Dissertation Research: No Immediate Risk: Environmental Safety and Nuclear Weapons Production, 1942-1996

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This study focuses on how knowledge about environmental safety is generated and how this is translated into different disciplinary and work contexts. More specifically, it examines waste management, worker safety, and public health practices utilized in nuclear weapons production. Identifying this package of behaviors, risk assessment practices, and decision-making procedures as `environmental safety`, this analysis seeks to understand how nuclear weapons scientists, engineers, managers, and workers undertook to contain and limit damage from the hazardous materials with which they worked. Arguing that nuclear weapons production occurs in a dynamic sociotechnical system, the study uses changes in environmental safety to illustrate the knowledge flows and organizational structures in the Cold War Institution. The general approach will be to track the generation and flow of ecological, health, and safety knowledge within the nuclear weapons production process through archival research of the laboratories, agencies, and divisions involved in such work. Archival work will also be conducted to determine official policy and operational practices at various production sites.