Radioactive condo paradise in San Francisco

"On this landscape it became hard to distinguish the impacts of the economic disaster from that of nuclear catastrophe." —Kate Brown, Manual for Survival

A few weeks back I wrote about the radioactive San Francisco island that was polluted by America’s nuclear weapons program — and which is now being turned into an upscale condo hotspot by the city’s developer ruling elite. I gotta be honest, it’s still hard for me to believe this is happening. They’re not just gonna unload this toxic land on a bunch of poor people, like they did in the past. They’re building expensive condos that will be bought or rented by people with real incomes — professionals with respectable jobs in the corporate and tech world. These are people who should matter just a little bit, or you’d think they’d be.

So how this is so smoothly sailing along — despite the radioactivity being a known issue — is a bit of a mystery to me. But maybe it’s just a matter of time. After a few decades, when people and their kids start coming down with strange cancers, then all this radioactive history will suddenly come to the surface. But by then it’ll be late. The damage will be done and the whole thing will be stuck in the courts with nuclear industry experts throwing doubt on people’s claims of victimhood and muddying things up with their research and studies that show everything is perfectly safe.

Thinking about Treasure Island and the total disregard our society has for the long-range harm of nuclear contamination reminded me of the work of Kate Brown. She’s a historian at MIT who writes about the toxic history and politics of nuclear technology in both the Soviet Union and the United States. Her last book — Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future — is one of the greats. It’s basically a revisionist history of the Chernobyl disaster and critical history of nuclear technology. She tries to show that the meltdown was actually much more destructive than the experts want you to believe and that the Soviet response to the accident was more transparent and proactive than people realize. There’s a lot in that book — including a lengthy discussion of how Soviet approaches to treating radiation damage in people was much more advanced than anything that existed in the U.S. But one thing that stuck with me was the lengths to which American and western institutions went to help the Soviet Union downplay the destructiveness of the disaster.

The United States usually never wastes an opportunity to bash the commies. But with Chernobyl, it was in the interests of U.S. to take the U.S.S.R.’s side in this public relations battle: to convince the world that radioactivity poses minimal risk to human life and doesn’t lead to cancers or any of that.

As she describes in the book, the west realized that it and the communist bureaucrats running the Soviet Union had a common objective: to protect nuclear tech. All that other ideological and global domination stuff? That was secondary!