Kate Brown, History, in Aeon

The online journal Aeon has published an excerpt from associate professor of history Kate Brown’s forthcoming book Plutopia, which is due out in 2013. “For the past seven years, I have spent a great deal of time in the radiated traces of the world’s first plutonium plants — the Hanford factory in eastern Washington State and the Mayak plant in the southern Russian Urals. As countries from the Middle East to the Baltics gear up for a new generation of nuclear power reactors, it is worth taking another look at how scientists laid claim to the ‘truth’ to dismiss the …