Unmaking the Bomb: Environmental Cleanup and the Politics of ImpossibilityWhat does it mean to reckon with a contaminated world? In Unmaking the Bomb, Shannon Cram considers the complex social politics of this question and the regulatory infrastructures designed to answer it. Blending history, ethnography, and memoir, she investigates remediation efforts at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, a former weapons complex in Washington State. Home to the majority of the nation's high-level nuclear waste and its largest environmental cleanup, Hanford is tasked with managing toxic materials that will long outlast the United States and its institutional capacities. Cram examines the embodied uncertainties and structural impossibilities integral to that endeavor. In particular, this lyrical book engages in a kind of narrative contamination, toggling back and forth between cleanup's administrative frames and the stories that overspill them. It spends time with the statistical people that inhabit cleanup's metrics and models and the nonstatistical people that live with their effects. And, in the process, it explores the uneven social relations that make toxicity a normative condition. |
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Unmaking the Bomb: Environmental Cleanup and the Politics of Impossibility Shannon Cram Limited preview - 2023 |
Unmaking the Bomb: Environmental Cleanup and the Politics of Impossibility Shannon Cram Limited preview - 2023 |
Common terms and phrases
ALARA Archives Research Center argued Author interview Ava Helen Biological body bomb Breast cancer Civil Defense cleanup CLUP Cold Cold War Collections and Archives Committee compensation contaminated Department of Energy dosimetry EEOICPA effects Environment Environmental Protection Agency Exposure Scenario fallout federal folder future genetics Hanford Site hazards Health Physics Helen and Linus human Ibid ICRP impact industry Ionizing Radiation IVRRF Journal Krupar Legacy Letter to Linus Linus Pauling Papers lives lung Manhattan Project Marshall Islands Masco models monitoring mutation National Laboratory nuclear waste nuclear weapons Occupational Illness Office Oregon State University Oxford permissible dose Plutonium Policy politics Program Radiation Protection Radioactive radionuclides reactor reasonable regulatory remediation Report RESRAD Richland Risk Assessment Robotics Safety Science scientists social statistical story Superfund tion tissue told Toxic tribal U.S. Department U.S. Environmental Protection U.S. Nuclear University Special Collections USTUR Vivo Washington Waste Management Yakama Nation York