Plutopia

Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters

Author	Kate Brown
Language	English
Subjects	Nuclear energy; Cold War
Genre	Environmental History
Published	2013
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Publication place	United States
Pages	416
Awards	George Perkins Marsh Prize; Ellis W. Hawley Prize
ISBN	9780199855766

Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters is a 2013 book by American environmental historian Kate Brown. The book is a comparative history of the cities of Richland, in the northwest United States adjacent to the U.S. Department of Energy Hanford Site plutonium production area, and Ozersk, in Russia's southern Ural mountain region. These two cities were home to the world's first plutonium production sites, and in Plutopia Brown charts the environmental and social impacts of those sites on the residents of and the environment surrounding the two cities. Brown argues that the demands of plutonium production – both the danger of the physical process and the secrecy required in the Cold War context – led both US and Soviet officials to create "Plutopias," ideal communities to placate resident families in exchange for their cooperation and control over their bodies. This entailed creating significant state-run welfare programs along with high levels of consumerism in both places. However, each city witnessed what Brown terms "slow-motion disasters" via the slow, and usually controlled, release of high levels of radiation into their surrounding environments.

Awards

Plutopia was awarded the 2014 George Perkins Marsh Prize from the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) and the 2014 Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians (OAH).