or political. Because woman has disappeared both figuratively and literally from society [see Sen, “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing”], Irigaray conceives the contemporary ethical (...) project as a recall to difference rather than equality, to difference between women and men—that is, sexual difference. She characterizes relations between men and women as market relations in which women are commodities, objects, but never subjects of exchange, objects to men but not to themselves: women do not belong to themselves but exist “to keep relationships among men running smoothly” [TS 192]. Women under these conditions require imaginative ways to reconfigure the self, to subvert the melancholy and regression of masculinist economies and envisage a future in which women would not be ashamed of the feminine, would experience it as a positivity worth emulating.Irigaray contends that after the gains of egalitarian politics are carefully examined, the inclusion of women in the political arena has failed to take into account women’s distinct and different position from men, and from each other, as well as perpetuating the fiction of the “neutral” citizen, the ahistorical individual citizen of the nation-state. It is that fiction Irigaray dispels in her critique of liberal democratic politics and its creation, “citizens who are neuter in regard to familial singularity, its laws, and necessary sexual difference” [SG 112] in order to benefit the State and its laws. The subject is male; the citizen is neuter. Who is the female citizen in contemporary society? What is the ethical elaboration of the contractual relations between women and men, and between sexed individuals and the community? How do women imagine a distinct set of rights and responsibilities based on self-definition and autonomy, given the particular strictures of contemporary politics—that is, the market-driven, antidemocratic nature of the current economic national and global forces? Irigaray suggests that “the return of women to collective work, to public places, to social relations, demands linguistic mutations” and profound transformations, an embodied imagination with force and agency in civil life [TD 65].Irigaray warns that if civil and political participation is construed in overly narrow terms, if focus is on economic or judicial “circuits” alone, we overlook the symbolic organization of power—women risk losing “everything without even being acknowledged” [TD 56]. Instead an interval of recognition can expand the political to include the concerns and activities of real women, lest silence imply consent to sexual neutrality, or more likely, to women’s obliteration under men’s interests and concerns. Women’s insistence on self-definition and wage labor, on love and justly remunerated work, [End Page 120] testifies to the obduracy of women’s difference, one that is not likely to disappear. The patriarchal family is still the legal norm, even when certain exceptions are made, while enduring questions regarding women’s health and children’s physical welfare as priorities beyond market considerations are consigned to legislative obfuscation, still a political afterthought. Instead, in the US the liberal state removes the slender welfare net specific to women and children, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and fails to provide medical coverage to those who are among the most vulnerable of its citizens. Women without access to the legal protection of sex-neutral citizenship, poor working women without language (the money for an effective “mouthpiece” to represent their distress in a court of law), are further disempowered by liberal politics’ insistence on sexual neutrality—that is, on repression or amnesia regarding the lived experiences of women.Sexual difference is key to any project of self-definition by women. Irigaray insists on the sexual nature of this self-definition, not solely for its obvious procreative necessity, but because the natural world is a source of renewal and fecundity which requires attentive interrogation and respect [SG 15]. This rebirth seems alien to the structure of male politics, which instead seem to provoke disasters (Bhopal, Chernobyl, or the current runaway... (shrink)

This article traces disagreements about the genetic effects of low-dose radiation exposure as waged by James Neel, a central figure in radiation studies of Japanese populations after World War II, and Yuri Dubrova, who analyzed the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident. In a 1996 article in Nature, Dubrova reported a statistically significant increase in the minisatellite DNA mutation rate in the children of parents who received a high dose of radiation from the Chernobyl accident, contradicting studies that (...) found no significant inherited genetic effects among offspring of Japanese A-bomb survivors. Neel’s subsequent defense of his large-scale longitudinal studies of the genetic effects of ionizing radiation consolidated current scientific understandings of low-dose ionizing radiation. The article seeks to explain how the Hiroshima/nagasaki data remain hegemonic in radiation studies, contextualizing the debate with attention to the perceived inferiority of Soviet genetic science during the Cold War. (shrink)

