Negotiating Radiation Protection in the Nuclear Age - by Maria Rentetzi & Angela N H Creager & M Susan Lindee (Hardcover)

About the Book

An International Exploration of Radiation Risk and Protection Policies Since 1945

Book Synopsis

The development of nuclear technologies for war, medicine, and energy production dramatically increased the number of people exposed to artificial radioactivity and raised new stakes and questions about protecting them. This volume examines how the establishment of standards and protocols for radiation protection was not only a technical process, but also the byproduct of extensive and ongoing negotiations among scientists, states, international bodies, lawyers, economists, companies, unions, and activists. Over time, exposed individuals--whether Japanese survivors, accident or fallout victims, atomic veterans, or workers--have leveraged their own experiences of radiation exposure to challenge powerful institutions and their standards. Contributors explore radiation risk and protection policies across the globe, from Japan to Canada, Britain to North Africa, and Spain to Greece. They excavate the legal, scientific, diplomatic, and personal challenges posed by radiation protection. Chapters move from the individual and institutional to the global level, arguing that issues of radiation exposure, like so many other forms of risk, are never merely personal but deeply, often invisibly, political and diplomatic.

Review Quotes

Journeying across five continents and alighting at locations as diverse as mines and crash sites, meeting rooms and laboratories, blast zones and field stations, the contributors of Negotiating Radiation Protection develop truly transnational standpoints on the development of knowledges and standards surrounding radiation exposure. The volume showcases the situated, multi-sited, and contingent nature of this important history. Contributors establish the centrality of actors and agents including atomic veterans, miners, labor organizers, survivors, and scientists. Collectively, the authors offer insight into whose knowledge counted, and how standards were made and contested worldwide. The volume is essential reading for scholars and students in the history of biology and technology, as well as those interested in science and diplomacy and international standard-setting.--Mary Mitchell, New Jersey Institute of Technology

Spanning many domains, Negotiating Radiation Protection demonstrates how debates among stakeholders directly shape radiation protection standards and practices--and the lives of those exposed. It is a timely and groundbreaking volume destined to be a field-defining classic for understanding the origins and future of the global nuclear order.--Toshihiro Higuchi, Georgetown University

This collection of deeply researched essays is a timely reminder of the distributed and often intentionally downplayed risks, both past and present, of the nuclear world. The essays highlight the complex history of the safety standards for radiation protection, including the central role of the International Atomic Energy Agency in negotiating these standards, and the ongoing difficulties of holding the responsible authorities accountable for the harms to people and the environment.--Soraya de Chadarevian, University of California, Los Angeles

About the Author

Maria Rentetzi (Editor)
Maria Rentetzi is professor and chair of Science, Technology and Gender Studies at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU). She is also correspondent member of the International Academy of the History of Science, and FAU's special representative for internationalization. She has served as Scientific advisor on science diplomacy to the Alternate Minister of Foreign Affairs of Greece, (2017-2018) and as member of the EU working group "Making European diplomacy more strategic, effective and resilient through scientific evidence and foresight." She is the editor of a new book series on Science Diplomacy published by Brepols and of the academic journal Almagest. Her research focuses on nuclear history, gender science studies and science diplomacy. Her latest monograph is Seduced by Radium: How Industry Transformed Science in the American Marketplace (2022). For more info please visit https: //rentetzi.de

Angela N. H. Creager (Editor)
Angela N. H. Creager is the Thomas M. Siebel Professor in the History of Science at Princeton University, where she teaches in the Department of History and advises graduate students through the Program in History of Science. She is author of two books, both published by University of Chicago Press, The Life of a Virus: Tobacco Mosaic Virus as an Experimental Model, 1930-1965 (2002) and Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine (2013). In 2022, she and six coauthors published Residues: Thinking Through Chemical Environments, which considers the environmental impacts of chemicals production, consumption, disposal, and regulation. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Institutes of Health; she has been awarded residential fellowships at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the Paris Institute for Advanced Study.

M. Susan Lindee (Editor)
M. Susan Lindee's work explores the history of genetics, radiation, and science and technology in the twentieth century. The Janice and Julian Bers Chair of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, her books include Rational Fog: Science and Technology in Modern War (Harvard, 2020); Suffering Made Real (Chicago, 1994), The DNA Mystique (Freeman, 1995) and Moments of Truth in Genetic Medicine (Hopkins, 2005). Honors include the Schuman Prize of the History of Science Society, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and support from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health. She has been Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China; at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; and at the Graduate School for International Development and Cooperation (IDEC), Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan. She has also been Ship's Historian for a Lindblad Galapagos trip; and participated in Penn's Galapagos Project as an instructor in the islands; and in Spring 2023 taught a Penn Global Seminar that brought 16 undergraduates to Hiroshima and Tokyo. She is working now on a study of the history of the Atchafalaya River, a Louisiana swamp where she has family origins. She is a member of the History of Science Society, the Louisiana Historical Association, American Society for Environmental History, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.