Plutopia is a book about the parallel plutonium plants - one in the US ( Hanford Washington) and the other in the former USSR ( Ozersk in the Souther Urals).   

These plants were used to produce plutonium for the arms race during the Cold War.  They went about it differently in some respects, and in others they were very similar.   Hanford had segregated living quarter - only whites with professional skills were given gorgeous homes, good schools and health care.  If you were an ordinary laborer you had to live in a shanty town which maybe on contaminated ground.  In Russia the whole facility was like a prison regardless if you were actually a prisoner or part of the technical team. During much of it’s existence Maiak ( Mayak) was cordoned off from the rest of Russia.  Eventually they learned that they could keep valuable workers if they treated them to consumer goods ( capitalism in the USSR !)

Here are some quotes from the book:

“the practices of plutopia: partitioning territory into “nuclear” and “clean” zones, skimping on safety and waste management to prioritize production, repressing information about accidents, forging safety records, deploying temporary “jumpers” to do dirty work, and glossing over sick workers and radioactive territories, all while treating select citizens to generous government subsidies and soothing public relations programs.”

“four decades of operation, the Hanford plutonium plant near Richland and the Maiak plant next to Ozersk each issued at least 200 million curies of radioactivity—twice what Chernobyl emitted—into the surrounding environment. The plants left behind hundreds of square miles of uninhabitable territory, contaminated rivers, soiled fields and forests, and thousands of people claiming to be sick from the plants’ radioactive effluence.”

Hanford Site

Russian Farmer affected

There is an excellent article from The Japan Times on the Mayak plant