My Research

For my research work, I used Chernobyl as a comparison to study the sensationalism of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, since these represent the two greatest nuclear disasters of all time. While it is difficult to claim that something was sensationalized by solely observing that event itself — disasters are inherently sensational — by showing that Fukushima was more “sensationalized” than Chernobyl and that Chernobyl was ultimately a more dangerous threat, there must have been relative sensationalism in the case of Fukushima. It is intuitive that a more dangerous disaster should read as more sensational.

Newspaper Headlines from Chernobyl

Drawing on the work in Risk, Media and Stigma: Understanding Public Challenges to Modern Science and Technology, a collection edited by Paul Slovic, James Flynn, and Howard Kunreuther, I argued that there has been a stigmatization of nuclear power. The general public, likely due to headlines like those above, seem to generally associate atomic bombs and nuclear power, although they occur due to completely different technologies and a nuclear power plant could never explode like an atomic bomb.¹

Inspiration

While there must be a scholarly motivation for my paper itself, that doesn’t necessarily represent my true motivation for this research project. I was actually fascinated by how our society deals with nuclear disasters because of the invisibility of radiation. We can’t see it, so how do we even begin to have a tangible idea of its risks!

When I first researched this invisibility of radiation, I found a source on radiation and photography by Thom Davies.² In this paper, Davies states that “we can begin to make the invisible threat of radiation appear more tangible” through photography. His photographs display what he calls a double exposure: “once to the invisible radiation and then to the failures of Ukrainian governance.” I found Davies’ ideas so incredible that I planned on making my paper about photography, but I was not able to form sufficient grounds of comparison (since Fukushima is so new and the USSR suppressed most early photographs of Chernobyl). Therefore, I focused my research on ways in which we try to make the threat of radiation tangible through our perception of risk. Nonetheless, I have provided two of Davies’ images below (the captions below are the copied from his paper). Since I did not ultimately write my paper on images of nuclear disaster, I made an effort to make these photographs an integral component of my website.

“This photograph was on the front page of the Kyiv Post newspaper the day after the Chernobyl memorial. The caption read, “A woman cries during the requiem to the Liquidators and victims of the Chernobyl tragedy near the monument ‘To the victims of the Chernobyl tragedy’ in Kiev, Ukraine.” Reproduced with permission of photojournalist Alexey Furman.”

“Participant photograph of a field in Orane Village, four kilometers from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. The bucolic scenes evident in images such as these hide the polluted nature of this deindustrialized landscape. Reproduced with permission from Thom Davies.”