Russia’s war in Ukraine made it strikingly obvious what historians and social scientists have emphasized in their analyses of nuclear programs since WW II: that the “peaceful atom”, as the civilian, non-military applications of nuclear technologies have been referred to since the famous “Atom for Peace” speech by the US President Eisenhower in 1953, is never entirely “peaceful”. Indeed, civilian and military nuclear technologies have been inextricably intertwined since the dawn of atomic age. Nuclear power was “born violent”, as the historian Robert Jacob reminds us, because it was invented as part of producing the atomic bomb: the first nuclear reactors had the sole purpose to produce plutonium for the weapons1. Indeed, promotion of the civilian nuclear applications served diverse military purposes. The states that had the bomb used the peaceful atom to limit international and national public discontent with the expansion of the nuclear weapons production and testing, and to prevent other states from getting the bomb. Several other states used civilian nuclear programs to develop clandestine nuclear military applications2. In fact, civilian and military nuclear technologies use same natural resources, their risks and impact on the environment are very similar, and they draw on same knowledge and material infrastructures3. Most recently, Russia’s war in Ukraine opened a frightening new chapter in this history: the weaponization of civilian nuclear installations.
The artificial separation between the military and civilian nuclear technology has been crucial to maintaining existing international nuclear order and is enshrined in multiple nuclear agreements, institutions, organizations, national and international. More important, it is at the foundation of the international non-proliferation regime first institutionalized by the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1962 that divided the world into nuclear haves and have-nots, and aimed at preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons (while preserving the right of those few who have them to continue having them), and facilitating the diffusion of the peaceful nuclear technologies to serve the interests of other states.
The nuclear history of Ukraine has also been viewed through the lens of this artificial separation. Since independent Ukraine agreed to let go of the nuclear weapons arsenal that it inherited from the Soviet Union and signed the NPT as a non-nuclear state in 1994, the interconnexions between military and civilian atom have largely remained out of focus of scholarly attention4. Instead, Ukrainian nuclear historiography as well as popular representations about country’s nuclear history have been dominated by a single event, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. And during the ongoing war, the Chernobyl disaster site became the central stage for military activities when the Russian military occupied the plant and Chernobyl exclusion zone. But Ukrainian nuclear history starts long before the building of the first nuclear power reactor at Chernobyl and is also connected with the Soviet atomic bomb project.
In this essay I will emphasize this civilian-military interface while providing a historical context for understanding the heightened nuclear safety and environmental risks due to the Russia’s war on Ukraine. First, I shall briefly recall the “long” nuclear history of Ukraine. Second, I shall analyze which facilities that developed during that history have become most vulnerable in the context of Russian aggression.
The beginning of the atomic age in Ukraine: nuclear research and large-scale uranium mining, 1930s-1950s
Nuclear history in Ukraine dates to the creation in 1928 in Kharkiv of the Ukrainian (later Kharkiv) Physical Technical Institute (UFTI or KhFTI). The Institute was renowned for pathbreaking research in theoretical, low temperature and nuclear physics. Its staff included such well-known physicists as Kirill Sinelnikov, Aleksander Leipunsky, Lev Shubnikov, and future Nobel laureate Lev Landau. In 1932 the first experiments in nuclear fission in the Soviet Union were conducted at UFTI.
By 1940 several of UFTI scientists worked on the first proposal on how to build a bomb, even if these proposals were eventually rejected by scientists from Moscow5. During WW II, UFTI’s personnel were evacuated, and the Germans looted and destroyed the laboratory. Late in the war UFTI became “Laboratory No. 1” of the Atomic Project of USSR6. After the war most design work on weapons and production were moved to Russia. UFTI specialists focused on such peaceful applications as fusion research.
From the late 1940s and 1950s a series of large uranium mining and reprocessing facilities were established in Ukraine. During this time the Soviet Union produced and tested its first nuclear bombs, and Ukrainian uranium became increasingly important to weapons production. In 1948 Prydniprovs’kyi Chemical Plant (then called Plant No. 906) was built by Gulag prisoners in South Central Ukraine to process uranium ore of the Pervomaiske uranium deposit in the Kryvyi Rih basin. Later, the plant mostly reprocessed uranium ore coming from other Soviet republics and East European socialist nations (Kazakhstan, East Germany, Romania, Hungary) The processed uranium was later further enriched in Russia for weapons or as fuel for nuclear reactors. At the height of its production the plant produced uranium used in up to two-thirds of Soviet nuclear weapons7.
