S0010417506000314jraQueries

AQ Please check the right-hand head.

AWorking Knowledge of theInsensible? Radiation Protectionin Nuclear Generating Stations,1962–1992JOY PARR

University of Western Ontario

Radiation is a workplace hazard that eludes the sensing body, or seems to.After Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, Kai Erickson described radiation as“an invisible threat,” “the very embodiment of stealth and treachery.”1 Thefirst generation of Canadian nuclear power workers, from their four decadesof experience around reactors has a different sense of the matter. They describea physical awareness of the morphology and topography of radiation, a culti-vated bodily knowledge that informs their actions as they produced power.They describe a “feel and a touch for the plant,” framed in theoreticalstudies, made through attentiveness and alert expectation, honed by beingout and about in the station, being its intimate, “listening to its very cries.”By their telling, “doesn’t feel right” ceased to be a metaphor about their work-place circumstance, and through study and practice, became a bodily effect, areport from the somatic. Key to work safety for Canadian nuclear workers wereclose study of the theory of ionizing radiation, adeptness with both the instru-ments which made radiation apparent and the calculations that made the read-ings on dials into qualitatively and spatially distinctive workplace presences,and skill in choosing, donning, building, and removing physical barriersbetween their bodies and radiation fields. Through this knowledge and prac-tice, Canadian nuclear workers came to embody the hazards of the job. Thisworking knowledge of the insensible enabled them to be responsible fortheir own radiation protection and for the safety of those with whom theyworked.2

S0010417506000314jra pp: 820–851 Techset Composition Ltd, Salisbury, U.K. 6/22/2006

1 Kai Erickson, “Radiation’s Lingering Dread,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 47 (Mar. 1991):34–39. See the commentary by J. Samuel Walker, Permissible Dose, A History of Radiation Pro-tection in the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 135–40.

2 Interview with Jim Bayes, Port Elgin, ON, 6 Oct. 2003; Bryan Patterson, Dipper Harbour, NB,5 Aug. 2003.

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0010-4175/06/820–851 $9.50 # 2006 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

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Learning how to keep safe in the presence of silent, invisible, and impalpabledangers is now a commonplace, a challenge of modern life. Tainted food andwater often taste just fine. All around us electromagnetic fields influencebodies through an “invisible topography of power.” Through years of routinefunctioning, the high technologies of our everyday lives harbor, beyondremark, the components of “normal accidents.” In twentieth-century work-places, as electrical and chemical processes displaced mechanical technologiesin industry, the balance of occupational assaults on the body shifted from theimmediately apparent—fingers lost to saws and burns from acid spills—to aconstellation of deferred effects—hearing loss, asbestosis, silicosis, andcancers—arising from imperfectly discernible hazards.3

Nuclear generating stations are a protean and heuristic instance of this tran-sition. In the literature of science and technology studies they are presented asthe apogee and nadir of high technologies. Think of the contrast drawn in thetitle of Langdon Winner’s The Whale and the Reactor.4 Winner asserted thatnuclear workplaces must be essentially and invariably hierarchical. In this heis mistaken. The protocols and practices guiding those who earned theirlivings in twentieth-century radiation fields exhibited considerable variationnationally and over time. We have studies of production and fuel-processingreactors and generating stations in the United States and France, and willsoon have a fine study of nuclear work in the Soviet Union. These showhow centrally nuclear work practices were influenced by differences innational, political, and managerial cultures.5 Canadian nuclear powerworkers of the 1960s and 1970s lived this transition. Commonly theyentered the generating stations from conventional steam plants and hydrodams or from resource and manufacturing industries where bodily confronta-tions with hazards were immediate. For them, mastering the theory and

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3 Dorothy Nelkin, The Language of Risk: Conflicting Perspectives on Occupational Health(Beverly Hills: Sage, 1985); John Tulloch and Deborah Lupton, Risk and Everyday Life(London: Sage, 2003); Joy Parr, “Local Water Diversely Known: Walkerton Ontario, 2000 andafter,” Society and Space 23, 2 (2005): 251–71; Lisa M. Mitchell and Alberto Cambrosio, “TheInvisible Topography of Power: Electromagnetic Fields, Bodies and the Environment,” SocialStudies of Science 27 (1997): 221–71; Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents (New York: Basic, 1984).

4 Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technol-ogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

5 Constance Perin, Shouldering Risks: The Culture of Control in the Nuclear Power Industry(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Monica Schoch-Spana, “Reactor Control andEnvironmental Management: A Cultural Account of Agency in the U.S. Nuclear WeaponsComplex,” Ph.D. diss., The Johns Hopkins University, 1998; Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance ofFrance, Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,1998); FranCoise Zonabend, The Nuclear Peninsula, J. A. Underwood, trans. (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1993[1989]); Sonja Schmid, “Reliable Cogs in the Nuclear Wheel:Nuclear Power Plant Operatives in the Soviet Union,” paper presented at the Society for theHistory of Technology Meetings, Oct. 2005, Amsterdam, and drawn from a doctoral dissertationin progress in Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University.

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instrumentation of nuclear work safely was a demanding and daunting modernadventure, one they were happy to share through careful and critical reflections.

By way of introduction, consider these three reports by early Canadiannuclear operators. The men from conventional power stations were leavingworksites of roiling water or roaring boilers, where workers had physicalaccess to all parts of the station at all times, and steam plants where pulverizedcoal dust hung in the air about open control rooms. These taskscapes were suf-fused with sensory stimuli. Jim Bayes, who came in 1960 to a nuclear reactor atChalk River after four years as a stationary engineer in the R. L. Hearn steamplant in Toronto, described the nuclear working environment he entered asmildly and minimally different, “a little more sneaky and a little moresubtle.” A small but notable distinction. Many men who by trade had tunedtheir bodies to register the mechanical and hydraulic systems around themfound the sensual banality of the nuclear site “hard” to accommodate. This ishow Ken Hill, a refinery worker described the change after he entered thenuclear industry in 1970: “In the oil industry, you know sound is there . . .sound is more important. If the sound changes I’ve got to go there and findout why the sound changed. Pumps shutting down or pumps starting or—like that. Whereas in a nuclear plant you can walk by and a pump starts, apump shuts down and it could not mean very much, a guy’s changing-overpump. Tank level got down so far and that’s it. I found that kind of hardbecause I was listening—coming from the oil refinery—it makes a difference.”

Bob Ivings, who came to Chalk River from a coal fired plant, remembers,“when I was an operator at Hearn, one of my biggest assets was my nose,because if things began to overheat and you had a bad bearing or something,you would walk around and you’ll smell it.”6 For these men, a challenge ofnuclear work was to retune the embodied practice and working knowledgethey had used in conventional work sites, to cultivate a different somaticmode of attention.7

For North America, we know of this process famously from Donald Harper’sWorking Knowledge, a 1980s report of a North Country Saab repair shop.8

Recall also Marcel Mauss’ presentation in the 1930s of bodily technique as acultural notion.9 Since then, the philosophical insights of Merleau-Pontyhave informed scholarship on embodiment amongst hunter-gatherers, and

6 Interviews by Joy Parr: Jim Bayes, Port Elgin, ON, 6 Oct. 2003; Ken Hill, Quispansis, NB, 28Oct. 2003; Bob Ivings, Southampton, 9 Oct. 2003.

7 Interviews by Joy Parr: Dave McKee Kincardine, ON, 2 July 2002; Frank Caiger-Watson,Kincardine, ON, 3 July 2002; Lorne McConnell, Etobicoke, ON, 25 Oct. 2002; Ken Elson,Kincardine, ON, 10 Oct. 2002. Thomas Csordas, “Somatic Modes of Attention,” in Body/Meaning/Healing (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 241–59.

8 Douglas A. Harper, Working Knowledge: Skill and Community in a Small Shop (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1987).

9 Marcel Mauss, “The Notion of Body Techniques,” in Sociology and Psychology: Essays(London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1979[1934]), 97–105.

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amongst those experiencing pain and violence and accommodating medicalinterventions.10 From this perspective, perception is not only an encounterbetween a sensing body and a discrete thing, but a “way of being-in-the-world”transcending the boundary between body and object. Canadian radiationworkers likely did (they said they did) embody knowledge of their taskscape,of the physical structures of the generating station. They also developed waysof attending to the insensible radiation fields of their worksite, somatic modeswhich kept them safe, sensibilities and practices refined as attributes of a self-responsible, relatively non-hierarchical nuclear work culture. In some respects,these practices are distinctive and not representative of the mainstream intwentieth-century nuclear reactor work, but within the history of the sensingbody and the history of high technologies, their very exceptionalism makesthem worthy subjects for study.

R A D I AT I O N P R O T E C T I O N I N T H E U N I T E D S TAT E S A N D F R A N C E

Winner’s hypothesis that nuclear generating stations are artifacts, which requirehierarchical workplace politics, began with his observation of the DiabloCanyon generating station near his hometown on the California coast. His con-clusions depend upon elements of U.S. nuclear history and features of the own-ership and fuelling characteristics of U.S. power reactors. The hierarchicalpatterns which characterize U.S. nuclear workplaces began in the militaryfacilities of World War II, where “a philosophy of purposeful ignorance, ofknowledge control” was necessary “to prevent revelations that mighthamper” the security of weapons research. At the Hanford nuclear site in the1940s, only selected members of the Medical Section were informed aboutthe radiation hazard in the workplace, and to these Health Surveyors fell theresponsibility to implement and enforce procedures and practices whichwould keep the unknowing labor force safe.11 After the war, in the navynuclear submarines and in production reactors such as those at SavannahRiver in Georgia making tritium and plutonium for weapons, the hierarchicalhealth physics model persisted, with specially trained surveyors mapping theradiation fields, choosing the dosimeters and clothing and time in field allow-able for each task, and shadowing employers while they were in the presence ofionizing radiation.12

10 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge Kegan Paul,1962); Tim Ingold, Perception of the Environment (London: Routledge, 2000); Nancy Munn,“Excluded Spaces: The Figure in the Australian Aboriginal Landscape,” Critical Inquiry 22(1996): 446–65; Thomas J. Csordas, ed., Embodiment and Experience (New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1994).

