Poison in the Well: Radioactive Waste in the Oceans at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age

Notes

261 Notes Abbreviations AB Records of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority and Its Predecessors , UK National Archives, Kew, England. AHSP Alfred H. Sturtevant Papers, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. FO Records Created and Inherited by the Foreign Office, UK National Archives , Kew, England. GBP George Beadle Papers, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California. HCCEA Fonds Haut-Commissaire, Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique, Fontenay -aux-Roses, France. LRDP Lauren R. Donaldson Papers, University of Washington Libraries, Seattle. NA326 Record Group 326, Atomic Energy Commission, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md. NA59 Record Group 059, Department of State, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md. NAA National Academies Archives, Washington, D.C. NIO National Institute of Oceanography, Southampton, England. ODWHOI Records of the Office of the Director, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution , Woods Hole, Mass. RHFP Richard H. Fleming Papers, Accession 4110–2, University of Washington Libraries, Seattle. RRP6 Roger Randall Dougan Revelle Papers, MC 6, Archives of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, Calif. RRP6A Roger Randall Dougan Revelle Papers, MC 6A, Archives of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, Calif. SIOS Subject Files, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, Calif. UNESCOR Records of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization , Paris. Introduction 1. For Yablokov’s report, see Government Commission on Matters Related to Radioactive Waste Disposal at Sea, Facts and Problems Related to the Dumping of Radioactive Waste in the Seas Surrounding the Territory of the Russian Federation. For analyses of these revelations, see U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment , Nuclear Wastes in the Arctic, and Makhijani et al., Nuclear Wastelands, 285–392. 2. Peterson, Troubled Lands; Feschbach and Friendly, Ecocide in the USSR; Feshbach , Ecological Disaster. For a discussion of environmental impacts related particularly to the Soviet focus on production of nuclear power, see Josephson, Red Atom. Some scholars suggest that despite the apparently contrite attitudes of the government in the early years of the Russian Federation, many of the faults of the old regime have continued to flourish in the new regime. See Ziegler and Lyon, “The Politics of Nuclear Waste in Russia.” 3. An outline of the history of sea dumping, giving details about each country’s responsibility for introducing radionuclides into the oceans, can be found in Linsley, Sjöblom, and Cabianca, “Overview of Point Sources of Anthropogenic Radionuclides in the Oceans.” 4. On fallout, see Divine, Blowing on the Wind; Kopp, “The Origins of the American Scientific Debate over Fallout Hazards.” On reactors, see Mazuzan and Walker, Controlling the Atom; Carlisle, Supplying the Nuclear Arsenal. On the general scienti fic, production, and safety challenges faced by American and British atomic energy establishments, see Gowing and Arnold, Independence and Deterrence, and Hewlett and Duncan, Atomic Shield. 5. See Macfarlane, “Underlying Yucca Mountain.” 6. See Lindee, Suffering Made Real; Walker, Permissible Dose. 7. On the cultural products elicited by the bomb, see Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light; Weart, Nuclear Fear. 8. On early efforts to trace Strontium-90 in children’s teeth, see Reiss, “Strontium90 Absorption by Deciduous Teeth.” 9. For an overview of this kind of exposure through ecological pathways, see Preston and Wood, “Monitoring the Marine Environment.” 10. An overview of the reprocessing facilities built for weapons production during these decades, along with descriptions of waste disposal practices broken down by country, can be found in Makhijani et al., Nuclear Wastelands. 11. On the proliferation of radioisotopes after World War II, see Creager, “Tracing the Politics of Changing Postwar Research Practices”; Creager, “Nuclear Energy in the Service of Biomedicine.” 12. See Hacker, Elements of Controversy; Mazuzan and Walker, Controlling the Atom; Walker, Permissible Dose. 13. The tendency of the AEC to focus on direct exposure rather than environmental exposure is discussed in Silverman, “No Immediate Risk.” Daniel Grossman has argued that even when risks of environmental exposure were recognized, they were subordinated to production goals. See Grossman, “A Policy History of Hanford’s Atmospheric Releases.” 14. For an example, the process by which scientific truth should speak to power is outlined in Price, The Scientific Estate. For a discussion of the decline in public confidence in scientists to speak truth to power, see Jasanoff, “Science, Politics, and the Renegotiation of Expertise at EPA.” 15. Peter Haas has employed the term “epistemic communities” to describe how knowledge-based experts arrive at a consensus and then help policy makers articulate and pursue their interests. This approach has generated lively discussion...