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INTRODUCTION: BY BRIAN FREER
Broadly speaking, I am interested in documenting Hanford’s role in the history of the American west and the Nuclear Age. The Hanford Site, a Department of Energy (DOE) facility located in southeast Washington State, gave birth to most of America’s plutonium through the Cold War and currently houses the majority of its military nuclear wastes. My current research explores one chapter of this larger story by examining everyday professional practices of health physics [radiation protection].
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I examine these practices as they form linkages from a Cold War industrial society committed to mutual deterrence through production of nuclear products to a post-Cold War risk society characterized by increased awareness of uncertainty and environmental legacy (Douglas and Wildavsky, 1982; Adam, 1990; Beck, 1992). As an apprenticing anthropologist, I pursue these interests through ethnography and oral history with retired as well as presently employed health physics professionals. Anthropology has much to say about the Stone Age and the Iron Age. It is my view that anthropology should also contribute to humanity’s understanding of our entrance into the Nuclear Age.
A brief glimpse into my background is necessary to appreciate my research interests. I attended public schools from 1974-1985 near Hanford. Thus, I grew up with a major piece of world history in my backyard. Yet, I graduated high school knowing precious little about my backyard’s relationship to the Manhattan Project, Nagasaki, Japan, or Geiger counters.
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Later, I realized I was not alone wearing historical and scientific blinders on nuclear issues. During my Master’s I resolved to gain a working knowledge of one manageable aspect of this nuclear outpost. I write during a time when a search is on as officials rush to fashion a new story by revealing former secrets, only most of the players have traded paychecks for pensions as the ‘big’ secrets they lived meld slowly with little life events. It is my task to communicate my experiences and the results of this research process to the local public in the Northwest, the scientists I associate with, and the wider community of interested readers.
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It is central to my research to develop a firm grasp of cultural and social aspects of institutionalized secrecy experienced by pioneer health physicists during the Manhattan Project and Cold War as this relates to the development of radiation protection practices. For example, I have explored this relationship through research into the career and scientific reputation of Herbert M. Parker, a major figure within health physics, and in establishing early radiation dose limits for public health. However, because much of his work was originally classified, he remains a minor figure in the minds of many nuclear specialists, not to mention the interested public. This research task faces an immanent challenge because time is getting short for oral history research with people who worked in radiation protection with Mr. Parker at Hanford between 1943 and 1965.
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Documenting the practical knowledge bases of ‘production era’ (1943-1965) radiation protection professionals and technicians will be accomplished in collaboration with the present generation of risk professionals. Their practical knowledges will be elicited in conjunction with, but will not be confined to, official documents, the growing published record, and nuclear sites with similar histories (e.g., Chelyabinsk, Russia, a facility with reactors built with Hanford blueprints courtesy of Cold War espionage) in an effort to identify, estimate, and comprehend social and scientific dimensions of Hanford’s place in the global post-Cold War environmental legacy. My research links three generations by following the ways that knowledge possessed by retired employees “children of the Great Depression” has been transmitted to the current generation of health physicists “babyboomers” in a project initiated by a generation ‘X’ graduate student. Together, through a series of small-scale case studies examining technical problems in institutional contexts, we will examine losses, errors, mutations, gains, ‘black boxes’, and time lags in the pursuit of radiation and the conveyance of working knowledge developed in this pursuit.
This project will be undertaken in order to promote intergenerational communication of practical knowledge in health physics and to illustrate generational, disciplinary, and cultural limits of particular ways of knowing about risk and radiation. If present scientific practices and future public policy are to learn lessons from Hanford’s past and promote environmental sustainability, this past must first be documented, undergo analysis, and be communicated in the present. Although ‘solutions’ are not to be found in the past, we need a much better understanding of the extent to which current knowledge of risk from radiation is dependent upon past knowledges.
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