In 1951 Plant (Kombinat) # 9 (now the Eastern Mining and Processing Combine, SkhidGZK, near Zhovti Vody, in Kirovograd oblast) was established. It became the main enterprise responsible for uranium ore mining and production of natural uranium concentrate in Ukraine. Although production has diminished significantly, Ukraine’s SkhidGZK company has produced between 500 and 800 tons of uranium per year, or up to 30% of the country’s needs. In all, Ukraine has a dozen uranium mining sites, but uranium mining continues in only three of them8.
In the Novokostiantynivska mine of the Eastern GZK.
In the 1950s Ukraine opened several other plants that produced equipment for the nuclear arsenal, such as a Kharkiv facility that produced control systems for nuclear missiles, and another plant producing rockets that could be fitted with nuclear warheads. Ukraine therefore contributed in significant ways to the Soviet nuclear weapons arsenal from design to mining and from enrichment to delivery, and at the end of the Cold War a large part of this arsenal was deployed on Ukraine’s territory.
Producing energy: from Soviet to Ukrainian nuclear program
In 1967 Soviet authorities took the decision to build the first nuclear power plant in Ukraine, and in 1977 the first unit of Chernobyl plant commenced operation. In the decade before the catastrophic accident at Chernobyl in 1986, nine more reactors had been added to the grid at five different locations, including three more at Chernobyl site. When the Chernobyl disaster occurred in April 1986, ten reactors were operating and seven more were under construction in Ukraine. Even the catastrophic accident at unit 4 did not at first slow down the development of nuclear power in Ukraine; six more units came online in Ukraine between 1986 and 1990. The three units of the Chernobyl station that were shut down after the accident resumed operation by the end of 1987.
Nuclear power stations were managed from Moscow by the Soviet Ministry of Energy, thereby bypassing ministries at the republican level and making control and safety matters of Soviet, not local, importance. However, even if the development of the nuclear power in Ukraine is initially an essentially colonial project, it has gradually “taken roots” in Ukrainian soil9. Indeed, the “Ukrainization” of the Soviet atom started long before the Soviet collapse and occurred with strong local support for these projects on Ukraine’s territory, growing numbers of Ukrainian nuclear specialists, employed both in Ukraine and elsewhere in the USSR, and the existence of a range of enterprises producing nuclear technologies for the Soviet energy sector and military industry10.
However, when a broad independence movement developed in Ukraine it drew on strong anti-nuclear sentiment that was fueled by delayed revelations about the nature and the scale of the disaster impact11. Many anti-communist protesters came to see the Chernobyl accident, and nuclear power in general, as a manifestation of Russian-Soviet colonialism. In response to this anti-nuclear sentiment, the Ukrainian Rada (parliament) voted in August 1990 to adopt a moratorium on the construction and commissioning of new nuclear power units12.
When Ukraine gained its independence in 1991 upon the collapse of the USSR, the country's leaders decided to maintain nuclear power capacity amidst economic crisis and recession; the nation needed electricity. The public perception of nuclear technology had also changed, as it came to be associated with the country’s energy independence. In October 1993 the Rada voted to overturn the moratorium and to keep the three remaining reactors at Chernobyl in operation13. Soon after the repeal of the moratorium, construction resumed at the Zaporizhzhia, Khmelnytska and Rivne stations. Zaporizhzhia Unit 6 was commissioned in 1995, making the plant the biggest in Europe, and two more units, one at Khmelnytska and another one in Rivne came online in 2004.
The pursuit of the nuclear energy program in independent Ukraine posed challenges beyond dealing with the legacy of Chernobyl. The collapse of the Soviet system meant the end of Soviet institutional arrangements and regulations, and the partial disintegration Soviet nuclear technological system, including all elements of the fuel cycle from uranium mining, enrichment and fuel fabrication to reactor building and waste management. This had a serious impact on Ukrainian nuclear sector which had both to establish its own nuclear agencies and ministries almost from scratch and to cope with its strong technological dependency on Russia.
