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Radiation Science After the Cold War. The Politics of Measurement, Risk, and Compensation in Kazakhstan

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Health, Technologies, and Politics in Post-Soviet Settings

Abstract

In the northeast of Kazakhstan more than 110 above ground nuclear explosions were carried out between 1949 and 1963. After the moratorium on atmospheric nuclear tests, underground nuclear testing was continued until 1989. This chapter follows the routes chosen by scientists and those responsible for public compensation programmes to navigate uncertainties of radiation-exposure in local communities around Semipalatinsk. It describes how, since the 1990s, research and compensation programmes have been negotiated and implemented in post-Soviet Kazakhstan, following decades of biomedical research during Soviet time. It shows how in the context of international collaborative projects, efforts to document long-term health effects stimulated innovations in epidemiological studies, exposure reconstruction, risk estimation, and radiation ecology. However, while negotiating compensation for local communities, most benefits of the innovative studies travelled to scientific practices in western countries, leaving global health disparities as they were.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The terms ‘transition’ and ‘transitology’ in post-Soviet studies beg the question of from where to where this transition was supposed to take place. Post-Soviet transition processes have been said to have moved from state to corporate realms at first and recently back to the state (Goldman 2010) in the Russian Federation and in Kazakhstan.

  2. 2.

    During the Cold War fallout debates, both Western and Soviet radiation biologists and geneticists measured mutation rates in human cells irradiated in the laboratory at defined doses (Luchnik and Sevankaev 1976; Sevan’kaev et al. 1995). With regard to chromosomal damage, Soviet medical geneticists and radiation biologists also wrote about the dangers of radiation and nuclear war (Bochkov 1966, 1983). In the 1970s, cytogenetic techniques to detect chromosomal alterations (e.g. by karyotyping) became widely used in prenatal diagnosis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Susanne Bauer

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  1. Susanne Bauer
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Health, Ethics and Society, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands

    Olga Zvonareva

  2. Centre for Policy Analysis & Studies of Technology, Tomsk State National Research University, Tomsk, Russia

    Evgeniya Popova

  3. Department of Health, Ethics and Society, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands

    Klasien Horstman

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Bauer, S. (2018). Radiation Science After the Cold War. The Politics of Measurement, Risk, and Compensation in Kazakhstan. In: Zvonareva, O., Popova, E., Horstman, K. (eds) Health, Technologies, and Politics in Post-Soviet Settings. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64149-2_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64149-2_9

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-64148-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-64149-2

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