Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats

Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats

Investigative journalism at its best, Full Body Burden tells a story of people and community in Rocky Flats near Denver, Colorado, where a secret nuclear power plant was a major site of employment in the region throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Producing plutonium to fuel America’s cold war nuclear weaponry, the plant became a cause for health and environmental disasters. A disproportionate number of residents suffered from cancer, anemia, and thyroid disease, while soil, water, air, all necessary resources for life, became so highly contaminated that they became a threat for life. Secrecy, silence, and suppression that surround virtually any nuclear production worldwide are distinctive in Iverson’s story, too, illuminating the uneven relationship between national security experts and scientists on the one hand, and the lay people whose life, resilience, and citizenship rights were severely challenged by them, on the other.

Iverson, Kristen

New York: Crown Publishers, 2012.

07/31/2017

Wake, Naoko

English

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