Goskomatom (the State Committee of Ukraine for the Utilization of Nuclear Energy) was formed soon after Ukrainian independence that ultimately became the small Department of Nuclear Energy in the Ministry of Energy and Coal Industry. Energoatom, its utility partner that operates all fifteen Ukrainian reactors, was created in 1995. As for regulation, Ukraine's State Inspectorate for Supervision of Nuclear Safety was created only in 1992 and struggled to establish its independence from the industry; since 2018 it has been called the State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate of Ukraine.
Technological dependence on Russia has been a constant problem for the post-Soviet Ukrainian nuclear industry. Different Ukrainian governments pursued a variety of projects, some international, to lessen dependence, but only after the beginning of the Russian war in Eastern Ukraine have these attempts led to meaningful changes. Since all fifteen operating reactors in Ukraine are of Soviet-Russian design, Ukraine is dependent on Russia for nuclear fuel deliveries. Until recently, the Russian enterprise TVEL was the only producer of the fuel for Soviet/Russian pressurized water reactors. Ukraine mines uranium, but it has neither enrichment nor reprocessing facilities; it has been buying nuclear fuel from Russia and sending the spent fuel back for storage and reprocessing. Since the early 2000s, Ukraine has cooperated with Westinghouse Electric which, after much trial, testing, and political resistance from the officials trying to protect Russian monopoly, now produces competing nuclear fuel assemblies. From 2014 Ukraine finally started to increasingly use Westinghouse assemblies produced at a facility in Sweden, and currently six of fifteen reactors use this fuel.
Radioactive leftovers
Accumulated radioactive waste (RW) and contamination make nuclear power in Ukraine problematic, and the dangers associated with them have become particularly acute during the current war. Spent nuclear fuel (SNF) is the most highly radioactive part of what is left at nuclear power stations when it is replaced by fresh fuel. During the Soviet period, Ukraine sent all of its SNF back to Russia for storage and reprocessing. It continued doing so, at great expense, after the USSR collapsed. Until recently, only one operating station had its own spent nuclear fuel storage, the Zaporizhzhia plant, that opened in 2001. In 2022 a centralized storage for SNF in Chernobyl exclusion zone that Ukraine had been building since the mid-2010s was finally ready to open and Ukraine no longer needs to use Russian services14.
As for other radioactive waste, the great majority of it is concentrated at the Chernobyl station site and the exclusion zone around it that has been gradually transformed since the late 1980s into a nuclear wasteland, a sort of “sacrificial zone” for radioactive leftovers. In 1995, Ukraine and the G7 countries signed a Memorandum of Understanding to close the station in exchange for significant compensation, and Ukraine closed down the last operating reactor at Chernobyl in 2000. The very long and extremely costly international effort to make the site of the disaster stable and safe is still ongoing. An important milestone was reached in 2016, when a massive new protective arch was installed over the destroyed reactor and its old containment structure built in late 1986, popularly known as Sarcophagus. However, the highly radioactive debris that remains under new safe confinement must eventually be properly disassembled and stored. Several new long-term waste storage and reprocessing facilities have been built in the exclusion zone that are designed to host waste from other sites in Ukraine.
Chernobyl new safe confinement.
Ukraine’s extensive nuclear infrastructure produced contaminated territories and toxic legacies beyond Chernobyl site, in places such as the uranium mining and milling facilities in Central and Eastern Ukraine. There are several storage facilities that contain research and medical radioactive waste, and two contaminated sites that resulted from so-called “peaceful nuclear explosions” within Ukraine15. Ukraine also inherited military nuclear waste in at least six sites, three of which - two in Crimea and one in Donetsk - are situated on the territories over which Ukraine lost control in 2014. The exact contents of waste at these sites is unknown since the relevant documentation is missing. Since 2010s there have been negotiations with NATO to work on the safe dismantling of these sites and work have advanced at two of them.
These numerous nuclear sites and contaminated territories have posed unprecedented risks since the beginning of the Russia’s war in Ukraine in 2014. The estimation of these risks is still difficult both because of the continuing hostilities and the lack of historical precedents, but they will certainly durably affect national, regional and international nuclear security and safety.
Immediate risks: direct damage from military activities and disruptions of nuclear security and safety
Since the first days of the Russian war, there has been an unprecedented situation in which, as the International Atomic Energy Agency put it, all indispensable pillars for ensuring nuclear safety and security during an armed conflict has been significantly compromised. Among these pillars are physical integrity of nuclear installations, their secure connection to the electrical grid, normal functioning of safety, security and radiation monitoring systems, lack of undue pressure on the operating personnel, and reliable communications16.
