“What would happen if radioactivity itched?” Ulrich Beck ponders. If it did, the public would not be dependent upon organizational actors, both corporate and governmental, to intercede on their behalf. In turn, socio-technical prowess introduces hazards the individual, family, or community cannot easily negotiate. As Beck notes, the pubic are left in a state of […]

The Nevada Test Site (NTS) was home to nearly 100 atmospheric atomic detonations between 1951-1962 as well as more than 800 underground detonations, which ceased in 1992. Deep within the NTS lies Yucca Flat. It is scarred by underground detonations eliciting not mushroom clouds but subsidence craters due to obliteration of rock far below the

Shot Simon in April of 1953 was the largest open-air tower detonation to date at the Nevada Test Site (NTS)–although less by design as its yield exceeded expectations by 20 percent. It was a brusque 43-kilotons or roughly three times the explosive yield of the device that destroyed Hiroshima, Japan. As the mushroom cloud raced

In the 1950s a troubling concern was whether an atomic detonation could unintentionally be initiated in the case of an accident–as might occur when a bomber crash lands–and there were questions regarding the biological effects of plutonium dispersal, if such an accident were to occur. Safety testing was conducted at the Nevada Test Site (NTS)

What qualifies as a “cover-up?” In the summer of 1977 Gordon Eliot White, a reporter for the Salt Lake City Deseret News, discovered an unpublished National Cancer Institute report outlining leukemia rates in Utah between 1950-1969. He combined this with data on fallout from atmospheric atomic testing at the Nevada Test Site (NTS) between 1951-1962,

The herds find refuge from the snow grazing on the public lands of the Great Basin Desert in Nevada. They lumber back home to Cedar City, Utah each spring in time for the arrival of newborn lambs and shearing of wool, and then depart for cool, rich mountain pasture. It is a geographic and biological

The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) conducted more than 100 atmospheric atomic detonations at the Nevada Test Site (NTS) between 1951-1962, depositing radioactive fallout downwind. It is generally assumed that the towns, ranches, and Native American communities within a roughly 150-mile radius from due north to southeast of the test site–consistent with the prevailing winds-bore

   Strontium-90 and the Restlessness of Nature In the spring of 1953, officials from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), military officers, and scientists affiliated with the RAND Corporation met in Santa Monica, California. They confronted a conundrum. Radioactive debris from Ivy Mike, the world’s first thermonuclear detonation, was missing. Ten megatons (10,000 kilotons) of

There are disproportionate age and sex differences in the aftermath of exposure to ionizing radiation. The young are, by far, the most radiosensitive as reflected in a greater risk of a variety of diseases later in life compared to adults exposed to the same dose. Less frequently recognized, however, is that fact that females are