The story of nuclear testing in Nevada in the 1950s and 1960s, and the subsequent health effects on the unsuspecting people downwind in Nevada, Utah and Arizona. The book is framed around the 1982 trial by cancer victims and their survivors, which the author, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, attended.
The story of the Atomic Energy Commission's atomic bomb testing in Southwestern Utah and Eastern Nevada in the early 1950s. Most of the bombs were more powerful than Hiroshima, yet the government assured the local population that they were safe, and denied responsibility for their ensuing illness.
The true story of the thousands of women who worked on the Manhattan Project in the secret city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee during World War II. Nine women are highlighted in this book: janitors, chemists, secretaries, even factory workers who unknowingly separated uranium.
Recommended by Fairewinds board member Chiho Kaneko, “Refuge” is the powerful true story of a family in Utah who are experiencing the health effects of atomic bomb testing. Williams, a naturalist and writer, parallels the story of her mother dying of radiation-induced cancer with the environmental changes occurring simultaneously, as the Great Salt Lake rises to record heights and threatens local wildlife.
Flenniken grew up in a community of Hanford workers in Washington state at the height of the Cold War, where "every father I knew disappeared to fuel the bomb." The author herself worked as an engineer at Hanford for three years. After the release of declassified documents contradicting the safe world she knew as a child, and the radiation-induced illnesses of family friends, Flenniken makes sense of life at Hanford in this much lauded collection of poems.
Fairewinds Energy Education is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to furthering public understanding of nuclear power and nuclear safety related issues.
