The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant explosion in 1986 is arguably the worst industrial accident in history, but there has been comparatively very little disclosure of its consequences. This was a disaster predominantly kept quiet by the Soviet government; the victims were lied to about the dangers of the radioactivity and the seriousness of the consequences were kept to a minimum. Svetlana Alexievich was one of the few people who managed to expose the truth through her book Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. There have also been a multitude of documentaries centered on the disaster, however, with different approaches, than Alexievich, in informing viewers. *Alexievich wrote Voices from Chernobyl with the intent to …show more content…
The video follows Shane Smith, the co-founder of Vice, as he travels to Chernobyl with the intention to hunt mutant wolves in the highly irradiated Red Forest near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Smith takes a guerilla style journalism approach by playing an active role in collecting information on the dangers of the contaminated land through interviews with locals and tour guides. The video, for the most part, however, doesn’t put enough focus on informing viewers about the nuclear accident. Smith talks about the accident briefly and provides exaggerated information on the mutated animals for the sake of showing just how dangerous the area around Chernobyl really is—in other words, to raise the stakes of Smith’s hunting adventure: “You’ve got three-eyed wolves and five legged bears that are in Chernobyl now, so we’re gonna go and we’re gonna hunt them” (The Radioactive Beasts of Chernobyl). Accompanied by energetic music and profanity, it is clear that the video’s intent is focused more on showing a ‘crazy’ and ‘fun’ experience rather than an educational
The engineers in Visit Sunny Chernobyl created a new frontier past the safety zone because they want to test the limits of the reactor. What the scientists didn’t account for is that fact that the reactors already had the potential of a dangerous chain reaction. (Blackwell 6) Consequently, their boundary destroying led to catastrophic consequences and the total annihilation of a land area because of massive radiation. Blackwell thought Chernobyl was so horrific he expressed that no one should visit without a “working understanding of radiation and how it’s measured” (Blackwell 7). These are some horrific consequences that followed from surpassing the
Imagine working with radioactive materials in a secret camp, and the government not telling you that this material is harmful to your body. In the book Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters by Kate Brown, she takes her readers on a journey to expose what happened in the first two cities that started producing plutonium. Brown is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She has won a handful of prizes, such as the American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize for the Best Book in International European History, and was also a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow. Brown wrote this book by looking through hundreds of archives and interviews with people, the evidence she found brought light to how this important history of the Cold War left a nuclear imprint on the world today.
This article does not contain a comical sense to it but has a dark, serious tone that is used to show the disturbing realities of this world that these people live in. The article using multiple rhetorical questions that are meant for the reader to think about and place themselves in the described world. This allows them to place themselves in this world and visualize the harsh reality and fear that this world truly holds. The audience is again those people who are not part of this world but are supposed to be in the position of “on the outside looking in” as this description tries to set them in this world within their imagination. This news article breaks its genre conventions as it is not the usual detailed-packed account of a situation you see on the news that simply describes the news it is talking about. Instead, this uses questions to stimulate the reader to envision their own idea of what is happening, while using some supporting details to sway the reader the way I want them to think. Differently, this does keep the convention of having a serious, and dark tone that most of the new news stories and articles
Today, Chernobyl is defined as an abandoned city in the northern Ukraine. Pripyat, the city founded in 1970 to house the workers for the nearby Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, is currently described as a ghost town. The population of Chernobyl in 2010 was around 500. Prior to the spring of 1986, the city was inhabited by about 14,000 residents. For $140-$160 U.S. dollars, SoloEast Travel offers guided tours of Chernobyl, but that price does not include the $80 charge for mandatory insurance. Plus, everyone who goes on the tour has to be tested for radiation before leaving the Zone of Alienation, the 19 mile area around the site. Long before the worst nuclear disaster in history, Chernobyl was a city. For more than 300 years after the nuclear fallout, the area will be contaminated.
I am interested in the role of visual rhetoric in maintaining this "war of position" between military, environmental, arms-control, pacifist, industrial, scientific and federal interests [in post-Cold War culture]. Issues in this research include the nature of verbal and visual codes in nuclear representations (e.g., in critical disagreement over the success of nuclear landscape photography in evoking viewer knowledge of the deadly, invisible radiation which "really" suffuses its depicted objects), the uses to which images are put in various social contexts (e.g., in museum exhibits commemorating the Japanese atomic bombings), and the consequences of images for existing power relations between nuclear authorities and citizens (e.g., in legitimating the "accelerated" -- and arguably incomplete -- cleanup of contaminated nuclear weapons plants by federal agencies and their contractors) . . .
Countless engineering disasters have occurred in this world, many civilians lost their lives due to corrupted constructions. The most fatal and deadly engineering disaster that took place in our history was the Chernobyl disaster. The Chernobyl catastrophe was a nuclear setback that happened at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in on April 26, 1986. It is seen as the most recognizable terrible nuclear power plant cataclysm ever. A nuclear crisis in one of the reactors caused a fire that sent a cluster of radioactive consequence that on the long run spread all over Europe.
A wild animal’s life remains destroyed and many lives have ended, all for dangerous entertainment.
