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This article examines the politics of permissible exposure in American nuclear remediation. At its heart is Washington State’s Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the nation’s largest and most expensive nuclear cleanup effort. According to Superfund regulation, nuclear landscapes are considered remediated once acceptable carcinogenic risk levels have been met. The challenge of remediation, then, is to measure and manage the conditions of carcinogenic encounter—titrating environmental contamination with human activity to achieve the appropriate balance of permissible dose. In this article, I follow the genesis and development of “Jane,” a future human designed for life in post-cleanup Hanford. Jane embodies a distinct set of regulated movements and activities, each specifically calculated to ensure legal compliance within the terms of acceptable risk. In tracing Jane’s genealogy, I examine the history of radiogenic science and the official making of nuclear safety. Next, I discuss the efforts of two local Native American tribes to craft their own future human template, a standardized indigenous body designed for use in Hanford’s remediation planning. Rejected by federal regulators, the indigenous body is framed as Jane’s constitutive outside, remediation’s unthinkable subject. As such, I consider how cleanup efforts seek to reconstitute life itself—formalizing a new baseline from which to evaluate the boundaries and biologies of post-nuclear existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the lived experience of radioactive and chemical poisoning following the S-102 accident at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. It seeks to understand how sickness is made intelligible (or not) in the context of nuclear toxicity, and how layers of certainty and uncertainty structure medical decisions, legal action, procedure, and daily life in the nuclear complex. Discussions about nuclear risk and illness often hinge on the issue of causality, on whether-and at what dosage-radioactivity causes harm. I argue, however, that centering these discussions on truth versus falsehood sidesteps critical examination of the politics that created the terms of the debate. Rather, improving nuclear safety and accountability means analyzing how the boundaries of valid (and by default, invalid) nuclear illnesses are identified and made legally actionable. It also means integrating qualitative measures of health and safety with the quantitative measures of risk currently informing management practice at Hanford. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional risk assessments, including those involving the United States Department of Energy (USDOE), are often criticized for producing useless or noncredible management responses because they did not meaningfully involve the public. The first step to involve the public is to identify appropriate active participants (stakeholders). This study was done to understand the processes used to identify stakeholders to serve on advisory boards established at the two largest remediation sites in the United States: the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The Hanford stakeholder identification process produced an interest-based board whereas the Savannah River Site strategy produced population-based representation. The basic goals of the stakeholder advisory groups were similar. However, different processes were used to identify the participants for the groups in part because of distinctly different social and cultural conditions in the areas affected by the operations of the two facilities, and in part because of the different level of trust of the USDOE and their contractors at Hanford compared with Savannah River. The discussion analyzes their different needs and potential for successful citizen participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]