The Problem

Radioactive zones have been described as “landscapes of risk” that are often represented by Hanford in the US, Ozersk in Russia, Chernobyl in the Ukraine, and Sellafield in the UK, but also include abandoned mining, refining, and military-industrial sites around the world. The number of sites is unknown because of lapses in record keeping and illicit dumping, but one review of US Department of Energy documents by The Wall Street Journal identified 517 sites in the US alone considered for radioactive cleanup by a special government remedial action program. Radioactive landscapes of risk are hazardous because they are contaminated with higher-than-ordinary electromagnetic radiation (such as gamma rays and X-rays) and the radioactive elements that are the source of these emissions. Uranium, Strontium-89, Cesium-137, and Cobalt-60 illustrate a few of the radioactive elements freed either by design or accident through the extraction, processing, and utilization of nuclear materials. These and other radionuclides pose special chemical and radioactive hazards to biological life as they are internalized and bioaccumulate in flora and fauna, as do other toxic non-radioactive elements, such as lead. For example, radioactive isotopes of strontium bioaccumulate in bones, teeth, and the brain as the body misidentifies this element as calcium.

Biological life evolved under electromagnetic radiation exposure, but efforts to determine “safe” levels of exposure for particular radioactive elements, some of which did not exist on earth prior to human engineering, are challenged by the contingencies of exposure and the particularities of the exposed, such as their age, sex, and general health. Uncertainties about radiation effects, particularly under conditions of chronic exposure, fundamentally complicate social justice for the exposed. Uncertainty adds to the procedural challenges associated with having voice in decision making regarding community exposure standards and legal recourse and compensation after contamination. For decades after World War II, legal recourse and compensation were denied to entire communities living in landscapes of risk after being exposed to atmospheric testing. For example, indigenous people exposed to atmospheric testing in the South Pacific Marshall Islands (1946–1955) were studied as experimental subjects by the US military, but to this day are still seeking full compensation for ongoing claims of acute health problems and property lost due to contamination.