Chernobyl bibliography
Compiled by David Moon (with assistance from Kate Brown), 10 April 2016
This bibliography contains a selection of the vast body of writing on Chernobyl from the perspectives of different academic disciplines, journalists, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)[1] offering contradictory perspectives on this highly contested subject. At the end are some works on the wider context and comparisons of the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters.
Concise articles/journalism
Simon Parkin, “‘We have a chance to show the truth’: into the heart of Chernobyl”, The Guardian, 9 April 2016
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/09/chance-show-truth-into-heart-of-chernobyl-nuclear-disaster
David Sim, “Chernobyl: Wolves, eagles and other wildlife thriving in exclusion zone 30 years after disaster”, International Business Times, April 6, 2016
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/chernobyl-wolves-eagles-other-wildlife-thriving-exclusion-zone-30-years-after-disaster-1553489
Kim Willsher, ‘Chernobyl 30 years on: former residents remember life in the ghost city of Pripyat’, The Guardian, 7 March 2016
http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/07/chernobyl-30-years-residents-life-ghost-city-pripyat
Kate Brown, ‘The Berdichev Leather Factory in the Wake of the Chernobyl Accident’, Toxic News, 4 November 2015: http://toxicnews.org/2015/11/04/the-berdichev-leather-factory-in-the-wake-of-the-chernobyl-accident/
Mike Wood and Nick Beresford. "Wolves, boar and other wildlife defy contamination to make a comeback at Chernobyl." The Conversation (5 October 2015).
http://theconversation.com/wolves-boar-and-other-wildlife-defy-contamination-to-make-a-comeback-at-chernobyl-48600
Adam Vaughan, ‘Wildlife thriving around Chernobyl nuclear plant despite radiation’, The Guardian, 5 October 2015
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/05/wildlife-thriving-around-chernobyl-nuclear-plant-despite-radiation (based on the scientific article below)
Deryabina, T.G. et al. ‘Long-term census data reveal abundant wildlife populations at Chernobyl’ Current Biology , Volume 25 , Issue 19 , R824 - R826, 5 October 2015
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(15)00988-4
Victoria Gill, ‘Chernobyl: A field trip to no man's land’, BBC News, 26 July 2011
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/14250489
Brendan Borrell, ‘Scientific meltdown at Chernobyl?’, Scientific American, 24 March 2009
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/news-blog/scientific-meltdown-at-chernobyl-2009-03-24/
Mark Kinver, ‘Chernobyl “Not a Wildlife Haven”’, BBC News, 14 August 2007
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6946210.stm
Stephen Mulvey, ‘Wildlife Defies Chernobyl Radiation’, BBC News, 20 April 2006
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4923342.stm
Richard Stone, ‘The Long Shadow of Chernobyl: Twenty years after a nuclear reactor exploded, blanketing thousands of square miles with radiation, the catastrophe isn’t over’, National Geographic, April 2006, at http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2006/04/inside-chernobyl/stone-text (‘accidental wilderness’).
Books
Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl (New York: Picador, 2006)
(Oral history by Nobel Prize winning author)
Robert Peter Gale and Thomas Hauser, Final Warning, The Legacy of Chernobyl (New York: Warner Books, 1988)
(Robert Gale is an American physician who travelled to the USSR in 1986 to try to treat the victims, in particular the firemen suffering from fatal radiation sickness)
[International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA], Environmental Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident and Their Remediation: Twenty Years of Experience, Report of the Chernobyl Forum Expert Group ‘Environment’ (Vienna: IAEA, 2006)
http://www-pub.iaea.org/mtcd/publications/pdf/pub1239_web.pdf
(NB See reply by Iablokov et al, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe)
Iablokov, A. V., Vasiliĭ Borisovich Nesterenko, Alexey V. Nesterenko, and Janette D. Sherman. Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, v. 1181. Boston, MA: Published by Blackwell Pub. on behalf of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2009.
(NB Reply to IAEA, Environmental Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident and Their Remediation)
Olga Kuchinskaya, The Politics of Invisibility: Public Knowledge about Radiation Health Effects after Chernobyl (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014)
Grigori Medvedev, No Breathing Room, The Aftermath of Chernobyl (New York: Basic Books, 1993)
(Memoir by an insider to Soviet nuclear energy)
Zhores Medvedev, The Legacy of Chernobyl (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990)
(Book by Soviet dissident scientist and historian.)
Mary Mycio, Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl (Washington, DC, Joseph Henry Press, 2005)
(Account by journalist who, to her surprise, found ‘thriving’ flora and fauna in zone)
Adriana Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens After Chernobyl (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013)
Robert Polidori, Zones of Exclusion: Pripyat and Chernobyl (Göttingen: Steidl, 2003)
V. K. Savchenko, The Ecology of the Chernobyl Catastrophe (Taylor & Francis, 1995)
Iurii Shcherbak, Ian Press, and David R. Marples, Chernobyl: A Documentary Story (Palgrave Macmillan, 1989)
Wladimir Tchertkoff, The Crime of Chernobyl: The Nuclear Goulag (London: Glagoslav Publications 2016)
Articles (mostly sciences and social sciences)
M. Balonov, M. Crick and D, Louvat, Update of impacts of the Chernobyl accident: Assessment of the Chernobyl Forum (2003-2005) and UNSCEAR (2005-2008) (2010), http://www.irpa2010europe.com/proceedings/S10/S10-01.pdf. International Radiation Protection Association
M. I. Balonov, ‘On protecting the inexperienced reader from Chernobyl myths’, Journal of Radiological Protection, Volume 32, Number 2 2012
Thom Davies, Abel Poleseb, ‘Informality and survival in Ukraine's nuclear landscape: Living with the risks of Chernobyl’, Journal of Eurasian Studies, Volume 6, Issue 1, 2015, pp.34-45
T.G. Deryabina, S.V. Kuchmel, L.L. Nagorskaya, T.G. Hinton, J.C. Beasley, A. Lerebours, J.T. Smith, ‘Long-term census data reveal abundant wildlife populations at Chernobyl’, Current Biology, Volume 25, Issue 19, pR824–R826, 5 October 2015
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822%2815%2900988-4
Edward Geist, ‘Political Fallout: The Failure of Emergency Management at Chernobyl'’, Slavic Review, Vol. 74 (2015), pp.104-126
Yury G. Grigoriev, "Six first weeks after Chernobyl nuclear accident (memoirs of an eyewitness)." The Environmentalist 32.2 (2012): 131-135.