11 Winner, The Whale and the Reactor, 174–78; Peter Hales, Atomic Spaces (Urbana: Universityof Illinois Press, 1997), 282–83; Gerber, On the Home Front, 48–52.

12 Schoch-Spana, Reactor Control, 328, 342.

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From the 1950s, this workplace ideology of achieving safety in radiationfields through structures of “command and control” carried over into the peace-time use of nuclear reactors to generate electricity. Partly this was because thepool of experienced nuclear workers came from the navy, and partly becausepeacetime managers found “people who follow orders just [got] aheadfaster” in generating stations where the military legacy persisted.13 But therewere technical and proprietorial reasons, as well, to favor hierarchical workrules and to keep radiation protection within the control of a specializedcadre of nuclear workers in the United States. American nuclear powerplants were privately owned. Though they all were fuelled with enricheduranium and cooled by light water, American generating stations exhibitedmyriad proprietorial differences. Differing designs for coolant and moderatortransport systems led to radiation fields of differing geography and compositionbetween stations. Reactors using enriched uranium fuel rods cannot be refueledat power. Still today, during refueling U.S. reactors are shut down and transientteams of specialists arrive to replace the regular staff. Often, in the 1970s, manyother casual employees were brought into the plants “to perform simple main-tenance, repair and other tasks in areas of high radiation” so that permanentstaff “did not exhaust their permissible doses performing routine tasks.”14

These casuals often were referred to in the industry by the unlovely but accurateterm “dose fodder.” Given the gravity and complexity of the radiation hazardand its spatial variability between stations, when a sizeable proportion ofthose in fields were mobile re-fuelling crews and transients unfamiliar withthe local radiological terrain, the self-responsible models of occupationalhealth and safety of conventional power plants were unworkable. Twentyyears on, by the 1980s, the stresses of the hierarchical model were showingin a rigid work culture that emphasized technical fixes and procedural compli-ance rather than analysis at the front line and reporting upward of emergingconditions. As one subdued worker reported to Constance Perin, an ethnogra-pher who has recently studied U.S. nuclear stations, “you’re not supposed tofind anything new, which doubtless you do.” These obstacles to gatheringgood information about changing current conditions in nuclear stations com-promised safety, especially in the presence of a market-driven production men-tality that seemed to reward shortcuts. Despite these implications, through the1990s command and control paradigms continued to govern the U.S. industry.Only recently has an alternative posture toward radiation safety begun to gain

13 Perin, Shouldering Risks, ch. 1; quote from p. 23.14 J. Samuel Walker, Permissible Dose: A History of Radiation Protection in the Twentieth

Century (Berkeley: University of California Press), 104; Robert Gillette, “‘Transient’ NuclearWorkers: A Special Case for Standards,” Science 186 (11 Oct. 1974): 125–59.

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currency in the United States, one that valorizes discovery and doubt andemphasizes worker responsibility throughout the nuclear workplace.15

Like those at Hanford and Savannah River and for similar reasons, FrenchCommissariat a l’Energie Atomique (CEA) production reactors from the1950s, radiation protection protocols were hierarchical. A trained staff ofagents de radioprotection planned the work and shepherded workers in radi-ation fields. Safety in these settings depended upon “striking the properbalance between making employees understand risk and alarming themunduly.” This uneasy equilibrium was often challenged by workers who were,their historian suggests, moved to subvert the rules, not through carelessness,indifference, or production incentives, but as acts of rebellion against theelitism the strict separation between experts and workers of the nuclear work-place implied.16 Similar dilemmas emerged in the 1970s at the fuel reprocessingand vitrification plant at LaHague, run by a spin-off of CEA. There the radiopro-tection staff was seen as “part guardian angels, part police.” This “client relation-ship” workers found “hard to take,” and they often subverted it by taking theirbadge dosimeters as badges of safety rather than records of accumulatingdanger.17 At LaHague, regular employees observed untrained transientworkers moving on to the next job without records of the doses they hadtaken in contaminated areas, a practice which one unionist called “huge contrick,” which undermined the integrity of the radiation protection regime.18

Nuclear power reactors run by Electricite de France (EDF) were fueled bynatural uranium, moderated by graphite and cooled by CO2. A study of theChinon site on the Loire in the 1960s found that foremen alternated as techniciensde radioprotection in the work teams they led, a still hierarchical but “more tech-nically and socially integrated” approach to work in insensible radiation fields.19

The supervisor responsible for radiation protection on a shift was a co-worker,taking the same risks he was managing, rather than an alien policeman fromanother division of the workforce. But it is important to note that only engineersin these stations had training in radiation theory and only senior staff hadcommand of the practical skills to seal off hot spots. The radiation knowledge

15 Constance Perin’s fine recent study Shouldering Risks charts the path toward this change inU.S. power reactor sites with admirable detail and consummate skill. The quote is from p. 224.Chapters 5 and 6 analyze the provocations for and impediments to this transition. An early analysisof these arising difficulties in the hierarchical U.S. command and control system is JohnR. Childress and Victoria Broadhead Briant, “Risk Management through Concurrency: A NewWork Culture for Improving Safety and Performance,” in, Ronald A. Knief, et al., eds., Risk Man-agement: Expanding Horizons in Nuclear Power and other Industries (New York: Hemisphere,1991), 85–89; Schoch-Spana, in Reactor Control and Environmental Management, found thesame deficiencies arising in the production reactors at Savannah River (pp. 335–39).

16 Hecht, Radiance of France, 168–82.17 Zonabend, The Nuclear Peninsula, 78–79, 88, 96–97, 115–17; quote from p. 78.18 Ibid., 80–81.19 Hecht, Radiance of France 183–84, 191, 194.

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of the balance of the workforce was notional, “stripped of the mathematical form-alism,”20 and perhaps closer to a set of rules of thumb. Thus while responsibilityfor radiation safety in the EDF seemed to be more widely shared, line workers didnot know how to conceptualize the changing character and force of the radiationfields through which they were moving on the job. Nor were they fully cognizantof the implications of bending the rules to get the job done. Transient workerswho entered Chinon as construction laborers or to do maintenance and repairjobs were disparaged by the unionized employees as “careless, even dirty,”and blamed for the doses they took and the contamination they purportedlyspread.21 Despite EDF modifications in the hierarchical military work rule gov-erning radiation protection during the 1960s, the nationally owned nuclear gen-erating stations of France remained closer to a “command and control model,”than to the alternative Perin characterizes as “doubt and discovery.” And in thelate 1980s, after Three Mile Island, much of the shared responsibility andimproved information flows which had resulted from the 1960s civilian inno-vations was wrung out of the system, replaced by “strict compliance” to pro-cedures and a renewed Taylorite division between those who planned andthose who executed the work. These retreats toward the military model deniedthose within radiation fields “any initiative” in dealing with arising events.22

T H E D E V E L O PM E N T O F D I S T I N C T I V E LY C A NAD I A N R A D I AT I O N

P R O T E C T I O N P R A C T I C E S

Canadian nuclear reactors are technologically different from those of theUnited States and France in several respects. They are fuelled by naturalrather than enriched uranium. They are moderated and cooled by heavywater, deuterium, rather than light water, hence the CANDU name. Thesystem is pressure-tubed. The fuel bundles are set horizontally, so that thereactor can operate continuously without shutdowns for re-fuelling. These tech-nical differences influence the physical structure of CANDU reactors, and thetopography and composition of their radiation fields. And they contribute to thehistorical distinctiveness of Canadian radiation protection practices.

The focus here is on three nuclear installations. These represent three differ-ent phases in the development of Canadian radiation protection practice. The22 MW Nuclear Power Demonstration (NPD) was the first Canadian reactorto produce power, a pilot built near Chalk River, on the Ottawa River two-hoursdrive northwest of Ottawa. NPD went critical in 1962. Here the radiation pro-tection practices characteristic of research reactors producing experimentalresults, plutonium, and medical isotopes were radically reorganized to suitthe new project of generating electricity. The 206 MW Douglas Point reactor

20 Ibid., 191.21 Ibid., 195–96.22 Perin, Shouldering Risks, 217–19.

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on the eastern shore of Lake Huron near Kincardine, Ontario was the firstCanadian reactor to supply commercial power to the grid. There, from1968–1984, distinctive Canadian radiation protection protocols wereimplemented and refined. Douglas Point was a very festival of “teachablemoments,” because simultaneously power workers were struggling withflawed pressure tube design and the unhappy discovery of tritium, anambient beta source that was created as heavy water passed through neutronfields. Point Lepreau, a New Brunswick Power CANDU 6 reactor with capacityto produce 634 MW, began operation in 1982 on the eastern coast of theprovince between Saint John and the Maine border. Here were refined thedistinctive radiation protection pedagogy and practice, worked out throughthe 1970s at eight Ontario Hydro 500 to 700 MW reactors at Pickering andBruce. The primary research for this study was conducted in the archivalrecords of the Atomic Energy Control Board and Ontario Hydro, the thirty-yearseries of radiation protection training manuals from Ontario Hydro and NewBrunswick Power, and thirty extensive interviews with managers, operators,and maintainers with experience at some or all of these three reactor sites.

