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

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, the United Kingdom 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

This deeply researched collection is a timely reminder of the distributed and often intentionally downplayed risks, both past and present, of the nuclear world. Chapters highlight the complex history of the safety standards for radiation protection 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

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

About the Author

Maria Rentetzi (Editor)
Maria Rentetzi is professor and chair of Science, Technology and Gender Studies at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. Her latest monograph is Seduced by Radium: How Industry Transformed Science in the American Marketplace.

Angela N. H. Creager (Editor)
Angela N. H. Creager is the Thomas M. Siebel Professor in the History of Science at Princeton University. She is author of The Life of a Virus: Tobacco Mosaic Virus as an Experimental Model, 1930-1965 and Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine.

M. Susan Lindee (Editor)
M. Susan Lindee is the Janice and Julian Bers Chair of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Rational Fog: Science and Technology in Modern War, Suffering Made Real, The DNA Mystique, and Moments of Truth in Genetic Medicine.