By Kate Rix
When Cathryn Carson was in high school in Washington, D.C. she found she had an aptitude for physics. She enjoyed it too, and fully expected to become a physicist when she grew up.
She did in fact earn a master’s in physics, but then changed course and went on to earn her Ph.D. in the history of science from Harvard.
This switch from the lab to history may have been presaged in part by an event not far from Carson’s childhood home. In 1979 the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania went into core meltdown mode.
“Washington is not far from Harrisburg,” says Carson. “I remember how it was brought to consciousness all at once that things can go very wrong. Even when federal officials or scientists and engineers say a technology is safe, that does not always mean that they’ve been able to capture all the scenarios of things going wrong.”
On a national level, that catastrophe helped nurture public distrust of the nuclear industry. Together with Vietnam and Watergate, Carson adds, the Three Mile Island incident helped trigger heightened public skepticism about recommendations from government or science authorities.
“It was a generational shift,” says Carson, who joined Berkeley’s history department in 1996. She directs the interdisciplinary Office for History of Science and Technology.
This is where Carson’s work as an historian finds its locus: the intersection of science and society. Public trust for scientific elites has declined even as science and technology assume larger and larger roles in daily life. With her grasp of scientific concepts and ability to approach technical material from an historian’s point of view, Carson studies the evolving attitudes of scientists and the government toward taking public concerns into account.
“The way I see it,” she says, “you can’t tell story of public protest without getting into the guts of the science and technology. And vice versa. My deep interest in this story is about how the technical and the social are so interwoven with each other. They’re coupled into each other. In a case like this, you can’t solve a technical problem anymore without addressing the sociological issues.”
The alarm set off by the meltdown at Three Mile Island would be triggered again by subsequent events. One that Carson has examined is the stalled proposal to store spent nuclear reactor fuel in a repository at Yucca Mountain in southern Nevada, near Las Vegas and the Nevada Test Site. Congress put forward the site for the nation’s only high-level nuclear waste repository in 1987. Residents immediately near the site supported it. At the state level, however, opposition grew, mostly to the process by which the area was selected. There are no nuclear power plants in Nevada, which has led many Nevadans to feel that it’s unfair for the state to have to take on the risks of a waste repository, particularly when other states were voting to have the waste excluded from their own territory.
As the Department of Energy’s scientists see it, the site may be perfectly adequate, and many technical experts agree. It is remote and has been studied exhaustively.
“The science community mostly concluded that Yucca Mountain is a good choice,” Carson says. In 2002 the Secretary of Energy made the decision that Yucca Mountain would make a suitable site for the nation’s repository. As of 2008, some $9 billion had been spent determining whether Yucca Mountain is a safe place for storing nuclear waste.
However, critics questioned some of the government’s research. Scientists did additional investigations and a license application was submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which prompted the governor of Nevada to object. Congress overrode the objection and amid growing controversy, Yucca Mountain became a campaign issue in the 2002 presidential race.
Then this past year the Obama administration announced that Yucca Mountain was no longer a candidate for waste storage and pulled all funding for the project. Among the reasons for the site’s abandonment: the state of Nevada vigorously protested, arguing that voters and state leaders there had not been sufficiently consulted. For Carson, there is a cautionary tale in Yucca Mountain’s jagged journey from scientific approval to public outcry to political rejection.
“From an historical point of view, one lesson here is that forcing things through doesn’t work,” Carson says. “Dictating to people, even when you call on science for backing, doesn’t work very well in the American political system anymore.”
“As an historian, my question is not whether Yucca Mountain is safe or not,” she continues. “I don’t know. But it’s interesting to see how critics have forced proponents to rethink their case and account for new problems. Yucca Mountain scientists have to respond to public pressure and regulation by making their models more refined, making new calculations about how groundwater flows through the area or what the effects of a volcanic eruption would be.”
Carson is working on a book comparing American and German nuclear waste policy, tracking how grassroots organizations have pushed back against decisions made by government and how regulators have had to change their rules to accommodate public concerns.
“You can’t understand waste management unless you see the politics that is there at every stage,” she says, “shaping not just policy decisions but also what kind of science is done.”