H I E R A R C H Y I N E A R LY R E S E A R C H R E A C T O R S

The early Canadian experimental reactors were located in the universities andtwo federal agencies: Defense Industries Limited (DIL) and Atomic EnergyCanada Limited (AECL). Like that at Hanford and Savannah River, radiationprotection in these federal agencies, whence many pioneers came to thenuclear power industry, was the responsibility of health surveyors.The health surveyor inspected the work site and wrote out a permit specifyingthe clothing, shielding, and dosimetry required, and the allowable length ofexposure. Other employees had little radiation protection training. WhenCharles Mann started at Chalk River in the early 1950s he was given as hismanual four pages of typed onionskin paper. The rest of his training came onthe job and by word of mouth. Gerald Black remembers receiving aday-and-a-half instruction when he began work with AECL at Chalk Riverin 1958. Workers generally did not know much about radiation and wereobliged to depend on the surveyors as “shepherds” of their work in radiationfields. This hierarchical system had advantages in experimental sites whereworkers might meet a wide array of radiation hazards, high gamma fields,big neutrons, plentiful alpha and beta sources, and tritium, while setting upnew experiments whose risk profiles were, by definition, unknown.23 These

23 Interviews by Joy Parr: McConnell; John Wilkinson, Hastings, ON, 17 Oct. 2002; RobertWilson, Scarborough, ON, 1 Nov. 2001 for the “shepherd” reference; Caiger-Watson; JanBurnham St. Andrew’s, NB, 22 Oct. 2002; Dave McKee; Charles Mann Kincardine, ON, 29Oct. 2001; Gerald Black, Grand Bay-Westfield, NB, 28 Oct. 2003. On the spectrum of hazardsat defense sites, see Hales, Atomic Spaces, 284–89.

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were the radiation work rules which prevailed after the transition to powerproduction in the nuclear generating stations of France and the United States.AECL experimental reactors apart, they did not persist in Canada.

The hierarchical system produced tensions. A shepherd tended sheep. Amechanic, electrician, or millwright with a task before him might have towait around for hours until a surveyor was free to plan the job. The separationof knowledge from execution, which underlay the scientific management ofFrederick Winslow Taylor, infantilized workers. Instructed what to do, butnot equipped to know why, engineers and tradesmen alike resisted the healthsurveyors’ authority and suspected their competence.24 Ken Hill was controlroom operator at Point Lepreau, and by the late 1980s a widely experiencednuclear operator long certified to be responsible for his own radiation protec-tion. He remembers with exasperation the callow air force officers, “real snotbags,” surveying his work at AECL research reactors. Without independentgrounds to assess radiation hazards, workers were tempted to “find easierways,” following the conventions of their own trades and taking risks“without realizing the nature of the risks they were taking.”25

Two incidents from these early days endured in Canadian nuclear history asforbidding folklore and telling instance. On 12 December 1952, during aroutine shutdown, a National Research Experimental reactor, the NRX,melted down. Charles Mann, who was present and participated in the ensuringfourteen-month cleanup recalled, “it literally melted itself into a glob.” TheAECL official historian links the cascade of misheard and misinterpretedinstructions from supervisor to operator that created the event to the agency’s“rigidly hierarchical system of authority and responsibility.”26 The second inci-dent involved one man, Alex Sandula, a mechanic who, unawares, picked up a“rabbit,” a piece of fuel rod which having passed though the reactor neutronflux, ricocheted off the shielding and onto the floor. In the moments beforehe reached a monitor, heard the alarm, and dropped the rabbit, contaminationtransmitted at 3000 rad/hour deposited in the creases of his fingers. For yearshis arm erupted in sores. He eventually lost his hand.27

Workers who knew little about the radiation hazard had no sound infor-mation with which to conceptualize the radiation danger in the job site, to rep-resent the geography, the topography, and the heterogeneous intensity of the

24 Schoch-Spana, Reactor Control and Environmental Management 296, 334–39. In U.S. plantsradiation protection is the responsibility of health physicists.

25 Interviews: Burnham; McConnell; Caiger-Watson; Bayes; Dave McKee; Hill; and Wilkinson(on the temptations to proceed based on trade knowledge).

26 Robert Bothwell, Nucleus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 154–66; interview:Mann.

27 Variant versions of the event were told to me by Dave McKee and Charles Mann. It became afrequent “teachable moment” in radiation protection training in later years. There is another versionin University of Toronto Archives (UTA), Bothwell Family Papers, Interview: Dr. Gordon Stewartby Robert Bothwell, Deep River, ON, 15 Apr. 1986.

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fields, and to embody the hazard in reflex and intuition. If they did not knowthat alpha, beta, and gamma rays and neutrons spread in different ways, haddifferent penetrating capacities, and would be produced in different parts ofthe plant, the hazard of the nuclear job site was both insensible and inscrutable.The shop-floor oral culture of the early years, the emulation by junior of seniormen, the four pages of instruction, and the few hours of training taught workerssomething about what to do in the presence of radiation fields, but nothingabout why. John Wilkinson, whose nuclear savvy dated from his war-timeactivities with the Scientific and Technical Intelligence Branch of the Britishsecret service, observed, “You couldn’t carry on this little apprenticeshipsystem with a whole station full of people.”28 Though the CANDU powerplants would present a narrower spectrum of radiation hazards, principallygamma and tritium, and a more stable compass of tasks than the experimentalpiles, they would be industrial work places, with more people of more variedbackgrounds in and around the reactor building.

F R OM E X P E R I M E N T S A N D H I E R A R C H Y TO E L E C T R I C I T Y A N D

S E L F - R E S P O N S I B I L I T Y

The man in charge of the NPD pilot to nuclear power was Lorne McConnell, aUniversity of Saskatchewan-trained physicist who soon after the eventhad been put in charge of the NRX emergency and the clean-up. At NPDMcConnell instituted a radical reorganization of radiation protection practice.These innovations were designed to make occupational health and safety innuclear job-sites analogous with those in conventional process industries.Every person in a station producing nuclear power was to be responsible forher or his own safety. Each worker from janitor to senior operator and shiftsupervisor would be able in the course of their job “to take their own contami-nation readings, scan themselves, look for radiation sources and safely operatethe equipment.”29 Each was to know the procedures and also understand theplant sufficiently to make sense of them. The early 1960s aspiration was thatnuclear power workers would thus be equipped to discern conditions thatmight arise and make reasoned decisions, [I’ve deleted to here] “to take risksby changing the way they were doing things . . . knowingly in the same waythat people would be taking chances with conventional hazards,” to “lookafter themselves implicitly,” and look out for the safety of their co-workers.30

The changes in radiation protection were paralleled by a shift in job classesaway from specialization, so that mechanical and technical maintainers devel-oped a wide working knowledge of the station and were safely at home with

28 Interviews: Wilkinson; Caiger-Watson.29 Interviews: Elston; Wilkinson; McConnell; Dave McKee.30 Interviews: McConnell; Wilkinson (on deciding how to do the job); Dick Joyce, Underwood,

ON, 16 Oct. 2001.

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more of its elements. “Safe as at home” was McConnell’s motto for thechange.31

Between the plan, which had the potential to significantly extend the embo-died working knowledge of every person who entered radiation fields, and itsexecution lay conceptual and pedagogical challenges. Transforming the tacitunderstandings of the pioneering phase into the explicit knowledge, writtenregulations, and procedures of a mature industry was a task common to allnations developing nuclear generating stations in the 1960s. But formulatingradiation protection manuals was more demanding in Canada where self-responsibility was a central objective of the project. Because at AECL researchreactors the health surveyors had been trained through an apprenticeshipsystem,32 Charlie Mann’s four pages of onion-skin apart, there were no texts,and no symbolic representations of what surveyors knew sensually and whatthey did in practice. With this in mind, a drafting team was organized consistingof the newly appointed NPD health physicist Al Frey, his assistant, RobertWilson, two health surveyors seasoned in the AECL hierarchical system,John Wilkinson and Frank Caiger-Watson, and the assistant superintendentof NPD. They began to collect the oral culture and habits of the surveyors,and combined these with the physics and chemistry the scientists judgedrelevant to formulate procedures. Along the way the team consulted documen-tation from the American research establishments at Hanford and Oak Ridges.Then, over a period of months, McConnell cajoled the group to reframe whatthey knew from their own and U.S. hierarchical precedents into procedures thata high school leaver responsible for her or his own radiation protection couldfollow while performing their jobs.33

The commissioning and operating manuals for the pilot power station, NPD,were reports from practice, “when we figured the system was working, ‘it’s com-missioned(!),’ we had to write it up. That was the commissioning manual.”Operators studied the manufacturers’ documentation and the plant flow sheets,then got the equipment functioning. Their reports of what they had donewere the early operating manuals. “You put down your best guess . . . put

31 Interviews: McConnell; Elston.32 Interviews: Wilkinson; Caiger-Watson.33 Interviews: Wilkinson; Caiger-Watson; Wilson; McConnell. Shoshona Zuboff describes a

similar transition in the computerization of manufacturing processes, in In the Age of the SmartMachine (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 59, 77. The recent literature on knowledge managementis also helpful in untangling the issues the drafting team faced: David J. Teece, “Knowledge andCompetence as Strategic Agents,” 138; and Bo Newman, “Agents, Artifacts and Transformations:The Foundations of Knowledge Flows,” 305, both in Clyde W. Holsapple, ed., Handbook onKnowledge Management I (Berlin: Springer, 2003); Claus Otto Scharmer, “Self-TranscendingKnowledge,” in, Ikujiro Nonaka and David Teese, eds., Managing Industrial Knowledge(London: Sage, 2001), 83–88. Fredrik Ericsson and Anders Avdic formalize a similar interaction,in “Information Technology and Knowledge Acquisition in Manufacturing Companies: A Scandi-navian Perspective,” in, Elayne Coakes, Dianne Willis, and Steve Clarke, eds., KnowledgeManagement in the SocioTechnical World (Berlin: Springer, 2002), 121–35.

