No immediate risk: Environmental safety in nuclear weapons production, 1942--1985.

摘要

This dissertation explores the environmental history of the American nuclear weapons production system during World War II and the Cold War. It focuses on three facilities: the Hanford Engineering Works, the Nevada Test Site, and the Feed Materials Production Center at Fernald, Ohio.;Conceiving of weapons production as a socio-technical system, this dissertation analyzes the development of decision-making and risk assessment practices in the realm of environmental safety. It argues that the process of nuclear weapons production was not strictly monolithic and hierarchical. Rather, the production system linked numerous bureaucratic, corporate, and individual actors in dynamic political, technological, and economic relationships.;This dissertation uses the concept of "environmental safety" to examine the social and political construction of acceptable risk in worker safety, public health, and ecological protection. It seeks to explain how actors within the nuclear weapons production system---scientists, engineers, managers, and workers---sought to define, contain, and limit damage from the hazardous materials with which they worked. This dissertation also examines how external actors---concerned citizens, environmental regulators, and advocacy groups---came to learn about and then influence these notions of environmental safety.;Each of this dissertation's three case studies examines external challenges to internal definitions of environmental safety. Actors within the production system defined initial approaches to environmental safety, often based on what they recognized were "best guesses." Within the closed production system, however, these tentative standards tended to become relatively stable over time. Internal actors deferred resolving known environmental safety problems (such as radioactive waste management) because they believed these issues posed "no immediate risk.";External participation proved necessary to force changes in bureaucratic approaches to environmental safety. External actors gradually learned about and then challenged the internal definitions, producing conflict that reshaped the previously settled, internal notions of environmental safety.;This dissertation demonstrates the negative effect of secrecy on environmental performance and public accountability. Taken together, these studies shed much-needed light on heretofore unexplored or misunderstood practices of risk-related decision-making and environmental management within the nuclear weapons production system.