A - Plan of Investigation- For my Historical Investigation, I wanted to research the catastrophic nuclear meltdown that occurred on April 26th, 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. My research question is: Could the Chernobyl disaster have been avoided, if so, which moments in the chain of events leading to the accident needed to occur differently? To carry out my investigation, I plan on utilizing the Internet, encyclopedias and finding books that explain how accidental Chernobyl really was, the variety of mistakes made by the Ukrainians, as well as the Soviets, and how these problems could be fixed in accordance to the time period. I will use Chernobyl, global environmental injustice and mutagenic threats by Nicholas Low and Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl by Adriana Petryna for references that can help me in my investigation.
Every since the industrial revolution, society has moved to jobs, factories, manufacturing goods and products, and larger cities. This process called industrialization is when an economy modifies its way of living from an agriculture based living to the production of merchandise in factories. The manual labor that is required for farm work is replaced with mass production on assembly lines. Andrew Blackwell visits this idea of industrialization in Visit Sunny Chernobyl but to a higher extent. Blackwell states “today that society is an industrial one, resource hungry and plant-spanning, growing so inefficiently large, we believe that it is disrupting its own host… It’s not just about living sustainably. It’s about being able to live with ourselves,”
While this footage plays, the former trainers discuss the alarmingly low amount of information they, as employees who worked with these orcas on a daily basis, were given. Footage of Tamaree being pulled into the water by Orkid and the resulting compound fracture in her arm exemplifies a situation that could have ended in a fatality. Cowperthwaite also includes several minutes of footage of the Ken Peters attack, as well as footage of him receiving medical attention in the aftermath. A multitude of shorter clips of trainer accidents surround these longer clips. The interviewees comment on the culture at SeaWorld where they were expected to get right back out there after an injury and that SeaWorld ignored risks to trainer safety. The interviews about the danger the trainer’s were unknowingly placed under are disturbing on their own, however without the footage of bloody and injured trainers, there is less of an impact. By including the gory footage, Cowperthwaite forces the viewer to acknowledge how dangerous working with orcas is. In turn, the interviews contrast this evident danger with SeaWorld’s repeated claim that working with orcas is not particularly dangerous, thus showing that SeaWorld knowingly misinforms their
For example, the video shows how health epidemics are a hot topic. When the flu was around, many commercials were targeted towards the issue (Glassner 2009). The video also reveals how even vaccines were seen as a deadly source of protection at one point in our culture, and seen to “kill your child” (Glassner 2009). Certain fear trends are sold in the media to show the so called dangers out there, and are delivered to every demographic. News media is a huge soruce of selling fear because it is the government’s way to control a culture as a whole (Glassner 2009). Organizations, politicians, and local depend on people’s attention, and that is why fear is used to draw awareness on issues that are often not justified (Glassner 2009). Fear often becomes a conflicting trend, and it causes people to battle for it. According to (Glassner 2009), “this is done by implications and coast.” The media goes for what will sell, and the news covers what attracts its viewers. After 9/11, the fear of U.S being attacked was uncontrollable. News headline took it to advantage and manipulated people. The video reflects on how the “war on terror after 9/11 alone was manipulated in so many ways” (Glassner
There is a range of safety concerns in regards to nuclear power with one of these being the effects of radiation resulting from a nuclear accident. Research shows that there is a link between exposure to radiation and the development of cancer (Zakaib 2011) whist Preston (2012) express’s concerns that people exposed to radiation may not be able to see the effects of radiation exposure for several years as was the case in Chernobyl. Furthermore, people are unable to move back into the vicinity of reactors that have been involved in an incident due to their fear of radiation as is the chase in Fukishima (Cyranoski & Brumfiel 2011) and in the areas surrounding Chernobyl (Berton 2006). Governments are increasingly becoming more stringent in the levels of radiation in which people are exposed to with this evident in Fukishma, where the Japanese government evacuated people living within a 30km radius of the plant (Evacuation Orders and Restricted Areas n.d.). As a result of nuclear accidents and the resulting radiation, support for nuclear power has diminished due to safety concerns.
Chernobyl was the greatest nuclear disaster of the 20th century. On April 26th, 1986, one of four nuclear reactors located in the Soviet Union melted down and contaminated a vast area of Eastern Europe. The meltdown, a result of human error, lapsed safety precautions, and lack of a containment vessel, was barely contained by dropping sand and releasing huge amounts of deadly radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere. The resulting contamination killed or injured hundreds of thousands of people and devastated the environment. The affects of this accident are still being felt today and will be felt for generations to come.
mental degradation. The mass production of goods, in manufacturing industries, more so has led to a lot of pollutants being released into the atmosphere. These pollutants continue to degrade the environment. There are several forms of pollutions that continue to be heavily experienced as a result of the activities of Multi-National Corporations. The two most adverse types of pollution are water pollution and air pollution. They affect a lot of the systems that are in play.
On April26, 1986, the nuclear power plant was exploded in Chernobyl, Ukraine. At 1:23 AM, while everyone were sleeping, Reactor #4 exploded, and 40 hours later, all the city residence were forcefully moved to other cities, and they never return to their home. The Chernobyl disaster is ranked the worst nuclear accident. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant was ran by the Soviet Union central nuclear energy corporation. (International Atomic Energy Agency-IAEA, 2005)