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it down in an operating format.” While the writers of these texts thought of themas “basically a history,” the history was short. These were not chronicles ofproven routines. And so, at NPD, when working knowledge was evolvingrapidly, there “wasn’t really . . . a hard and fast rule that you had to follow themanual. You were allowed to think, ‘how do I fix this thing?’” 34

The labor force of the first Canadian reactor to produce power was drawnfrom the hydraulic and thermal power divisions of Ontario Hydro35 and fromthe AECL research establishment at Chalk River. These “dam attendants,”“coal and ash handlers” and “nuclear jockeys,” as they called one another,were all entering new shop-floor terrain. None had been responsible previouslyfor their own radiation protection. None had worked in a site where masteringand maintaining documentation was so central to the job. The men from theexperimental reactors had a grasp of nuclear theory and “a feel for workingin radiation fields.” The thermal men were familiar with the workings of theNPD turbine hall, for, outside the reactor building, a CANDU nuclear stationwas and is essentially a steam plant. In terms of responsibility, new radiationprotection protocols at NPD made safety in nuclear power stations more analo-gous with that in conventional process industries. In terms of sensuality, dis-tinctions between nuclear and conventional industries remained. Thedifference is significant. For the new protocols to be most successful, nuclearworkers would need to retune the embodied practice and working knowledgethey had used in conventional work sites. They would need to cultivate a differ-ent somatic mode of attention.36

In retrospect, nuclear workers who worked at Bruce and Point Lepreaurecalled welcoming the new system and the individual responsibility it con-ferred. Those who stayed with the work and adapted to the change took onthis competence to keep safe in the presence of a grave insensible danger asa personal attribute. “I preferred to look after my own self.”37 Claiming theworkplace convention as consistent with the concept of a discerning self waskey. Knowledge embodied only by repetition in obedience to authoritywould have been held rigidly. Knowledge volitionally embodied was heldreflexively, within the stance of alert attention by the self, which had delibera-tively accepted the re-embodiment. This was a collegial rather than a militarymodel of workplace relations.At the start in 1962, AECL and the Canadian regulatory agency, the Atomic

Energy Control Board (AECB), were skeptical about the initiative. The system

34 Interviews: Ivings; Bayes; Dave McKee; Hill.35 Ontario Hydro had been a co-sponsor of the Chalk River site since 1955; Bothwell, Nucleus,

206–7.36 Interviews: McKee; Caiger-Watson; McConnell; Elson; Hill; Bayes; Ivings. Thomas Csordas,

“Somatic Modes of Attention,” in Body/Meaning/Healing (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002),241–59.

37 Interview: Hill, 26.

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that made workers responsible for their own radiation protection wasimplemented in the nuclear stations of Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswickand exported with CANDU reactors to India, Romania, and later China. In theyears before 1983 the Canadian system of radiation protection was the exceptionto the prevailing health surveyor model at nuclear sites around the world.

The two systems rested on different epistemological foundations. Forexample, in the 1980s Dupont managers at the Savannah River project inGeorgia, refusing the premise of the NPD innovation, insisted that industrialsafety and nuclear safety were not equivalents.38 The American approachwas prescription: “codes you had to comply with,” “procedures . . . for goshsakes don’t ever deviate from them . . . ” even to employ a safer alternative.The Canadian AECB, by contrast, in the 1970s had come around to the positionthat “as you could never write a perfect procedure,” deliberative refinementsmade by well-trained and long-practiced workers were acceptable alternativesto code. “Just show us it’s safe.”39

CANDU reactors, dating from the NRU, the immediate successor of theNRX, were re-fuelled at power. Because of this it made sense to Canadiannuclear operators to make deep investments in training of their stable year-round labor forces. In CANDU reactors anyone who worked in radiationzones was also qualified to supervise the radiation protection of others, includ-ing supervising the smaller number of outside contractors who entered Cana-dian stations. This intensified surveillance. If a contractor embarked uponsomething foolish, “somebody would say, ‘don’t do that.’ It might be ajanitor, it wasn’t somebody specially paid for that.”40 If the CANDU refuelingtechnology allowed power plant operators to provide continuous employment,and led them to emphasize skills development amongst local recruits, publicpolicy promoted this human resources strategy. For the nuclear stations atBruce in Ontario and Point Lepreau in New Brunswick had been sited in mar-ginal economic zones at least in part to be generators of stable high-wageemployment.41

The year 1962 was a good time to implement a fundamental reorganization inwork rules in Canada, because at that time Canadian power producers and theirunions had only a few years experience using steam to generate electricity. Thepower workers unions were small. Hydro stations predominated. Steam

38 Schoch-Spana, Reactor Control and Environmental Management, 271–72. The technologicaldifferences between Canadian and U.S. reactors would not have been in the foreground in this case.Savannah River was a U.S. heavy water site with radiological hazards similar to those in CANDUplants.

39 Interviews: Wilson; Joyce.40 Interview: McKee.41 Robert Gillette, “‘Transient’ Nuclear Workers: A Special Case for Standards,” Science 186

(11 Oct. 1974): 125–29; Interviews: Caiger-Watson; Black; Stephen Frost, Johnson Settlement,NB, 11 Aug. 2003.

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generation, either by burning fossil fuels or by harnessing nuclear reactions, wasrelatively new to Ontario and so there was not a long union legacy of job classi-fications to remake for work around boilers, turbines, and transformers.42

Over time it became apparent that in hierarchically organized nuclear worksites workers with narrower responsibility and accountability were more likelybored, and bored workers were less attentive. Aworker made more accountablefor his own actions and for those around him was more “alert and aware ofthemselves and their surroundings,” more responsive to little cues and chan-ging conditions, and likely to “notice and confront discrepancies earlier.” Aperson given greater responsibility and accountability assumed a differentsomatic mode of attention. As the authors of a 1989 international studyreported, “they can almost ‘sense’ when a particular piece of equipment isnot working right, before the problem is big enough to be a majorproblem.”43 These workers were more likely to use the knowledge they thusembodied to optimize performance and safety.44 Aworker taking his own radi-ation readings and analyzing contamination levels in his own samples madeguides for action from numerical representations of insensible hazards. Heorganized his work accordingly.45 He was more likely to work safe.

D O U G L A S P O I N T, P I O N E E R S W I T H O U T S H E P H E R D S

The work safety challenges at Douglas Point, the first Canadian reactor toproduce power for the grid, were memorable and instructive. Scale alonealtered worker’s sensory modes of attention. Douglas Point, at 200 MW, pro-duced ten times more power than NPD, and physically was ten times as big.Whereas at NPD a chief operator could see half the station from the controlroom window, at Douglas Point “a guy would leave the control room, youhad no idea where he was.” Operators were moving from visual to instrumentsurveillance in unpropitious circumstances. Planning for the transition frompilot to power had proceeded deliberatively through the recession years,1958–1962. But in 1963 the ‘swinging sixties’ began in Canada, and asdemand for electricity increased the scientists designing Douglas Point, gate-keepers of a new source of supply, were pressed to complete their work.Their haste showed. Douglas Point was “delicate.” What, in McConnell’swords, should have been designed “like a dray-horse, was designed like a race-horse,” a reactor made by scientists which did not satisfy engineers.46

42 Interviews: McConnell; Burnham.43 Childress and Broadhead Briant, “Risk Management through Concurrency,” 85–89.44 Nuclear Energy Agency, OECD, Work Management in the Nuclear Power Industry (Paris:

OECD 1997), 11–15.45 Zonabend, Nuclear Peninsula, 76–81, 96–97, 101.46 Interviews: Bayes; Wilson Ivings; UTA, Bothwell Family, McConnell interview. R. Wilson

and D. A. Lee, “Radiation Protection—the Future,” 27th Annual Conference of the CanadianNuclear Association, St John, NB, Proceedings 14-7, June 1987, 379–83.

