Shannon Cram

This article examines the politics of permissible exposure in American nuclear remediation. At its heart is Washington State's Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the nation's largest and most expensive nuclear cleanup effort. According to Superfund regulation, nuclear landscapes are considered remediated once acceptable carcinogenic risk levels have been met. The challenge of remediation, then, is to measure and manage the conditions of carcinogenic encounter—titrating environmental contamination with human activity to achieve the appropriate balance of permissible dose. In this article, I follow the genesis and development of ''Jane,'' a future human designed for life in post-cleanup Hanford. Jane embodies a distinct set of regulated movements and activities, each specifically calculated to ensure legal compliance within the terms of acceptable risk. In tracing Jane's genealogy, I examine the history of radiogenic science and the official making of nuclear safety. Next, I discuss the efforts of two local Native American tribes to craft their own future human template, a standardized indigenous body designed for use in Hanford's remediation planning. Rejected by federal regulators, the indigenous body is framed as Jane's constitutive outside, remediation's unthinkable subject. As such, I consider how cleanup efforts seek to reconstitute life itself—formalizing a new baseline from which to evaluate the boundaries and biologies of post-nuclear existence.

This article explores the complex politics of “permissible exposure” for U.S. nuclear workers.  I argue that despite recent efforts to improve regulations for occupational radiation protection, the federal government has been unable to solve the fundamental paradox of nuclear safety: that some level of exposure is unavoidable when working with nuclear materials, and that any level of exposure comes with an associated biological risk.  In short: injury is an operational necessity of nuclear industry.  Thus, nuclear safety can never mean total protection for workers—it can only ever be the level of exposure that has been deemed acceptable relative to the benefits of radiation.  For nuclear workers this begs a very practical question: How do you stay safe in a system that requires your exposure in order to function?  I consider this question by first examining the federal policy directive that radiogenic exposure be “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” (ALARA).  Detailing the specific development and application of this concept, I discuss how ALARA uses reason to manage the inherent impossibilities of radiation protection.  Next, I use in-depth interviews with nuclear workers to explore how exposure standards are translated into the embodied practice of “dose”—a calculated dispensation of exposure over time that seeks to forestall the inevitability of harm.  Finally, I consider how the cost-benefit calculus of acceptable risk frames exposure as integral to economic development and national security,
normalizing nuclear injury as an unfortunate, yet necessary, part of modern life and work.

Nuclear weapons production has created a unique geography of irradiated open space in the United States. In recent years, many of these landscapes have been reclassified as national wildlife refuges in an attempt to transform the nation's atomic sacrifice zones into spaces of environmental salvation. However, these areas are also home to contaminated biota that migrate beyond refuge boundaries, inspiring biological vector control campaigns that frame nuclear nature as a threat that must be contained. How can these environments simultaneously embody ruin and redemption, and what work does this constitutive contradiction do? In this article, I explore the slippery subjectivities of nuclear waste and nature at Washington State's Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Beginning with the Hanford Reach National Monument, I examine how this space is framed as both pristine habitat and waste frontier. Next, I consider how Hanford's biological vector control program addresses the spread of radioactive flora and fauna. Looking specifically at one of the site's most notorious offenders (the fruit fly), I discuss how vector control uses instances of nuclear trespass to articulate the boundary between contaminated and uncontaminated. Finally, by examining the dual production of nature as both untouched wilderness and biological vector, I consider how this slippage between pure and polluted has been employed in the service of nuclear industry. I argue that in its doubling, nature is being recruited to do what the U.S. Department of Energy cannot: to solve Hanford's nuclear waste problem. Tracy stands on a mound of steaming garbage at the city landfill and tries to get used to the smell. Geiger counter in hand, she moves carefully between rolling hills of trash, feeling the unstable squish of each step on decaying ground. Searching. She steps over a plastic bag that has burst in the middle, spewing chicken bones, oily napkins, and a partially melted spatula. She checks the radiation count—normal—and wishes she could plug her nose. She moves on. Finally, beneath a rusting three legged chair she finds it: a garbage bag containing rotten food and elevated levels of Strontium 90—the signature of radioactive fruit flies. With a whoop, she reaches for the bag and calls it in. " Got one, " she says over the radio. I imagine this scene as I sit at Tracy's kitchen table, sipping tea and listening to her tell stories about biological vector control. Tracy is a Health Physics Technician (HPT) at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, a 586 square mile nuclear weapons complex in southeastern Washington State. Once the heart of American plutonium production, Hanford is now the nation's most contaminated nuclear site, laced with more than 450 billion gallons of liquid

This paper explores the lived experience of radioactive and chemical poisoning following the S-102 accident at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. It seeks to understand how sickness is made intelligible (or not) in the context of nuclear toxicity, and how layers of certainty and uncertainty structure medical decisions, legal action, procedure, and daily life in the nuclear complex. Discussions about nuclear risk and illness often hinge on the issue of causality, on whether—and at what dosage—radioactivity causes harm. I argue, however, that centering these discussions on truth versus falsehood sidesteps critical examination of the politics that created the terms of the debate. Rather, improving nuclear safety and accountability means analyzing how the boundaries of valid (and by default, invalid) nuclear illnesses are identified and made legally actionable. It also means integrating qualitative measures of health and safety with the quantitative measures of risk currently informing management practice at Hanford. T HE DILUTION HOSE must have burst. Splash patterns indicate as much. Perhaps radioactive liquid sprayed outward in a graceful toxic arc, thrown aloft in a fantastic burst of energy. Maybe it hung there for a millisecond of triumphant escape before falling to earth with a soft patter. Or maybe the moment was uglier, more befitting the imagined temperament of waste—a belch of air and a poisonous squirt, followed by a slow, hollow, glugging. Only the waste knows exactly what happened in that instant, for no humans were there to bear witness. Radioactive liquid escaped holding tank S-102 under the cloak of darkness, it melted into the night. Though unseen, its exit did not go unnoticed. Hints of nuclear breakout hung in the air as pungent vapor, entering the lungs of several tank farm workers nearby. Noticing a strange smell in the night around them, an odor that signaled danger to the experienced nose, the workers radioed their office with concern. Perhaps their message of alarm, as it moved on rolling radio waves, encountered the waste's more frenetic gamma rays in the air. Maybe the two sets of waves, each communicating their own story of hazard, passed each other as they moved through the darkness. It wasn't until morning that the full-extent of the spill became apparent. A wide expanse of wet, oily-looking ground near tank S-102 confirmed the previous night's fears. An investigation was duly performed, and educated conjectures made about what caused the spill. In the months that followed, the requisite " lessons learned " and procedural re-examinations