Anders Pape Mølle and Timothy A. Mousseau, ‘Efficiency of bio-indicators for low-level radiation under field conditions’, Ecological Indicators, vol.11, Issue 2, March 2011, pp.424-430
Timothy A. Mousseau’s website with links to summary of his research and full list of publications: http://cricket.biol.sc.edu/Mousseau/Mousseau.html
Phillips, Sarah Drue. “Half-Lives and Healthy Bodies: Discourses on Contaminated Food and Healing in Postchernobyl Ukraine.” Food and Foodways 10, no.1–2 (2002): 27–53
Phillips, Sarah D. “Chernobyl’s Sixth Sense: The Symbolism of an Ever-Present Awareness.” Anthropology and Humanism. 29, no.2 (2004): 159
Phillips, Sarah D., and Sarah Ostaszewski. “An Illustrated Guide to the Post-Catastrophe Future.” Anthropology of East Europe Review, vol.30, no. 1 (June 16, 2012): 127–40
Kaja Rahu, Anssi Auvinen, Timo Hakulinen, Mare Tekkel, Peter D Inskip, Evelyn J Bromet, John D Boice Jr and Mati Rahu, ‘Chernobyl cleanup workers from Estonia: follow-up for cancer incidence and mortality, Journal of Radiological Protection, vol.33, no.2 (2013)
Cultural Perspectives/Photography/Tourism
Andrew Blackwell, Visit Sunny Chernobyl:... and other adventures in the world's most polluted places (Random House, 2012)
Daniel Bürkner, "The Chernobyl landscape and the aesthetics of invisibility." Photography and Culture 7.1 (2014): 21-39
Thom Davies, "A visual geography of Chernobyl: Double exposure." International Labor and Working-Class History 84 (2013): 116-139.
Karena Kalmbach, "Radiation and borders: Chernobyl as a national and transnational site of memory." Global Environment 11 (2013): 130-159.
Ganna Yankovskaa & Kevin Hannamb, ‘Dark and toxic tourism in the Chernobyl exclusion zone’, Current Issues in Tourism, vol.17, Issue 10 (2014), pp929-939
Wider context
Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (New York: Oxford UP, 2013)
Peter Coates, ‘Borderland, No-Man's Land, Nature's Wonderland: Troubled Humanity and Untroubled Earth’, Environment and History 20 (2014): 499-516.
Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly, Jr., Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature Under Siege (New York: Basic Books, 1992)
Murray Feshbach, Ecological Disaster: Cleaning up the Hidden Legacy of the Soviet Regime (New York: Twentieth Century Pr, 1995)
Andrew L. Jenks, Perils of Progress: Environmental Disasters in the Twentieth Century (Pearson, 2011)
Paul Josephson, Red Atom: Russia's Nuclear Power Program from Stalin to Today (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005)
Paul Josephson et al, An Environmental History of Russia (New York: Cambridge UP, 2013)
David R. Marples, Chernobyl and Nuclear Power in the USSR (Palgrave Macmillan, 1986)
Comparisons with Fukushima
Articles on Fukushima in Environmental History, vol.17/2 (2012)
Gayle Greene, ‘Science with a Skew: The Nuclear Power Industry After Chernobyl and
Fukushima’, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 10, Issue 1 No 3, 2 January 2012
Anders Pape Møller, Isao Nishiumic, Hiroyoshi Suzukid, Keisuke Uedab, Timothy A. Mousseaue, ‘Differences in effects of radiation on abundance of animals in Fukushima and Chernobyl’, Ecological Indicators, Volume 24, January 2013, Pages 75–81
Tessa Morris-Suzuki, "Touching the grass: science, uncertainty and everyday life from Chernobyl to Fukushima." Science Technology & Society 19.3 (2014): 331-362.
Timothy A. Mousseau and Anders P. Møller. "Chernobyl and Fukushima: Differences and Similarities a Biological Perspective." Transactions of the American Nuclear Society 107 (2012): 200-203.
Anders Pape Møller and Timothy A. Mousseau, “The Uncomfortable Questions in the Wake of Nuclear Accidents at Fukushima and Chernobyl”, Asia-Pacific Journal, 03 April 2013
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/15502-uncomfortable-questions-in-the-wake-of-nuclear-accidents-at-fukushima-and-chernobyl
Sarah Phillips, ‘Fukushima is not Chernobyl? Don’t be so sure’, Somastosphere: Science, Medicine, and Anthropology, March 11, 2013
http://somatosphere.net/2013/03/fukushima-is-not-chernobyl-dont-be-so-sure.html
Georg Steinhauser, Alexander Brandl, Thomas E. Johnson, ‘Comparison of the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear accidents: A review of the environmental impacts’, Science of The Total Environment, Volumes 470–471, 1 February 2014, pp. 800–817
Richard Wakeford, "Chernobyl and Fukushima—where are we now?" Journal of Radiological Protection 36.2 (2016): E1.
[1] The IAEA is a lobby for nuclear industry, which approaches the study of the accident and aftermath from within the parameters of continued nuclear power.