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The high pressure tubing in the heat transfer system quickly sprung leaks oftritiated heavy water. The valves imported from the utility’s conventional steamplants shed costly and radiated D2O at intolerable rates. At least 25 percent ofstation radiation doses came from moderator and heat transport system tritiumleaks. Beta radiation levels were sufficiently high that workers performing tasksin the reactor building had to don plastic suits daily, rather than exceptionally.Cobalt-bearing filings flaked off the stellite bearings in pump seals, and carriedradiating Cobalt 60, a high intensity gamma emitter, through the heat transportsystem. Up-keep at Douglas Point exceeded projections by 600 percent.47

A “primitive, early computer” measured the flow and temperature of theplant’s 308 coolant channels. This, and all the plant instrumentation, was setwithin a narrow and, retrospectively, a too narrow band for alarms. An imbal-ance in the readings signaled the computer to shut down the reactor, sometimesas many as three times per shift. These nuisance alarms were dangerous, for thereactor was most vulnerable on the way down from and back to power. Work inthe Douglas Point control room was so nerve-wracking that some experiencedoperators transferred to less daunting jobs. Getting the work done within thecombined yearly radiation dose limits of the station’s staff complement wasdifficult.48

Nuclear workers of this period are legendary. Given the prevailing knowl-edge and equipment, they had to be innovative. As innovators, they assumedthe same distinctive “pioneer” risk calculus Gabrielle Hecht has reported atEDF generating stations of the same period in France.49 “Nobody in theworld knew what we were doing then. Including us . . . . Basically, there wasa lot of theoretical stuff but nobody had ever tried it out.” Effective radiationprotection practice is an arbitrage of exposure amongst time, distance, andshielding. When their equipment was rudimentary and flawed, and their knowl-edge of their hazard gestational rather than resolved, nuclear workers in theDouglas Point days emphasized speed. “You quickly learned that rather thantippy-toe around, quick in and quick out resulted in less dose, plus gets thejob done.” Pioneers who had participated in the NRX clean-up, who hadwaded through heavy water in Chalk River emergencies, or who first hadbeen in radiation fields before there was much knowledge about the hazard,assumed that all radiation knowledge would be imperfect, thought of them-selves as ‘task-oriented,” and were more likely than younger men to act

47 Interviews: Bayes; Ivings; Caiger-Watson; Dave Meneer, Dipper Harbour, NB, 5 Aug. 2003.H. K. Rae, “Heat Transport System,” in, Atomic Energy Canada Limited, Canada Enters theNuclear Age: A Technical History of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (Montreal: McGill-Queen’sUniversity Press, 1997), 283–87; R. Wilson, et al., “Occupational Dose Reduction Experience inOntario Hydro Nuclear Power Stations,” Nuclear Technology 72 (Mar. 1986): 243–44.

48 Bothwell, Nucleus, 296–97; UTA, Bothwell Family, McConnell Interview; Interviews:Bayes; Ivings; Caiger-Watson. Wilson, “Occupational Dose Reduction,” 231.

49 Hecht, Radiance of France, 192–99.

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rather than deliberate.50 In the French fuel-reprocessing plant at LaHague, menwith this orientation toward risk, who emphasized speed and efficiency, werecalled kamikazes. They were distinguished from rentiers, workers whomanaged their radiation dose allowance as thriftily as a person living onmodest property revenues.51 In Canada, as in the French power station atChinon, this distinction seems to have been generational. In time, the risk-taking pioneers were replaced by nuclear workers more likely to emphasizedeliberation and doubt. The Canadian novelist Catherine Bush, whose fatherworked the Canadian nuclear industry, has a character parse the difference inthis way: “Nuclear cowboys . . . were reckless, cavalier in the face of radiation,believing they could do anything . . . . nuclear fishermen were careful andapproached their source of power as if it were a fruitful but dangerous sea:they took only what they needed and respected its dangers.”52

The training the pioneers got at NPD and Douglas Point was more timeconsuming and theoretical than at their previous jobs. At steam plants, station-ary engineers were exceptional in their formal pursuit of credentials. At NPDand Douglas Point the classroom radiation protection training, alone, wasfull time for six or seven weeks. In the health-surveyor system at LaHague,workers typically took two days of theoretical and two days of practical trainingin radiation protection.53 The Ontario Hydro course in the 1960s included thephysics, chemistry and thermodynamics of radiation, radionuclides, and radi-ation protection, “the basics of radiation external exposure, how to controlinternal exposure, . . . some ideas of the biological effects of ionizing radi-ations”54—all essential foundations for the working knowledge which wouldallow an employee to get his job done within his yearly dose limit. WhenOntario Hydro declined to pay nuclear workers a premium for their radiationprotection knowledge, their union took the issue to arbitration and, based ontheir “special skills and responsibilities,” won for nuclear workers the equival-ent of the highest local cost of living allowance in the contract.55

50 Interviews: Dave McKee; Bayes; Ivings; Burnham; Hill.51 Zonabend, Nuclear Peninsula, 105–13; Schoch-Spana, Reactor Control and Environmental

Management, 337.52 Catherine Bush, The Rules of Engagement (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2000), 176.53 Interviews: Wilson; Wilkinson; Bayes; Hill; Meneer. Zonabend, Nuclear Peninsula, ch. 5.54 Private Collection of Dick Joyce, Underwood, ON; Examinations, Radiation Protection,

Douglas Point, GS, 10 Feb. 1966, 17 Mar. 1966, 6 Apr. 1966. These exams were set by RobertWilson. Ontario Hydro, Radiation Protection Regulations, 1962. Interviews: Wilson; Wilkinson.

55 An incident from this 1964 arbitration before H. Carl Goldenberg, OBE, QC, described in thebargaining notes of Ontario Hydro representatives, is retold by union members to emphasize theexceptional knowledge required of nuclear workers. Bob Abbott, Hydro’s manager of laborrelations, contended that a mechanical maintainer in a nuclear station did not need to know anymore than a mechanical maintainer in a hydraulic site, a dam. Bob Ivings, a veteran of theHearn steam plant and NPD, and in 1964 an operator at Douglas Point, pointing to a four-foothigh stack on manuals he has piled on a near-by chair, exclaimed “Bull-shit.” The lawyer for theunion, David Lewis, later a leader of the New Democratic Party, the Canadian social democrats,

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It is hard not to sympathize. Science aside, even the number-work to estimatethe dose for a task was a challenge. Local hires for Douglas Point wereworkshop-savvy high school leavers from surrounding farms and furniture fac-tories.56 At Point Lepreau in the late 1970s, where New Brunswick Powermade local hiring a priority, some recruits had been fishermen and woodwor-kers. Others from skilled trades, for example machinists from the nearbySaint John shipyard, were enticed by the prospect of joining a leading edgehigh-technology industry. Many had been away from school for a decade ormore and many had left school after at grade 8.57

MAK I N G F I E L D S S E N S I B L E AT O N TA R I O H Y D R O AND N EW B R UN SW I C K

P OW E R : T H E MATU R E P H A S E

Robert Wilson’s teaching for the expanding Ontario Hydro nuclear program inthe 1970s and Jan Burnham’s pedagogy at New Brunswick Power in the 1980stook on this next challenge—to make nuclear workers with the embodiedworking knowledge to manage their own safety in radiation fields, not fromexperienced experimental, defense, or power workers, but by careful selectionfrom and training of the local labor pool. Burnham’s radiation protectionmanuals, in their five editions, have become the standard texts for the Canadiansystem of radiation protection, the basis for embodied working knowledge ofradiation fields, and the foundation for the somatic modes of attention thatguided CANDU workers.58

Burnham is English MSc in nuclear instrumentation, a gruff northerner ofhard-living postures and close, sympathetic habits of observation. He wasthirty-four in 1974 when he transferred from Ontario Hydro to New BrunswickPower to establish health physics at Point Lepreau. He began well, with respectfor the working knowledge new hires brought to the station. These were “verysmart guys; they could fix anything.” He gave his manuals the format of highschool science texts, fitting since men worked on them evenings next to theirteenagers around the kitchen table. New workers at Lepreau with gaps intheir book learning took a week’s preparatory instruction in mathematics.

is said to have rephrased: “I am informed by my young friend here that that isn’t true,” promptingGoldenberg to reply, “Yes, I hear, and I don’t want to hear it again.” Ontario Hydro Archives(OHA), Labour Relations files for 1964, submission to Goldenberg regarding NPD and DP withaccompanying notes; Power Workers Union files, “In the matter of an arbitration between theHydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario and the Ontario Hydro Employees Union, Local1000, award, 18 Mar. 1964; Interviews: Dave McKee; Ivings.

56 OHA, Labour Relations, 11 Feb. 1964; Interviews: Elston; Caiger-Watson; Wilson. OntarioHydro specified that their recruits would have finished grade thirteen, and that they be graduatesof the five-year academic high school stream, or equivalent. But given the composition of thelocal labor pool, equivalence must often have been offered and accepted

57 Interviews: Burnham; McCaskill; Frost.58 Interview: Wilson.

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Those for whom the math came easily unobtrusively continued study sessionsfor those who were struggling. After all, Burnham affirmed, “this stuff isn’trocket science, right?”59

The foundations for a working knowledge of radiation fields, for the somaticmodes of attention appropriate to this insensible hazard, were theoretical. The1979 manual opened with chapters on the atom and radiation theory, for thetypes of radiation have different physiological effects and need be differentlyembodied. With this knowledge recruits began to re-conceptualize theirworking bodies. A worker with a richly informed understanding of insensibleradiation fields more likely accepted measurements, calculations, and alarmsas counsels for deliberative action, and attended to them and embodied themwithout a sense of personal violation. The different knowledge bases and auth-ority structures sustained both different somatic modes of attention and differ-ent risk behaviors.Consider these examples, woefully simplified though they be. Alpha particles

move quickly over short distances. Externally, they are little threat, for they willnot penetrate the dead outer layers of skin. When ingested or inhaled, however,they are a danger from which movement provides no defense. Contaminationin the form of fuel particles carried out from fuel bays and fuel handling areason workers’ clothing and footwear, and on equipment, spread alpha. Somatically,Burnham quipped, these are hazards “you can’t walk away from.”60 Beta particlespenetrate about a centimeter of human tissue and are present in a wide range ofenergies, some sufficiently strong to burn the skin. The body itself is thus an inef-fective shield against beta. A sheet of plywood or rubber sheeting will serve, butbetween body and beta lead blankets are the shielding of choice. For gamma radi-ation evasive action is never completely successful. Water, aluminum, and con-crete barriers make measurable dents in gamma intensity, but some gammawill penetrate all shielding. Gamma is a radiation hazard nuclear workersmanage on a bodily uptake budget year by year, attempting to keep their accumu-lation as low as is reasonably achievable (ALARA). The dilemmas neutronspresent bodies differ. Both neutrons and gammas are produced prodigiously inthe reactor core at power, but neutrons activate matter; they create radioactiveprogeny, including progeny made with the water that constitutes much of thehuman body. From heavy water, they create the hydrogen isotope tritium, thebeta hazard first formidably encountered in CANDU stations at leaky DouglasPoint. Tritium is an airborne hazard that once inhaled or ingested joins thebody’s fluids. It is sweated and excreted, but it also fractionally persists.

