Ways of Contesting the Radiation Paradigm on Health Around Nuclear Facilities

• In Event: Counter-Hegemonic Epistemologies as Innovation and/or Contestation - III

Abstract

Two case studies in Great-Britain and in France exemplify different ways of resisting to hegemonic epistemologies. In the British context, a television program broadcast in 1983 revealed the existence of an unusual number of deaths by childhood leukaemia in the British village of Seascale, which borders the nuclear complex of Sellafield. The production of an alternative form of knowledge destabilized the dominant way of knowing and generated policy change. The investigation carried out by journalists and counter experts was judged “non-academic” by institutional experts, but it did impact, to some extent, the way of performing environmental epidemiological studies and of regulating discharges implied by nuclear fuel reprocessing.
A few years later in France, whistleblowing concerning leukaemia cases in excess around the la Hague reprocessing plant came from an epidemiologist who performed “conventional” epidemiological studies, which contested the dominant epistemologies. However, they couldn’t really question the scientific consensus of the time as they were heavily disqualified. Then, some environmental associations engaged in a state-funded participatory group to produce knowledge acceptable by all parties but failed in contesting the dominant way of knowing as they couldn't propose an alternative approach of risk evaluation.
I’ll show that the limited success encountered by these forms of alternative science is associated with the lack of connection between the environmental and health dimensions, and the force of inertia of a knowledge system that stems from the convergence of the dominant epidemiological and radiobiological paradigms.

Author

• Laura Barbier, CERMES3