Thomas R. Wellock - Safe Enough?: A History of Nuclear Power and Accident Risk

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

My career has spanned stints as a submarine reactor test engineer, an engineer at a commercial nuclear power plant, and fifteen years as a history professor. In the latter role, I wrote two books on the history of the antinuclear and environmental movements. It has been a privilege to serve an agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), welcoming of my eclectic life experiences and committed to independent historical research. As such, this book reflects my experiences, views, and judgments alone. It is a product of my training as a historian. It does not represent in any way an official position of the NRC. I enjoyed complete independence in selecting this topic, as well as in researching and writing it. The NRC only expects that I meet the high standards of the history profession.

I am indebted to the advice and assistance of many people. Colleagues at the NRC, some now retired, read parts of the manuscript or simply offered useful perspectives, including Andy Bates, Gary Holahan, Nathan Siu, Don Marksberry, Cynthia Jones, Allen Hiser, Karen Henderson, Jack Ramsey, Jenny Weil, and Scott Morris. I am grateful to the generations of regulatory staff who eased my pursuit of history by being historians themselves. They kept an astonishing array of records and wrote their policy papers and technical reports with painstakingly chronicled background sections, a breadcrumb trail I could not have done without.

My colleagues in the Office of the Secretary have been a daily source of reinforcement, especially Rochelle Bavol, Rich Laufer, and Annette Vietti-Cook, the most supportive boss I could ask for. Kristy Remsburg has the heart of an archivist. Like the monks of medieval Ireland, she believes deeply in preserving records and never failed to help me find them. In the Office of Public Affairs, Ivonne Couret, Holly Harrington, and Eliot Brenner took me on as a special project, believing that if the NRC historian was going to communicate with the public, he ought to get better at it. They helped me write simply, develop video presentations, and do a credible job reading a teleprompter. Bebe Rhodes, Lee Wittenstein, Anne Goel, Zuberi Sardar, and Kathleen Dunsavage of the NRC technical library supported my numerous interlibrary loan requests and renewed my very overdue books without complaint. Woody Machalek and Eddie Colon guided me through the federal contracting system.

The NRC retiree community was a constant source of wisdom. Most of all, Sam Walker, my predecessor, was a source of inspiration and encouragement, and a careful reader of the manuscript. Tom Murley, a deep thinker and valuable resource, deserves special thanks. Others include Ashok Thadani, Frank Miraglia, Dennis Rathbun, and Roger Mattson. I am grateful to several who have since passed away, including Manning Muntzing, Marc Rowden, Norm Lauben, John Austin, William O. Doub, and Harold Denton.

At the University of California Press, Senior Editor Niels Hooper was enormously supportive. He and Robin Manley went the extra distance in getting the book into production. Steven Jenkins at the UC Press Foundation gamely navigated the complexities of the federal contracting system. I would also like to thank copyeditor Catherine Osborne and production editors Emilia Thiuri and Francisco Reinking.

This book is the sixth in a series of volumes on the history of nuclear regulation sponsored by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and published by the University of California Press. The first volume, Controlling the Atom: The Beginnings of Nuclear Regulation, 19461962 (1984), was coauthored by George T. Mazuzan and J. Samuel Walker. Walker was the author of the next four volumes, Containing the Atom: Nuclear Regulation in a Changing Environment, 19631971 (1992); Permissible Dose: A History of Radiation Protection in the Twentieth Century (2000); Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective (2004); and The Road to Yucca Mountain: The Development of Radioactive Waste Policy in the United States (2009). Portions of chapters 1, 2, 3, and 6 of this book were previously published in Nuclear Technology, Technology and Culture, and History and Technology .