59 Interview by Joy Parr: Dan McCaskill, Maces Bay, NB, 27 Oct. 2003. Interviews: Frost;Meneer; Burnham. New Brunswick Power, Radiation Protection Training Course (RP), 1979,1981, 1986, 1992, and 2002.

60 The quip first appears in Burnham, RP (1979) RPT(A)-8.1 2, and persists: 1986, 310; 1992,308; 2001, 227.

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Time is a factor in these bodily encounters. Dose accumulates with time in aradiation field. Some fields pass away. Most gamma emitters decay quickly;during shutdowns, the gamma hazard soon dissipates. Some do not. Tritium,the beta emitter, has a half-life of 12.3 years; Cobalt 60, the beta-gammaemitter which plates out from stellite steels and “tramps” about for 5.3 years.Waiting will not help.

What is to be attended to, somatically, also depends upon place. Neutrons arecontained behind the concrete walls of the reactor core. But the moderatorsystem—the heavy water that slows neutrons in the reactor to causefission—and the primary heat transport system—the heavy water that circulatesfrom the reactor core to the boilers generating steam—both extend beyond theprotecting shield of the reactor. Where tritium leaks from the moderator pipes,nearby bodies meet beta. Where particles of Cobalt 60 have ceased trampingand come to rest along the pressure tubing, nearby bodies meet beta-gamma.

This rudimentary knowledge that alpha, beta, and gamma rays and neutronsspread in different ways had different penetrating capacities, and were presentin different parts in the site, suggests how the insensible hazard can begin to beboth sensible and scrutable. In real life, this knowledge, elaborated, compli-cated and refined over weeks of training at Point Lepreau and Ontario Hydrogenerating stations, and refreshed at three-year intervals, prepared nuclearworkers to elude or minimize the bodily effects of radiation. Their workingknowledge was a skilled arbitrage of time, distance, and shielding, a performedrepertoire of embodied practices guided by instruments.

The onerous days at Douglas Point convinced Robert Wilson, the OntarioHydro health physicist in charge, that CANDU stations had to be designedand managed so that they shed no more radiation each year into human fleshthan their regular staff complement than international limits allowed. Hisgoal was “no more dose fodder,” the outside contract workers and the staff bor-rowed from other parts of the station to do jobs after all the regular operatorsand maintainers had exceeded their allotted doses. These were people whotook dose and then slipped from place and mind. The effect of the fieldswould be borne in bodies of familiars, its accumulating impact apparent inthe work roster of the station. A supervisor or first operator so unlucky orunplanful as to “burn out,” exceed his dose for the period, would for the dur-ation no longer be seen in active zones. The multiple competencies thatMcConnell required of each nuclear worker from NDP on helped here, butthe trade work that could be scheduled depended on the dose that those withtrade skills had free. Some work, on consideration, could be deferred untilthe next dose period. Sometimes the only way to get a job done in thehighest fields was to distribute the dose, sending in members of a shift crewone after another for fifty-second turns at the crank on a valve. Personal databoards in the station were public records of who had taken what dose. Mana-ging contact with radiation fields in this way gave known limits and locations

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to the bodily implications of the insensible hazard. This was not a burdenimposed by stealth and treacherously distributed, but rather a diet of dose, anordinary individual responsibility with collegial implications. By the late1970s the positive implications of these innovations in design and work ruleswere demonstrable. The CANDU reactors where Wilson and Burnhamoversaw radiation protection tallied lower collective doses per unit of electricalproduction than did the light water reactors of the United States (figure 1).61

R EADING I NSTRUMENTS

Burnham’s academic specialty was nuclear instrumentation, and he designedsome of the radiation protection devices at Point Lepreau. His fascination with

FIGURE 1. Collective Dose per Unit of Electrical Production

61 Robert Wilson, “Occupational Dose Reduction Experience”; Robert Wilson and D. A. Lee,“Radiation Protection—The Future?” Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference of the CanadianNuclear Association, 14–17 June 1987, Saint John, NB, 379–83. Interviews: Wilson; Ivings;Bayes; Hill; Meneer; McCaskill; Burnham, RP (1992), 460, 466.

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the inner workings of measuring instruments shows in the early teachingmanuals. He believed that “guys need to know the underlying principles ofhow their instruments worked so that they would know and understand whattheir limitations were.”62 This attention exasperated students. For them, radiationmeasures were novel, and a conceptual challenge. In the mechanical and processindustries from which many had come, instruments were less likely to be blackboxes than devices whose workings were apparent: “you could see the littleplunger going up and down.” Or their implications were accessible byanalogy: “as the level in the vessel rose, so did the level on the gauge.” In anuclear station, however, instruments were electrical. They yielded readings,symbolic representations of the insensible radiation field. These readings inand of themselves could not direct action. They were inputs for calculationsand analysis of whether a job could be accomplished within acceptable doselimits. Workers were not so concerned about how the instrument worked aswith how to become quick and competent with the calculations that definedthe insensible in their specific task site. Zonabend observed that Frenchnuclear workers at LaHague who carried meters but did not do their own dosecalculations treated the instruments as means of protection rather than measuresof radioactivity. Canadians’ ciphering of their own doses spared them this cogni-tive slippage. Still, over time, edition-by-edition, power workers persuadedBurnham to “waste less” of their time on the mastery of electronics of instrumen-tation, and cut to the chase. His later editions emphasized rather the analyticalwork that let them “see” the dimensions of the hazard before them.63

Their differing innards made instruments read changes in the radiation fieldwith different response times. To this extent at least, Burnham was right and hisstudents were wrong. Some had dead times between registering pulses.Workers had to learn to embody these affordances in their practice to positionthe instrument for the most accurate reading, and to choose an instrument withthe best trade-off between response time and accuracy for the job. Designchanges of the 1980s diminished these limitations, especially at low levels.But workers still recognized the relationship between bodily gesture andgood information, particularly in the “friskers” they used at boundary pointsin the station to measure gamma contamination on their persons. The appli-cations section of the training course and the year of probation that followedit were an apprenticeship, when workers re-schooled their reflexes toembody the symbolic reading on the instrument as a sensation, as form oftacit knowledge with the same credibility as touch, taste, or smell.64

62 E-mail, Jan Burnham to Joy Parr, 18 Apr. 2004.63 Interviews: McCaskill; Hill; Wilkinson; Caiger-Watson. Shoshona Zuboff, In the Age of the

Smart Machine (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 72–73; Zonabend, Nuclear Peninsula 87, 117.64 Interviews: Hill; Frost; Meneer; Burnham; Mann; Caiger-Watson. Interview by Joy Parr:

Gerald Black, Grand Bay—Westfield, NB, 28 Oct. 2003. Gerald Black’s specialty at PointLepreau was instrumentation, and his interview is especially valuable on this topic. On

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Above all else, the message in the mature stage of training nuclear workerswas “believe the instrument,” to suppress doubt—“this thing can’t be readingright”—about the symbolic register of the dial. Stephen Frost, who began atPoint Lepreau as a service maintainer straight from high school in 1982doesn’t remember any cowboys in his time. “Fear was probably at the rootof it. I mean, I can’t see this, I can’t smell it, I need to know how to use thisinstrument. So I’m really going to pay attention here.”65 By the 1980s theknowledge the pioneers had done without was about. The stations had moreand better instruments. Workers’ fear was amply informed.

U SING F EAR AND LAUGHTER TO C REATE MATURE D ISCERNMENT

Burnham’s take on fear was bawdy. His students had experience with demand-ing manual work. The hazards from which he hoped to protect them couldinflict grave bodily, including genetic, harm. He interspersed the conceptuallydifficult content with groaner word-play and pictures of himself, “making afashion statement,” appendages inserted into the body scanners, face obscuredby visor and hard-hat, body clad in plastics vacuuming up contamination.66

Physical humor brought the body back into a setting where bodily sensationwas ineffectual as a defense. On tramp contaminants in the tubing: “Usually,beta-gamma sources have enough shielding to absorb all beta radiation. Butif they do not, beware! . . .At point contact, the dose rate would be greaterthan 1000 Gy/h/ This is not a misprint. ALWAYS USE TONGS WHENHANDLING SMALL SOURCES. Never use tongues.”67 On the personal dosi-meters (TLDs) each worker was required to wear in radiation fields, “Your TLDbadge is worn in a prominent position on the front of your body between waistand neck—most people clip it on their breast pocket rather than to theirnipples. . .. If you are working near a source such that the TLD would notmeasure the maximum dose to your whole body, move the TLD to that partof your torso that will receive the highest.”68 The image of the friendlyservice maintainer speaks to another concern (figure 2).69

Gallows humor acknowledged the shared physical threat and channeled thebodily response it invoked. Burnham claims that he would “stick a cartoon in”on the blank page opposite chapter heads to “get guys to look at the book. . ..

