Nuclear Legacy: Students of Two Atomic Cities brings together articles authored by students of two different countries who share a common inheritance - coming of age in a nuclear community. The book explores, from the students' perspectives, the past, present, and future of both the Tri-Cities area in the state of Washington and Slavutych in Ukraine, two cities established on nuclear-based industries. Slavutych is located near the Chornobyl nuclear power plant. The Tri-Cities area is near the Hanford nuclear research facility, which produced the plutonium for the first atomic bomb.

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Read the first article from the book - Veronika's Story

Forty Student Authors (from the back cover)
This book is about making connections--connections between cultures and communities; between the past, the present and the future; and between students and scientific and business communities in two different countries, Ukraine and the United States. It began as a way to help Ukrainian and American students connect what they are learning in school to a real product that would be valuable outside the walls of the classroom. It is primarily an educational publication, not a political statement. However, the student researched and written articles do discuss politically sensitive topics in straightforward detail. The moving first hand accounts by young people of the 1986 Chornobyl nuclear accident, and interviews with scientist and engineers who worked on the 1940's Manhattan Project in the United States make it a unique collaboration on nuclear culture.

The process of writing the book was as important as the content, and was driven by what the students needed to be able to do and know to make such a book possible. It was the process of researching and generating the articles, photographs and layout that has provided a unique and memorable educational experience for the middle school students that will stay with them throughout their lives. What you hold in your hands, the final published product, is a fringe benefit of the exercise. Few people believed that teenagers, 13-15 years old, could accomplish this goal. Against all odds they did, giving up summer vacations, and persevering through difficulties in cross-cultural communication so that they could create a product that they believe to be significant. What started as a semester project took a full year to reach fruition. All the while they were making connections through video-teleconferences, e-mail and site visits to the business and scientific communities.

Bechtel-Hanford, Inc., the International Chornobyl Center, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Battelle were instrumental in facilitating the business and technology connections.

The final publication is what can happen when teenagers believe that they can create a product that is beautiful and valuable and actually uses "all those things they learn in school." It is a perspective on nuclear culture seen from the first post cold war generation and gives us insight into what may be possible for our global future as nuclear cultures, once separated, now work together.