CAREER: Nuclear History as History of Science

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SES 99-83981 - Cathryn L. Carson (University of California, Berkeley)"CAREER: Nuclear History as History of Science"This CAREER project carries out an integrated program of work with the title "Nuclear history as history of science." In research and teaching it explores the interweaving of technical and sociopolitical matters characteristic of the nuclear age. For the research component Professor Carson is framing a technically informed history of the conceptualizations of nuclear waste. Nuclear waste is a problem whose perceived nature has changed dramatically from the 1940s to the present: what was once thought to be a small technical difficulty, soluble with modest effort on the basis of readily obtainable knowledge, has become a major international field of research with intensely complex demands of modeling and experimentation. Professor Carson's study examines the changing conception of the very nature of the challenge -- what sort of scientific problem nuclear waste has been understood to be -- and so brings technical matters back into our histories of policy and politics. Focusing on the U.S., Germany, and either France or Switzerland, it takes a comparative approach as a way of opening up points of controversy. The resulting account will be of value to broader communities with practical interests, since past attitudes towards nuclear waste stand in the background of many of its present problems. At the same time the project addresses itself to historians thinking about theoretical questions, using the exemplary site of nuclear waste management to investigate the interface between the sociopolitical and the technical.The education component then pursues the project's theme in a new undergraduate course that Professor Carson is devising at the University of California, Berkeley. As a history of science course on the nuclear age, the class brings together students from the sciences, engineering, humanities, and social sciences. In their encounters with this complex period, with its interweaving of technical and sociopolitical problems, the students will explore models of historical explanation that will serve them past the semester's end. The course title, "Nuclear Berkeley, Nuclear World," indicates its double focus: the local history of the university, the community, and the region, and the global context framing the developments at home. Along with standard pedagogical strategies of reading, lecture, and discussion, Professor Carson's course makes considered use of a web infrastructure for information and interaction. Moreover, as the culmination of the class experience it engages students in hands-on historical research, teaching them what goes into creating histories through the experience of practicing it themselves. The local focus of many student projects -- given the area's unparalleled resources -- will then return their work to the community, as their reports will be made available on the website as a gateway beyond the university.The two components of the project are mutually supportive. They explore technical optimism and historical inevitability at scales large and small: thus nuclear waste takes its place in the educational framework, while the course's overarching narrative provides the backdrop for the research. And the student projects, for their part, make connections back to Professor Carson's research, establishing contacts, unearthing sources, and opening up new fields to study.