“affordances,” see Zuboff, In the Age, 187. In the first four editions of the Burnham manual chapter5 concerns instrumentation. Instrumentation is covered in chapter 6 in Burnham (2001). WilliamH. Halenbeck, Radiation Protection (Boca Raton: Lewis Publications, 1994), 126–33.

65 Burnham, RP, 1979, RPT(A)5.4, 16–17; 1986, 201–3; 1992, 202–4. Interview: Frost.66 Burnham RP, 1979, RPT(A)-9.6 4; 1986, 418; 1992, 180, 400; 2001, cover.67 The ‘tongs not tongues” play first appears in Burham (1992, 251) and persists in 2001, 188.68 Burnham gives the instruction straight in RP (1981) RPT(A)-11.1 11 and in 1986, 223. The

nipples reference appears in the text in 1992, 293, and is gone by 2001.69 Burnham RP (1979) RPT(A)-6.1 10; 1986, 249; 1992, 246; 2001, 184.

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everybody else treats it deadly seriously and its bloody boring so I threw a fewjokes in.”70 Maybe, but look at the work these cartoons are doing, in a trainingcourse where the learning curve was steep, the hazards unfamiliarly insensible,their presence only indirectly knowable, their long-term and landscape effectsuncertain, when the effects were bodily, and potentially deadly (figure 3).71

Burnham’s pedagogy nurtured working knowledge, in this case a theoreti-cally informed practice composed of finely honed interactions between theautomatic and the attentive, actions learned to be instantaneously disruptableby conscious intervention. Artists call this “flow.”72 In part it is the tacit know-ledge historians of science so frequently consider, knowledge embodied inmuscle rather than symbol and sign, by the nature of its bodily repository, sen-suous and synthetic.73 More fully, it is the embodied knowledge informed byculturally distinctive somatic modes of attention that have fascinatedanthropologists in recent years.74 “Although instruments are essential to

FIGURE 2. Friendly Maintenance Supervisor

70 Interview: Burnham, 13.71 Burnham, RP, 1992, 480, 268, 448, 138, 554.72 Mihhaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention

(New York: HarperCollins, 1996).73 Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1967), 4; Stephen

Turner, The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge and Presuppositions (Oxford:Polity Press, 1994); H. M. Collins, “What Is Tacit Knowledge?” in Theodore Schatzke, KarinKnorr-Cetina, and Eike von Savigny, eds. The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (London:Routledge, 2001), 107–19.

74 Csordas, “Somatic Modes of Attention.”

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detect and measure radiation fields,” he counseled students, they should “assessthe magnitude of a hazard” by setting the results from the instruments withinthe context of the history and current operating state of the reactor. Thus to“get a feel for the hazard in advance.”75

FIGURE 3. a and b. Cartoons

75 Burnham, RP, 1986, 279–80; 1992, 277.

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D ISCOVERY AND DOUBT

Crafting this synthetic, embodied working knowledge was complicated. Yes,the hazard was insensible except through instruments and calculations. Butworkers’ protective clothing put more of the sensuous beyond ready register.Gloves limited touch, though surgical gloves were permissible for some jobs,and work around large equipment did not require fine sensuous discrimination.In areas where tritium levels were high, however, and tritium levels rose stea-dily through the life of a CANDU reactor, workers wore plastic suits. Fromtheir earliest versions, these limited vision and hearing. The first suits wereunventilated, and hot. The teams who wore these apparatus at NRX, NPD,and Douglas Point were all young men. Older workers could not have bornethe physical assault. Over time the technology improved, but with mixedsensory implications. Once the suits were ventilated, their wearers becamedehydrated, a state which compromised both comfort and concentration.Blown out several inches from the body to offer the protection of positivepressure against ambient hazards, the suit literally gave men tunnel vision,and the rush of moving air, especially around the face, was disorienting. Theroar of the ventilation system made hearing even more difficult, and theheavy shielding around the reactor meant that supplementary electronic com-munications were never very effective. The haptic constraints were consider-able. The air hose was a tether that restricted the range of movement. Theinflated suit was big and cumbersome, giving a man an unaccustomed girthand an ungainly gait, complicating access on the ladders and amidst the tightspaces of the station’s active zones (figure 4).76

The suits were a new and foreign environment, a radical alteration in “spa-tiocorporeal field” for the wearer, for the duration of the wearing. Men wereaware that they were not getting the “same kind of feedback” through theirbodies while they were in plastics, that they “lost some of their senses,” and“were not as well oriented.” Journeys out in plastics required thorough plan-ning, training, and practice. When a feel for the station’s spaces, distances,and historical fields ordered so much of daily work, the bouts of near totalinsensibility in plastics, the couple of hours not knowing whether the atmos-phere at the job was cold or hot, fresh or fetid, discomfited. Dan McCaskill,a mechanical maintainer employed at Point Lepreau from the beginning, con-cerned that he might thus have been a danger to himself or to others, compen-sated: “I think you’re much more aware of what you’re doing if you are doing itin a plastic suit. Because you take nothing for granted.” Being deprived of

76 Interviews: Bayes; Ivings; McCaskill; Hill; Frost. Interview by Joy Parr: Barry Schell; PortElgin, ON, 15 Oct. 2001. Hydro One Archives, Labour Relations Microfiche Collection: handwrit-ten notes on bargaining, c. 2 Apr. 1963, 11 Feb. 1964, 12 or 19 Sept. 1964. On noise, see “Union’sBargaining Agenda—Nuclear,” 29 Mar. 1966. On crotch tears, see A. J. Frey, Senior HealthPhysicist to William McCullough, 1 Feb. 1966.

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many sensory reference points by the protective equipment focused workers’attention, made them more conscious of their vulnerability and mortality.77

By the 1970s, most workers, unless they were fuel handlers, spent relativelylittle time in plastics. On entering active zones, places where contaminationmight be present, the routine was to don “browns,” the canvas coveralls thestation provided, safety shoes, issue yellow socks and underwear, a hard hatand safety glasses, garb not so different from that in other process industries.For some tasks the ram’s horn ventilated hood and jerkin worn over browns,which limited the inhalation of contamination but not its absorption throughthe skin, was a practical compromise between bodily sensation and protection.In browns alone, workers were no more hampered gathering sensory

FIGURE 4. Plastics

77 Interviews: Ivings; McCaskill; Frost. Schoch-Spana, Reactor Control and EnvironmentalManagement, 318–22; Munn, “Excluded Spaces”; Zonabend, Nuclear Peninsula, 75 ff.

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information about other features of their job site than they would have been inother process industries.

The station they embodied and the working knowledge they possessed aboutit was in certain ways particular to their job class. The routine work of thestation at power was to cool the fuel, to contain the fuel and to control the radio-activity of the core, while proceeding safely through schedules of maintenanceand refueling. Nuclear stations have defense in depth, with multiple back-upsfor each system that sit redundant in case of need. Ultimately in charge of coor-dinating these activities was the shift supervisor. Beneath the shift supervisorwere the operators, who from a single control room oversaw the functioningof the reactor and turbine buildings and their auxiliary systems. The first oper-ator was, like the shift supervisor, licensed by the federal Atomic EnergyControl Board (now the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission). Preparingfor these licensing examinations took operator applicants between three andfive years, shift supervisors seven or eight. The first operator observed the func-tioning of the station and planned the isolation of systems for testing and main-tenance. These were primarily jobs of the eye, to monitor the control panelsreading from stationary monitors about the station, keep current with largevolumes of technical updates on paper and screen, and construe system draw-ings of active and back-up systems so that isolations were achieved safely. Andthey were jobs that tested the nerve and the intellect, for the first operator wasresponsible for managing emerging events.78

Second operators rotated shifts between the reactor and the turbine buildingsso that they had current knowledge of both. They did specialized maintenance,coordinating valves and controls, and providing backup in the control room.Below them were the assistant or field operators, the “legs” of the operatorgroup, who were moving about the station doing the shift routines, what oneveteran called the equivalent of chores on a farm: taking readings, pumpingtanks, changing resins, checking batteries and compressors, and followingthe FIG—the field inspection guide—and the procedures. These workers hada patterned sense of a shift, and embodied habits ordered by the proceduresthat made them alert to changes in the channel of the system to which theyhad been assigned. Because there were two back-ups for each system in thestation, much of this work was testing. Because on each shift many elementsin the station were being put to work just to be sure they did work, unlikemany process industries a CANDU station at power did not present a singlerecognizable and diagnostically useful sensuous profile. Amidst all thisproving out of essential redundancy, assistant operators required modes of

78 Interviews: Hill; Ivings; Bayes; Patterson; Frost. Interview by Joy Parr: Bryan Patterson,Dipper Harbour, NB, 5 Aug. 2003. Burnham, RP (1979) RPT(A)-9.6 1–3; 1986, 415–20; 1992,411–13.

