UNMAKING THE BOMB

Cram offers a study of the limits and failures of nuclear cleanup and its safety risks.

This latest volume in the University of California Press’ Critical Environments series on nature, science, and politics takes a sweeping look at strategies for the remediation of nuclear harm. It focuses on the Hanford Site in eastern Washington state, where it estimates that 56 million gallons of radioactive waste product are stored in underground tanks, and nine reactors and five chemical processing plants contaminated the soil with about 450 billion gallons of liquid waste. Cram is a professor at the University of Washington Bothell’s School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. Every member of her immediate family was diagnosed with cancer (including the author), and both her parents died of it; her mother grew up in eastern Washington. “It matters that I want to know what caused my family’s cancer. And it matters that I will never be able to fully answer that question,” Cram writes. Working outward from the Hanford site and backward in time to the Castle-Bravo nuclear test in 1954—a detonation whose irradiated ash poisoned the crew of the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon—Cram works to find answers to a question posed by Hanford scientist Jack Healy: “How do we strike a proper balance between the interests of the individual and the interests of the Nation?” What does it mean, Cram asks, “to safeguard individual bodies with regulations that only envision disembodied statistical aggregates?” It’s a problem, she notes, that’s worsened by the fact that the disembodied statistics are skewed: She writes that women and children, for instance, are far more likely to develop radiation-caused cancers than the adult male “Reference Man” in industry use. In prose that’s both calm and solidly grounded in cited research, Cram presents a flatly devastating book about egregious mismanagement at the Hanford site and, more broadly, about the United States government’s calculation of risk in the field of nuclear waste disposal—a problem that, as Cram rightly points out, will certainly outlast the government itself. The result is a quietly devastating indictment that calls to mind such environmentalist classics as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring(1962).

A powerfully researched and important look at the ravages of nuclear waste remediation.