Doctoral Dissertation Research: Public and Expert Understandings of Nuclear Risk in Italy

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

Doctoral Dissertation Research: Expert and Public Understandings of Nuclear Risk in Italy Understanding how publics perceive and act on technological risks is important for the management of technologies and for ensuring their just governance. Given the global importance of nuclear technologies, understanding how publics perceive their value and danger is critical. Periodic nuclear accidents influence both public attitudes and government policies, but they are not sufficient to explain significant differences in how different groups perceive nuclear risks. To more adequately these risk perceptions, this research examines how groups' claims of nuclear contamination become objects of political debate and contestation at the local, national, and international levels. To explain how nuclear risks come be visible or invisible to experts and non-experts, this study analyzes three sources of risk perception: competing scientific, military, and political epistemologies and methods for assessing risk; forms of political mobilization; and everyday activities. Archival and ethnographic research will be carried out at a U.S. Navy base for nuclear submarines that were installed in the Archipelago of La Maddalena (Italy) between 1972 and 2008 to assess the specific role of political supervision and military secrecy on experts? assessments of nuclear risks, and how meanings of nuclear power were shaped by different forms of political mobilization took place both during and after the cold war. The research will contribute to theories of how nuclear experts and laypeople assess and understand the nature and the effects of nuclear power; how claims of health effects from nuclear contamination and accidents alter everyday perceptions of nuclear power and make nuclear danger visible; and how these different factors interact in specific localities, when there is a perceived danger of nuclear contamination. This study addresses problems of interest to experts, policy-makers, NGOs, and environmentalist groups in Italy and elsewhere. Research data is digitally available to publics, including the local community of La Maddalena and to experts and non-experts interested in risk communication, nuclear risk perceptions, risk assessment and management, and U.S. military basing policies and practices.