Standard Grant: Reconstructing Nuclear Environments and the Downwinders Case

Oregon State University, Corvallis OR

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports a hybrid project that involves both infrastructure development for enhancing STS research and basic research in the history of science. The project focuses on the science of reconstructing past environmental contamination and human exposures to radiation in the Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project, and a related court case often referred to as the Downwinders Case. The project and the case are of particular interest for historical and social scientific study because they involve efforts by scientists to imagine and calculate past exposure in the absence of data taken specifically for that purpose. The research team will develop an important research collection, the recently-acquired Berger/Haber Hanford Nuclear Reservation Downwinders Case Collection, working in collaboration with the Special Collections and Archives Research Center of Oregon State University. Team members will digitize a sizeable portion of this collection and supplement it with oral history interviews. They will also produce the first detailed historical studies of the dose reconstruction project, linking it to issues in the History of science, Environmental History, and the broader field of Science and Technology Studies. Graduate student research assistants will work with the Downwinders Case Collection at Oregon State University on the digitization project and conduct oral history interviews with guidance from the PI. Three workshops are to be convened that will include historians, scientists, and other stakeholders in the history of radiation exposure. Although the exposures themselves date from the 1940s, the Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project stretched from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. Its various publications were not only critical to legal proceedings, they also continue as the basis for most points of reference about thyroid exposure from Hanford. The studies were controversial, with criticism coming from other scientists working under the auspices of the National Research Council, and from stakeholders such as residents, victim advocacy groups, and Native American tribal councils. Such disparate views invite scholarly work analyzing how the historical doses were reconstructed and negotiated. The scientists had access to ecological, meteorological, geological, and public health data, as well as testimony from the people with thyroid cancer. The scientists had disciplinary expertise in a range of fields. What kinds of data did the scientists view as reliable? What questions did they ask? What kinds of data were excluded, and what arguments went unheard? Whose perspectives were included, and whose were excluded? These questions are foundational to both historians and social studies of science scholars. They will provide new insights into the social dynamics of scientists, the construction of scientific ideas, and the reconstruction of scientific facts as deployed in important legal disputes.