Living around nuclear reprocessing plants. Epidemiological controversies in France and in the UK

• In Event: Governing Toxic Waste 2

Abstract

This paper analyzes epidemiological controversies in the UK and in France and the way experts tackle the issue of the health effects of nuclear reprocessing on people leaving near the sites. During the Second World War, plutonium was produced from spent uranium fuel in the USA to equip the country with the atomic bomb. Reprocessing began in the UK and in France in the 1950s. However, as plutonium stocks were no longer needed for military motives, industrials have valued the assets of nuclear fuel “recycling” for civil applications. Reprocessing implies the discharge of gaseous and liquid effluents combining a great number of radioelements and chemical substances. Environmental activists have long denounced a global contamination of the ecosystems, but high visibility controversies arose when excesses of leukaemia in children living near the sites were publicly revealed. Activist groups have little invested the health field, occupied by professional epidemiologists who have proved unable to determine the effect of low doses of industrial effluents on human health. Moreover, leukaemia risk calculations rely on assumptions and models whom fundamental bases have not been opened to debate.
I will examine how the issue of health consequences of reprocessing is addressed scientifically and publicly, in the light of the political stakes of this practice in the UK and France. I will show that knowledge production organized as a response to public controversies has been framed and used in a way that has prevented to make health risks visible and thus helped to maintain the status quo.

Author

• Laura Barbier, CERMES3