Exploiting uncertainty in radiation limits: Monticello dissenters, health physicists, and the civilian nuclear-power debate (Minnesota)

In the late 1960s and early 1970s nuclear energy was seen as the most promising new source of energy. A large number of states, however, challenged the nuclear-power industry in court, defending their right to impose more stringent radiation standards than those of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The stimulus for their challenge was the proposed operation of the Monticello nuclear-power plant, which became a turning point in the civilian nuclear-power debate. Doubt and mistrust of the federal authorities motivated the concerns of local scientists about the effects on human health of the low-level radiation emitted into the environment during the routine operation of nuclear-power plants. Their concerns catapulted onto the national institutional and political agendas. Prominent scientists John Gofman and Arthur Tamplin, who were working at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Livermore, under a contract with the AEC, became deeply involved in the controversy and strongly supported the local concerned scientists.; The responses of the health-physics community to the issues raised by the Monticello dissenters, as I call the local concerned scientists and Gofman and Tamplin and the scientists who supported them, serve as a basis for my analysis of the interaction between politics and science and the ways in which scientific knowledge is produced, sustained, or changed.; The Monticello dissenters and health physicists constitute the main protagonists in my dissertation. I show they exploited the scientific uncertainty over radiation limits depending upon their political or professional interests. I also show that the scientific issue of the effects on human health of low-level radiation from the routine operation of nuclear-power plants emerged out of political concerns and in turn became the means of challenging and finally changing the political environment in which nuclear-power plants were operated in the United States. I also show that the political debate over low-level radiation from nuclear-power plants stigmatized health physics and shaped its subsequent evolution. Health physicists witnessed changes in their practice, profession, and scientific ideas in response to the issues that the Monticello dissenters raised.