This article proposes an auditory-phenomenological approach to the perception of toxic environments. A phenomenon called “toxic silence” is introduced, that is, silence in environments that are polluted to an extent that is hostile to life. Key texts from ecological literature that refer to silence in polluted environments are presented, namely Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices of Chernobyl. The main characteristics of toxic silence are laid out from a phenomenological perspective. Toxic silence is conceived as a non-resonant, (...) pervasive, and invasive atmosphere. Analogies between the phenomena of utter silence and toxic exposures are highlighted, namely their all-encompassing pervasiveness and the fundamental openness of the felt body towards them. Methodologically, the article builds on work on auditory phenomenology by Hermann Schmitz, and Don Ihde. It is framed with a discussion of shortcomings of visualist approaches to the perception of toxic environments and how auditory approaches can avoid similar pitfalls. (shrink)

_Abstract_ This article proposes the concept of the _ecumenical machine possessed_ to account for how contemporary humanitarian capitalism integrates marginality and reproduces totalitarian coherence through the figure of the _victim_. Building on Žižek’s reformulation of Hegelian totality as _“the whole plus its symptoms,”_ I argue that post‑war liberal universalism—materialised in the twin formations of _dialogical recognition_ and _empathetic trauma_—does not expel the _sinthome_ but _magnetises it into the symbolic edifice_. Reading Wagner’s _Parsifal_ (through Syberberg), Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Deleuze/Guattari, I show (...) how _Amfortas’s wound_ functions as the real kernel that supports the coherence of the post‑1945 order; how _genealogy_ is _recoded_ into a validating niche for humanitarian governance; and how the _fetish_ is _updated_ via the annexation of human and _eco‑victims_ to an expanded capitalist _recording surface_. A Deleuzian _retrospective problematisation_ reframes totalitarianism as a transcendental–immanent _problem_ that is never abolished by its solutions—democratic, humanitarian, or otherwise. In this horizon, the dispositif of _human dignity_ separates capital from its own unintelligible flood, while the deterritorialised voice of NGOs and human‑rights discourse takes the form of a _maternal superego_. The result is a _victimist fetishism_ in which commodities emanate halos of wound and care, and philosophy’s attempt to articulate contradiction is rendered _unintelligible_. The penultimate section reads the _identitarian state_ through _House of Cards_, Chernobyl as real‑unrepresentable object, and the hermaphroditic Parsifal; the conclusion advances a _Christological_ thesis: _subjective destitution_ as an antifilosophical practice that cancels the sociosymbolic Other and articulates a _triple formula_ of the _sense of the earth_. (shrink)

Starting in 1970, this article studies how Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was built. It follows the station’s operational history until 1982. During that year, reactor block one suffered a torn reactor channel, four years prior to the well-known catastrophe of 1986. It uncovers the genesis of these accidents by analyzing everyday history at the construction site. Construction relied on long established tools and processes, tried out at large-scale and mostly non-nuclear development areas. Masons, carpenters, and welders dealt with planned (...) quotas and deadlines, material and personnel shortages, as well as a lack of quality management. The tools they used to build this nuclear giant were rather a shock of the old (Edgerton) than futuristic. It uncovers circumstances, non-alignments, and decisions that amounted to a working environment characterized by a technocratic culture. This culture overemphasized the fulfillment of plans and quotas to the detriment of safety as should have been warranted by the nature of a nuclear reactor as specified in plans and regulations. By following the plant’s construction in its everyday struggles, this article shows characteristics of the working culture that evolved on-site and led to the accident of 1982. This innovative approach aids understanding of why and how the catastrophe of 1986 came about—beyond the two standard reasons established in the literature, namely a faulty reactor design and mistakes made by the operators. (shrink)

This article explores how nuclear disaster narratives have both been informed by and articulated collective images of risk and uncertainty since the 1980s. Drawing on ideas from classical and affective narratology that are framed by a perspective informed by the sociology of knowledge, we examine three variations of narrating nuclear disasters in different media: (1) sociologist Charles Perrow’s detailed analysis of the Three Mile Island accident in his popular science book _Normal Accidents_ (1984), (2) Svetlana Alexievich’s _Chernobyl Prayer_ (1997), a (...) literary/journalistic account of the Chernobyl disaster that chronicles individuals’ experiences through eyewitness accounts, and (3) the television series _Chernobyl_ (2019), which, in a docufictional style, combines what is staged as an objective reconstruction of the unfolding of the disaster with subjective memories of those affected while reflecting on the incident’s larger political, scientific, and environmental contexts. We suggest that these three stories of nuclear incidents not only produce specific knowledges about the disaster in question but also address the fragility of knowledge systems and social structures as well as assessments of agency. As such, these narratives function as sites of mitigation that offer their readers/viewers certainty in times of crisis. (shrink)