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somatic attentiveness that focused on the channel they were testing in isolationfrom the station as a whole.79

Service maintainers, too, moved throughout the plant on routines, replenish-ing protective equipment in storage locations and cleaning, carrying a gammameter as they made their way through active zones. This group also includedsome specialized trades, scaffolders opening areas for other service workers,the painters, masons, insulators and carpenters, and for technical, electrical,and mechanical maintainers. Until 1985, a service maintainer, in plasticswhere need be, rattled hourly about the active zones of the station with ametal trolley collecting samples from the pipes, processing them in the labfor tritium levels, and returning to each site to post the results.80 Mechanicalmaintainers did preventive maintenance on pumps, pipes, valves, and compres-sors, and responded to breakdowns in this equipment. Electrical instrument andcontrol maintainers kept radiation measuring equipment, both hand-held andstationary, calibrated and functioning, and serviced the electrical transmittersand controls.81

B OUNDARY WORK

The plants were marked by physical zones, material barriers, and patterned rou-tines for boundary crossing which organized the embodied practices of radi-ation protection on the basis of the historical radiation fields of the station.82

They defined the context within which men and women exercised individualresponsibility for their work in radiation zones. These sensible proxies forthe insensible framed and informed the habitus of nuclear workers.83

From the beginning of nuclear power generation, from NPD, that is 1962onward, there were four zones in increasing order of expected radiologicalhazard in CANDU stations. People who entered the plant wore radiationbadges color coded to the highest zone their training qualified them to enter,their physical mobility limited by their theoretical and practical training andsignified by the color of their badge and their surroundings. At PointLepreau the zones ranged between likely safety (orange) and certain danger(red). Workers saw the colors through their radiation knowledge. Dan McCas-kill recalls the color of Zone 2, where the radiation danger was lower, as a“pretty blue” and of Zone 3, where most work in radiation fields was done,“a hellish green.” Tubing, too, was coded in a dozen different colors to dis-tinguish pipes carrying all the various fluids and gases of the plant, from

79 Interviews: Mann; Hill; Ivings; Bayes; Patterson; Frost.80 Interview: Frost.81 Interviews: McCaskill; Meneer; Patterson.82 Schoch-Spana, Reactor Control and Environmental Management, 279, 314; Munn,

“Excluded Spaces.”83 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Richard Nice, trans. (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1977).

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heavy water that might be active to coolant water straight from the nearby Bayof Fundy.

Engineering design, the location of the reactor and the paths of the moderatorand heat transport systems dictated the zoning of the station. A map of thezones was located by the entrance to the reactor building. This topography, rela-tively stable by intensity and composition, workers took as known and incor-porated in reflex (figure 5).84

Passing from zone to zone involved a good deal of body work, registering thelevels on personal dosimeters by inserting them into a pad reader, on the way inchanging clothing, collecting and calibrating instruments, assembling thematerials needed for the job plan, on the way out carefully disrobing, pullingoff each garment inside out to contain contaminants, washing down and bund-ling any equipment which had to be removed for repair so as to not leave a trailof contamination along the route to the shop. These routinized actions ofapproach and repair gave the radiation fields an embodied presence.

K NOWING THE H ISTORY

Upon this topography was played out a less stable and more finely grainedhistory. Within the active zones 3 and 4, every completed job plan recordeddose taken. Consulting these documents provided each person subsequentlyassigned the job with the radiation history, and the planning foundation, forthe task. And the station had two sorts of history, the rising secular trendtritium levels in active zones, and the cyclical changes in fields as power

FIGURE 5. Changing Shoes at Area Boundary

84 Burnham RP (1979) PRT(A)-9.4, 1–4. A blue and green coded zoning map appears first in1986, 400–1, and persists through 1992, 398–400.

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levels were varied for fueling and outages. Knowledge of these historiesinformed workers’ expectations as they moved about the station on a givenday, gave them what Burnham called their “feel for the hazard.”85 How theywould actually work that day depended upon the breaking news of systemlevels and “hot spots” conveyed by stationary monitors and field operators.This current information about the fields was posted on a panel outside thework control and radiation control offices, at the zone boundary and on chalk-boards, by type, time, and intensity at the point source in zone. After 1992workers used information from this panel to set the visual and audiblealarms on the gamma instruments they wore and carried into the zone 3. Ifthe field they met was different from the field they had schooled themselvesbodily to expect, sound and light jarred them to a different somatic mode ofattention (figure 6).86

Within zones, workers established their own boundaries as necessary tocontain the contamination released as they opened equipment. They made arubber area by laying down a canvas floor, erecting physical barriers, andposting signage to direct other workers in zone away from particulate contami-nation on surfaces near the worksite. If the hazard being released was ambient,the person assigned the job built a ventilated tent and worked within it until thesystem was resealed.87

The response to these boundaries is a patterned sequence laid down in pro-cedures and incorporated as habit memory. Light water and graphite stations inFrance, the United Kingdom, and the United States are also bounded internally,with the transitions in insensible dose given visible, audible, and hapticmarkers. But studies completed in the 1980s in these jurisdictions suggestthat the work these markers do may have been different when workers’ knowl-edge of the dispersion, penetration, and decay of radiation was slight, when themarkers and procedures were received as shallowly grounded demands forcompliance.88

D O EMBOD I E D P R A C T I C E S A N D S E L F - R E S P O N S I B I L I T Y I M P R O V E

R A D I AT I O N P R O T E C T I O N S A F E T Y ?

This comparative study of the technological and pedagogical history of radi-ation protection in nuclear generating stations suggests a good deal about thelimitations of hierarchical command and control practices for securingworker compliance and good information flows in the presence of a gravebut insensible hazard. We know this much about how radiation fields came

85 Interviews: Black; McCaskill; Hill; Bayes; Patterson. Schoch-Spana, Reactor Control andEnvironmental Management, 342.

86 Burnham, RP (1992), 286–89; interviews: Hill; Black; McCaskill; Burham; Frost.87 Burnham RP (1979) RPT(A)-9.4 2–4, RPT(A)-9.5 1–7; 1986, 402–14; 1992, 395–410.

Interview: McCaskill.88 Zonabend, Nuclear Peninsula, 102–3, 114–15; and see note 30 above.

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to be embodied in the Canadian instance. The working knowledge that guidedoperators and maintainers in these nuclear stations was grounded in radiationtheory, which described the topography and morphology of the insensible radi-ation hazard. The likely intensity of fields was sensuously displayed. Thestation was color coded and barricaded so that passing into high fields ofdanger required physical performances, including the donning of prostheseswhich extended the sensing body and protective clothing which re-ordered it.Shift routines honed habitual paces and paths of movement, which embodiedthis longitudinal knowledge of the stations’ fields, and held this knowledgewithin a mode of somatic alertness to the specific visible and audible signsof the current hazards. Workers spent decades year-round ranging about inthe same station registering its fields through maintenance and fuelingcycles. They knew the dose they took each day, and the dose being parsedfor current work amongst the staff complement. The historical and technologi-cal foundations of Canadian nuclear work culture seem to have made individualresponsibility for radiation protection plausible and practical. Workers reportedthat embodying the insensible danger facilitated self-responsibility by concen-trating the attention. Theory informed for the intimate re-ordering of somaticattention to accommodate radiation fields became an issue of respect for selfrather than submission to authority. These findings are useful contributionsto our understanding of how specific bodies have been retuned historically todistinctive and changing national, political, and managerial cultures in the

Figure 6 Rubber Station

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workplace. In this sense these results will also interest ethnographers and stu-dents in the rising field of sensuous anthropology.89

Whether the departure from command and control models has in the past ormay in the future make nuclear workplaces safer is not a question that can beanswered satisfactorily by contemplation of the texture of the CANDUinstance. A long-term comparative study of managerial and worker responsesto events reported in nuclear generating stations may be on the agenda of theInternational Atomic Energy Agency, but does not now exist and, given theinformation culture of the industry, may be a long time coming. What we doknow from a 1989 study is that personal accountability in nuclear sites hasled workers to be more “alert and aware of themselves and their surroundings”and more likely to “notice and confront discrepancies earlier.”90 These resultsare supported by 1997 OECD Nuclear Energy Agency “Handbook of GoodPractices,” which concluded that “lower job doses as well as . . . high jobquality” result from work rules which leave the operator free “to obtain thebest results from his/her standpoint.”91 Certainly a cluster of recent studiesof control room operators at the Pickering CANDU reactors A and B conductedby engineers specializing in human-machine interface issues are promising.They find that work rules which encourage “active, problem-solving activities. . . play a fundamental role in monitoring a complex, dynamic work domain”such as nuclear generating stations where distinguishing between normal andcatastrophic indicators depends upon deep historical and contextual knowledgeof the worksite.92 These findings recently have persuaded an eminent student ofthe U.S. nuclear power industry of the advisability of protocols encouraging“doubt, discovery and interpretation” rather than “command and control” forwork in insensible radiation fields.93

89 A recent compendium of work in this field is David Howes, The Empire of the Senses(London: Berg, 2005).

90 Childress and Briant, “Risk Management through Concurrency”; 89.91 Nuclear Energy Agency, OECD, Work Management in the Nuclear Power Industry (Paris:

OECD, 1997), 11, 50.92 Kim Vincente and Catherine M. Burns, “Evidence for Direct Perception from Cognition in the

Wild,” Ecological Psychology 8, 3 (1996): 269–80; Kim Vicente, Neville Moray, John D. Lee, JensRasmussen, Barclay G. Jones, Richard Brock, and Toufik Djemil, “Evaluation of a Rankine CycleDisplay for Nuclear Power Plant Monitoring and Diagnosis,” Human Factors 38(3) (1996): 506–21; Randall J. Mumaw, Emilie M. Roth, Kim Vincente and Catherine M. Burns, “There is More toMonitoring a Nuclear Plant than Meets the Eye,” Human Factors 42, 1 (Spring 2000): third para-graph following Figure 3 (unpaginated); Kim Vincente, Emilie M. Roth, and Randall Mumaw,“How Do Operators Monitor a Complex, Dynamic Work Domain? The Impact of Control RoomTechnology,” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 54 (2001): 831–56, at p. 835.These studies were sponsored by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, the successor to theAECB.

93 Perin, Shouldering Risks, chs. 5 and 7.

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