Nuclear Berkeley, Nuclear World is structured as a collection of themes, topics, things, and conflicts which emerge as spokes heading out from the common core idea that there is a deep connection between a nuclear Berkeley and a nuclear world. Along each spoke are a series of pages ("nodes") exploring different aspects, different examples, temporal development, or something else. There is no emphasis on comprehensiveness, and there is no emphasis on absolute linearity, though a semi-linear structure (in terms of the nodes) is provided for ease of use.
order them into homogeneous groups.
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One of the most important questions asked about nuclear technology is its effect on the environment. Aside from the tens of thousands of tons of hazardous radioactive waste produced by commercial nuclear reactors and the nuclear weapons complex over the course of the late-20th century, there are also the concerns of more unnoticed contamination, such as the fallout from decades of nuclear weapons testing in Nevada.
This module focuses on the ways in which the issues of environment, waste, and contamination have played a key role in the history of nuclear technology in the Bay Area and Berkeley, the birthplace of the radioactive hazard symbol.
The Bay Area has been a major site of nuclear weapons development, deployment, and defense since the earliest days of the Manhattan Project.
This module traces out some of the ways in which the Bay Area has both been the site for the creation of security in the second World War and the Cold War, by means of its role in the creation of weapons, and how this has ironically made it the site of a potential
lack of security — as a target.
Nuclear technology has, from its beginnings, always required extensive interconnected social and economic systems in order to exist and to function. For many reasons nuclear technology has tended towards highly centralized systems of inputs and outputs, in terms of resources, materials, people, and knowledge.
The purpose of this module is to look at some of the different systems of production, distribution, and consumption which have come into being around nuclear technology, and some of the questions which have resulted from these arrangements.