This article is devoted to the problem of photographic representation of the environmental harm caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In many cases, this damage is intentional and due to the military strategy employed by the Russian military. The most illustrative case of this kind is the destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam, whose consequences are comparable with those of the Chernobyl catastrophe, and which are often referred to as 'ecocide'. In this article, I clarify the concept of (...) 'ecocide', which is vague, contested and not yet considered a crime by the international criminal court. I interpret this concept in a biopolitical perspective, as a form of domination over the biological in the broad sense of the word (over biosphere). I also examine photographs of environmental damage caused by the Russian invasion, in particular, the photographs showing the destruction of the Kakhovka dam and its consequences. The aim of my analysis is to find out what kind of visual records might visualise the ecocide and if the existing photographs from Kakhovka meet our expectations. This discussion refers to earlier debates about 'genocide photographs' and environmental photography. I argue that photographic records from Kakhovka, which are inconspicuous in visual terms despite the clearly ecocidal nature of the disaster, are nevertheless valuable and teach us an important lesson: we should not expect exhaustive photographs of ecocide, which can rather be represented, with a certain degree of approximation, through an evolving body of always imperfect and lacunar images. (shrink)

Public health emergencies have occurred throughout history, encompassing such events as plagues and famines arising from natural causes, disease pandemics interrelated with wars, and industrial accidents such as the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, among others. Law and legal tools have played an important role in addressing such emergencies. Three prime U.S. examples are Congressional authorization of quarantine as early as 1796, legally mandated smallpox vaccination upheld in a landmark 1905 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, and the President's 2003 executive order adding (...) SARS to the federal government's list of “quarantinable communicable diseases.”The public health emergencies of the present — both actual and potential — pose equally serious threats but do so in the context of greatly magnified expectations that stem directly from the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the immediately following anthrax attacks. (shrink)

Over the past decade, there has been growing positive interest in nuclear technologies as a sustainable source of clean electricity for the West and as a factor of industrial and social growth in Southeast Asia. Both developed and developing countries face the need to meet growing energy consumption needs, which is especially difficult in the context of gas market shocks and large-scale green transition plans. The social dimension of this problem, especially in the reactor-building countries, often remains “behind the scenes”. (...) Russia is one of the oldest countries with a powerful nuclear plant system, but even here the public’s attitude to the “peaceful atom” is ambiguous. Socio-political radiophobia has accompanied the development of the nuclear industry since at least the Chernobyl accident, and sociological publications that would topicalize the mood of Russian citizens, their level of anxiety and trust in nuclear energy are still sparse. The article examines Russians’ perception of nuclear technology in general and specifically regarding the “Development of Engineering, Technologies and Scientific Research in the Use of Nuclear Energy in the Russian Federation” (DETSR) program and the Rosatom state corporation’s activities. Based on two waves of representative surveys conducted in April-May 2023-2024, we assess the factors that contribute to the formation of trust in the industry. Using factor regression analysis, structural equations, and nonparametric tests, we outline a demographic profile of a Russian “nuclear optimist” — such optimism being typical primarily for the well-off segments of the population. A key role in the interpretation is given to the awareness factor, the increase of which (in the long term) should smooth out the inequality in support for the industry. The issue of (dis)trust in the state and its impact on this support is also discussed. (shrink)

Major crises often involve ethical, political and legal issues that are extremely difficult to handle. To make a good example, nuclear accidents sometimes open a catastrophic scenario which requires that someone assumes the responsibility to mend or isolate a damaged reactor. However, this is an extremely dangerous task that often causes death to some or even all those committed to address it. For example, in the case of Chernobyl, 29 firemen and employees participating in the mitigation measures died in (...) the days and months afterward from acute radiation syndrome. Who should carry that weight? What are the boundaries of our moral duties under those circumstances? What information are we obliged to provide to people who will have to deal with such a task? These are all issues that raise fundamental moral debates. Providing a tentative response or, at least, showing the type of elements that should be considered in the discussion, is one of the main aims of this book. (shrink)

In response to the Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island core melts, nuclear proponents allege they were “black-swan events”—extremely unlikely, at the tail of probability distributions. They...