![]() ![]() ![]() "She brought the apocalypse into children's bedrooms," wrote a critic for Die Welt after the author's death in 2020. But Pausewang's ultra-bleak, unflinching style also drew criticism. The fact that she used real-life locations in the story – Schlitz, and the Grafenrheinfeld reactor – added to its visceral impact. After the nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011, the book shot back into German bestseller lists. Schools have been named after Pausewang, environmental organisations have showered her with prizes for spreading anti-nuclear awareness, and Germany's Green Party has celebrated her work with screenings of a film version of The Cloud. To many West Germans – especially the so-called "Generation Pausewang" who read it as children and teens – it is as emblematic of the 1980s as stonewashed jeans, Nena and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Cloud went on to sell more than a million copies, and defined an entire era. She titled it Die Wolke ("The Cloud", published in English as Fall-Out). "I thought: what if this kind of catastrophe happened right in the centre of Germany? I had to warn people."įour weeks later, she began to write a story about a fictional nuclear accident, and a girl's struggle to survive the aftermath. She pictured what it would be like if it had occurred even closer, at Grafenrheinfeld, her nearest local nuclear plant. "The children weren't allowed to play in sandboxes anymore, they couldn't eat fresh vegetables anymore, or mushrooms," she later recalled. Now her fear of a disaster had come true, and she could see the impact even in her little hometown of Schlitz. Her son was away on a hiking trip, and when he called her, she yelled down the phone: "Don't sit down on the grass! It's contaminated!" Pausewang had recently published a children's book about nuclear war, and considered atomic energy an existential threat. The surprisingly radical politics of Dr SeussĪround that time, a then relatively little-known German writer and teacher called Gudrun Pausewang was watching the unfolding events with horror. The most comforting children's books ever A childhood friend of mine recalls asking her dad some days after the disaster: "Papa, is there still this TV-activity?" Many of us could barely grasp the concept of radioactivity. In our local grocery shop, people walked along the shelves with printed lists in their hands, showing the radioactivity levels of different foods, to check which ones were safe to eat. Diggers arrived to remove the damp, contaminated sand from playgrounds. For us, and many of our friends, the warning came too late: we'd already been in that rain, just like the rain-splashed lettuce and mushrooms we were now told not to eat. Clouds had carried radioactive rain over to Germany, and children were told not to play outside. The accident had happened two days before, at the Chernobyl nuclear power station. I probably wouldn't even remember that afternoon, if it hadn't been for the news that broke the next day: "Apparently, there has been a serious nuclear accident in the Soviet Union," a worried-looking presenter announced on the evening news. ![]() Alarm systems on the rig had been intentionally inhibited, because the company managing the rig didn’t want the crew to get woken up by false alarms.It was an ordinary day in 1986, in what was then West Germany, and I was playing in the garden with one of my brothers. Take the Deepwater Horizon accident in 2010, which caused a huge amount of oil to spill into the Gulf of Mexico. Judy Edworthy, who studies psychoacoustics and alarm design, says the Three Mile Island incident is a common case study when it comes to bad and ineffective alarm design.Īnd there are other, more contemporary examples of serious alarm system failure. All the alarms were really confusing and made the situation worse. All kinds of lights were flashing and alarms were sounding, but it wasn’t clear exactly what was wrong. The people operating the plant could see that something was wrong. But human error made everything much worse. A relief valve got stuck in the open position, releasing coolant and overheating the core. It turns out: a lot of things went wrong, and it was a “cascading failure” situation. ![]() In the aftermath of what happened, the president ordered a commission to investigate what happened. ![]()
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