These risks have been in international spotlight since the first days of the war when the Russian military seized Chernobyl site and fighting took place in the vicinity of the decommissioned reactors, reactor 4 that was destroyed in 1986 with its new confinement structure, spent fuel and RW facilities. The emplacement and maneuvering of military vehicles, and the digging trenches by soldiers led to highly contaminated soil being stirred up, which led to further spread of radioactivity. However, the disruption of the Chernobyl facilities’ connection to the electrical grid represented an even more serious risk because this threatened to disable ventilation and cooling systems. Indeed, spent nuclear fuel from shutdown Chernobyl reactors stored on the site needs constant cooling and ventilation because it continues to produce heat, although in much less dangerous quantities when decades ago. For several days Chernobyl facilities operated on back-up diesel generators.
Russia also violated the IAEA pillars to guarantee nuclear safety when, on March 4, 2022, just a week into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian troops broke through Ukrainian defenses in the town of Energodar, shelled, and later seized, the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant. Damage resulted to buildings on the site including a training center and laboratory which was set on fire. In late September, Russia declared the annexation of the Zaporizhzhya region and later announced that it considers the NPP Russian property.
During the months that followed its seizure, the station has been routinely shelled, leading to further damage and to the disruption of the station’s power supply. Indeed, all of the four power lines that connect the NPP to the grid have been damaged at some point and the stations’ six large reactors, and its large SNF storage, have had to rely on diesel generators. This makes the risk of a so-called “loss of coolant” accident such as one at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in March 2011 when tsunami destroyed the connection to the grid and disabled most of the cooling systems, evermore plausible.
The threats to the physical integrity of operating reactors, spent nuclear fuel storage and other facilities come also from rockets and missiles launched by Russia all over Ukrainian territory. There have been so far several cases registered of Russian guided missiles flying over the territory of nuclear plants, and on September 19, missiles exploded only 300 meters from the South Ukraine NPP in Mykolaiv region. Several other facilities with radioactive materials were hit during past months, such as low-level radioactive waste storages in Kyiv and Kharkiv and a nuclear research facility at Kharkiv Physical-technical institute.
These events also lead to the disruption of physical security, intrusion and illicit circulation of radioactive materials. Physical security or protection usually means all the measures to protect nuclear facilities and material against intrusion, theft, diversion, and other malicious acts. In normal time the access to facilities, all activities, and all radioactive and nuclear materials are meticulously monitored and regulated. There are strict and precise protocols about who can access what and when, and which license should they obtain; and there are monitoring missions of national and international organizations to control the respect of these rules and protocols, for example, in the framework of the so-called safeguards system of the IAEA that ensures very tight monitoring of production and circulation of materials that could be used for nuclear weapons.
In the case of the Russian occupation of Chernobyl and Zaporizhzha nuclear power plants unlicensed and unknown personnel have accessed and controlled access to nuclear sites and to the dangerous materials at these sites. Moreover, in the case of the Chernobyl site, abandoned by the Russian military on March 31, many facilities were looted, including laboratories with radioactive samples and radioactive sources used to calibrate such equipment as dosimeters, raising worries about illicit circulation of toxic radioactive materials.
Disrupted maintenance, protection, monitoring and remediation of the radioactive sites
Russia’s war on Ukraine involves somewhat less dramatically visible or immediate nuclear risks, but such risks are still important in the long run. They include disrupted maintenance and monitoring of nuclear and radioactive sites and facilities that often require active management such as cooling, pumping water away or radiological surveillance. For example, in Chernobyl exclusion zone, radiation monitoring system was switched off during the first days which made it very difficult, or even impossible, to survey potential radioactivity spikes on the site. Due to military activities and occupation, there was an increased risk of fires and the real difficulty to extinguish them safely. Such fires can further damage fragile environments and contribute to spread of radioactivity.
Another example of the environmental effects of the war in the longer run is the case of radioactive sites situated on the temporary occupied territories in Donbass over which Ukraine lost control since 2014. The region has large number of interconnected coal mines, with a number of them containing radioactive waste, for instance, Alexander-Zapad, Uglegorska, and the Kalinin mines in Donetsk. Such waste can come from coal mining, as coal contains small percentage of uranium. But the most problematic case is the Yunyi Komunar (Yunkom) mine where the Soviet authorities conducted a peaceful nuclear explosion in 1979 in attempt to mitigate a massive leak of gas. As a result of this explosion a sort of vitrified capsule with highly radioactive waste formed inside the mine.
