Technology, Health, and Empire in the Nuclear Age: A Global and Local History of Uranium Mining and Miners

FAIN: RZ-50033-03

Regents of the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1382)
Gabrielle Hecht (Project Director: August 2002 to February 2009)

Research on a comparative history of uranium mining in southern Africa and in North America that will focus on the history of the awareness of radiation hazards to the health of workers. (36 months)

What has global nuclear development meant for local communities? How have nuclear technologies shaped relationships between developing nations and nuclear powers? This project explores the history of uranium mining as a set of interacting technological, medical, political, and cultural practices in global, local, and comparative perspective. The overall project explores four key zones from the late 1940s to the 1990s: Francophone Africa; native lands in North America; Australian Aboriginal territories; and Namibia and South Africa. This funding request focuses specifically on southern Africa and Navajo lands, and investigates the history of the health and safety of workers in those sites.

Associated Products

Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (Book)
Title: Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade
Author: Gabrielle Hecht
Abstract: Uranium from Africa has long been a major source of fuel for nuclear power and atomic weapons, including the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In 2003, after the infamous “yellow cake from Niger,” Africa suddenly became notorious as a source of uranium, a component of nuclear weapons. But did that admit Niger, or any of Africa's other uranium-producing countries, to the select society of nuclear states? Does uranium itself count as a nuclear thing? In this book, Gabrielle Hecht lucidly probes the question of what it means for something—a state, an object, an industry, a workplace—to be “nuclear.” Hecht shows that questions about being nuclear—a state that she calls “nuclearity”—lie at the heart of today's global nuclear order and the relationships between “developing nations” (often former colonies) and “nuclear powers” (often former colonizers). Hecht enters African nuclear worlds, focusing on miners and the occupational hazard of radiation exposure. Could a mine be a nuclear workplace if (as in some South African mines) its radiation levels went undetected and unmeasured? With this book, Hecht is the first to put Africa in the nuclear world, and the nuclear world in Africa. By doing so, she remakes our understanding of the nuclear age.
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/being-nuclear
Publisher: MIT Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780262526869

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