Articles by Sonja Schmid

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Chernobyl Fatalities and the Challenges of Expert Judgment
Sonja Schmid – Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 16 May 2016

As the uncertainty over Chernobyl’s death toll illustrates, “scientific opinion” is not always unanimous, and neither is “expert judgment.” Scientific expertise is not immune to controversy. And expert judgment changes over time.

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Nuclear Emergencies and the Masters of Improvisation
Sonja Schmid – Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2 May 2016

April 26 marks the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, and those old enough to remember the event can recall the explosion, the evacuation, and the dread. But they rarely remember an immense milestone in the response to the disaster: the completion in November 1986 of a concrete encasement of Chernobyl’s reactor number four. Workers drawn from all across the Soviet Union built this “sarcophagus” under extreme radiological conditions, on the ruins of the destroyed reactor.

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