As closed mines are quickly flooded, they need constant drainage to avoid the spread of radioactive and other toxic contamination in the environment, especially because the mines are interconnected. The authorities of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics stopped costly pumping at several of these mines, including in 2018 at Yunkom. Scientists that conducted monitoring have recently confirmed the spread of the radioactivity in the environment both in Donetsk and in Luhansk region17.
Finally, other radioactive sites with wastes accumulated mostly during Soviet era are under threat in Donetsk, such as one on the territory of the Donetsk state factory for chemical products. The burial of the waste of unknown quantities and contents on that site dates to 1963, and the site remediation became impossible due to the war that resulted in extremely conditions and protection of the site. (There have been reports that some metallic structures there were dismantled as scrap metal).
Destruction of knowledge and of its material infrastructure
Another kind of long-term damage of Russia’s war in Ukraine concerns the destruction of knowledge about the radiation impact on health and environment and of the carriers of that knowledge: people, their laboratories, their samples and their equipment. This risk may be the least discussed, but such knowledge is crucial to ensure that radiation damage becomes and remains “visible” in public space. Historians and sociologists of science have documented the cases of the so-called production of ignorance or “science undone” concerning environmental and public health effects of toxic pollution. They have showed that the consequences of such pollution, as is the case for radioactive contamination, are not directly visible18. Instead, visibility of harm – and possibility of its mitigation - relies upon durable, costly, and extensive infrastructure for data collection and analysis as well as labor intensive and time-consuming efforts to produce knowledge.
These efforts were very limited in the case of Chernobyl accident19, and the ongoing war has resulted in further damage, such as the destruction and looting of a recently renovated research laboratory in Chernobyl exclusion zone, since 2015 called Central Analytical Laboratory. Created thanks to EU funding, the laboratory contained expensive equipment, samples of different radioactive waste materials, and radioactive sources for equipment calibration. It was engaged in radiation and environmental monitoring of the exclusion zone. Each year its employees collected roughly 5,000 samples of air, water, soil and hydrobiota, analyzed them, and produced data showing the content of the main radionuclides in the selected samples. It provided analysis of radioactive waste that would be stored in the exclusion zone. Now, samples, expensive equipment, data and years of monitoring data may be gone20.
Destruction of knowledge resulted also from the killing of scientists, researchers, students, as many of specialists have temporarily left their jobs or studies to go to fight. The working conditions for the scientists who continue research have seriously deteriorated during the war. In a much less dramatic way, ties of many years with Russian scientists, including those who for many years participated in the analysis of the highly radioactive waste in the Chernobyl zone, have been cut.
A Ukrainian soldier in Prypiat, April 3, 2022.
The blow to the international non-proliferation regime – and the risk to the European environment
Taken together, Russia’s war on Ukraine constitutes a serious blow to the existing international non-proliferation regime. After the Soviet collapse in 1991 Ukraine inherited a significant nuclear arsenal, the third largest in the world at that point, with intercontinental ballistic missiles, strategic bombers that could deliver nuclear warheads, and tactical nuclear weapons. There is some discussion whether Ukraine had capacity and expertise to safely preserve these arms and become a full-fledged nuclear weapons state, but Marianna Budgeryn, a specialist in non-proliferation, argues convincedly that Ukraine indeed had necessary scientific and military-industrial potential for that21.
And in the early 1990s, some Ukrainian elites argued that ownership of nuclear weapons would guarantee the country’s sovereignty and security, in particular with regard to a Russian threat. Ultimately, Ukraine chose to give up its nuclear weapons and adhere to non-proliferation regime under pressure from Western countries, and especially from the US. It negotiated hard its security guarantees. However, as the US did not want to accept a legally binding treaty, the Budapest memorandum that was finally signed in 1994 between Ukraine, Russia, UK and the US was above all a political document. The three countries committed to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity and not to use the nuclear weapons threat against it. When Russia violated the memorandum in 2014 when it annexed Crimea, and neither the US nor UK choose to intervene to protect Ukraine, this was a serious blow to the international efforts to further reduce the quantity, or even prohibit, nuclear weapons. The weakening of the non-proliferation regime in the longer term increases the chances that more states will seek nuclear weapons and those few who already have them will be less likely to reduce their arsenals let alone give their nuclear weapons up. Further, nuclear proliferation will not only increase risk of the use of these arms but, as we know so well from history, will continue to destroy environment and public health.
Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine we have seen unprecedented mobilization of researchers, investigative journalists, legal specialists, and activists who are collecting and analyzing information about the impacts of the war on Ukraine’s people, economy and society, including detailed documentation of the war crimes committed by the Russian military. If previously environmental damage was neglected as secondary to direct killing and destruction resulting from the war, it has now become an important focus of public attention. Documentation of the environmental impact of the war relies on crowdsourcing of information and on professional and semi-professional monitoring. This increased awareness might still be insufficient to prevent the risks of the use of nuclear arms, or the transformation nuclear power facilities into sites of war. But the documentation of the war’s human and environmental impacts, including in the nuclear sphere, has demonstrated that the artificial separation between civilian and military technologies is untenable. The peaceful atom in Ukraine was never fully peaceful and has been turned into a weapon of war by Russia.
Notes
1
Robert Jacobs, “Born Violent: The Origins of Nuclear Power”, Asian Journal of Peacebuilding, vol. 7 no. 1, 2019, p. 9-29.
2
Jacob Hamblin, The Wretched Atom: America's Global Gamble with Peaceful Nuclear Technology, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2021.
3
Sonja Schmid, “A new ‘nuclear normalcy’?”, Journal of International Political Theory, vol. 15, no. 3, 2019, p. 297-315.
4
A recent edited volume on the nuclear history of Ukraine is a rare exception: Polina Sinovets (ed.), Ukraine’s Nuclear History: A Non-Proliferation Perspective, Berlin, Springer, 2022.
5
Oleksandr Cheban, « Ukraine and Soviet Nuclear History », Wilson Center, Apr. 15, 2016.
6
Iurii Raniuk, Laboratoriia No. 1, Kharkiv, AKTA, 2001.
7
Yuriy Tkachenko, The Prydniprovsky Chemical Plant Ukraine’s Uranium Heritage, Oslo, Bellona, 2020.
9
Anna Veronika Wendland, “Nuclearizing Ukraine – Ukrainizing the Atom. Soviet nuclear technopolitics, crisis, and resilience on the imperial periphery”, Cahiers du monde russe, vol. 60, no. 2-3, 2019, p. 335-368.
11
Jane Dawson, Eco-nationalism : Anti-nuclear activism and national identity in Russia, Lithuania, and Ukraine, Durham, Duke University Press, 1996.
12
Supreme Rada of Ukraine, “Pro Moratorii na Budivnytstvo novykh atomnykh elektrostantsii na terytorii Ukrains’koi RSR”, Postanova, no. 134-XII, Aug. 2, 1990.
13
Supreme Rada of Ukraine, “Pro Deiaki Zakhody Zabezpechennia Narodnoho Hospodarstva Elektroenerhiieiu”, Postanova, no. 3538-XII, Oct. 21, 1993.
15
The term “peaceful nuclear explosion,” PNE, describes uses of nuclear explosives for non-military purposes, usually for mining or excavation.
16
IAEA, Nuclear Safety, Security and Safeguards in Ukraine : 2nd Summary Report by the Director General, 28 April - 5 September 2022, Vienna, IAEA, 2022, p. 7.
18
Olga Kuchinskaya, The Politics of Invisibility: Public Knowledge about Radiation Health Effects after Chernobyl, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2014; Soraya Boudia, Nathalie Jas (eds.), Powerless Science? Science and Politics in a Toxic World, New York, Berghahn Books, 2014; Ximo Guillem-Llobat, Agustí Nieto-Galan (eds.), Tóxicos invisibles. La construcción de la ignorancia ambiental, Barcelona, Icaria, 2020.
19
Kate Brown, “Blinkered science: why we know so little about Chernobyl’s health effects”, Culture, Theory and Critique, vol. 58, no. 4, 2017, p. 413-434.
21
Mariana Budjeryn, “The Power of the NPT: International Norms and Ukraine's Nuclear Disarmament,” The Nonproliferation Review, vol. 22, no. 2, 2015, p. 203-237.