Review: Gabrielle Hecht, Uranium africain, une histoire globale (original) (raw)
Related papers
Review: Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (2012), by Gabrielle Hecht
Although Gabrielle Hecht's Being Nuclear falls outside my field of study, her book exemplifies the caliber of work I aspire to write. The nuclear status of uranium seems like something far removed from culture and global politics, but Hecht's work suggest otherwise. The impact of her work is best described by a quote from William James when he said "the trail of the human serpent is thus over everything."
An elemental force: Uranium production in Africa, and what it means to be nuclear
Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists, 2012
Uranium from Africa was, and remains, a major source of fuel for atomic weapons and power plants throughout the world. Uranium for the Hiroshima bomb, for example, came from the Belgian Congo. During any given year of the Cold War, between 20 percent and 50 percent of the Western worldÕs uranium came from African places: Congo, Niger, South Africa, Gabon, Madagascar, and Namibia. Today, there is a renewed uranium boom throughout the continent. The author writes on the ambiguities of the nuclear state, and the state of being nuclear, and why the nuclear designation matters. She looks at two countries to uncover different dimensions of nuclearity: Niger, which has long struggled with France over the price of its uranium; and Gabon, where cancer and other illnesses related to four decades of uranium production remain invisible.
Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade
The hidden history of African uranium and what it means—for a state, an object, an industry, a workplace—to be “nuclear.” Uranium from Africa has long been a major source of fuel for nuclear power and atomic weapons, including the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In 2003, after the infamous “yellow cake from Niger,” Africa suddenly became notorious as a source of uranium, a component of nuclear weapons. But did that admit Niger, or any of Africa's other uranium-producing countries, to the select society of nuclear states? Does uranium itself count as a nuclear thing? This book probes the question of what it means for something—a state, an object, an industry, a workplace—to be “nuclear.” It shows that questions about being nuclear lie at the heart of today's global nuclear order and the relationships between “developing nations” (often former colonies) and “nuclear powers” (often former colonizers). The book enters African nuclear worlds, focusing on miners and the occupational hazard of radiation exposure. Could a mine be a nuclear workplace if (as in some South African mines) its radiation levels went undetected and unmeasured? This book is the first to put Africa in the nuclear world, and the nuclear world in Africa, and in so doing remakes our understanding of the nuclear age.
Africa and its nuclear renaissance
International Journal of Nuclear Governance, Economy …, 2009
Against the background of power shortages, higher prices for oil and gas and the creeping effects of climate change, the nuclear power renaissance has become a global catch phrase. Several African nations are seriously considering the nuclear power option and making exploratory steps toward this objective. The rising expectations for nuclear power are also driven by abundant uranium resources in Africa. A weak industrial infrastructure, the lack of skilled labour, interstate conflicts, social and ethnic strife, insurgencies, corruption and crime does not create, however, an environment in some African countries that is conducive to the safe and secure implementation of nuclear power generation policies. The long and daunting road toward this objective would require African governments to go beyond the traditional framework of a technical programme and apply considerable efforts toward ameliorating the problems that plague their states and private sectors.
Comparative studies in society and history, 2009
What is Africa's place in the nuclear world? In 1995, a U.S. government report on nuclear proliferation did not mark Gabon, Niger, or Namibia as having any "nuclear activities." 1 Yet these same nations accounted for over 25 percent of world uranium production that year, and helped fuel nuclear power plants in Europe, the United States, and Japan. Experts had long noted that workers in uranium mines were "exposed to higher amounts of internal radiation than . . . workers in any other segment of the nuclear energy industry." 2 What, then, does it mean for a workplace, a technology, or a nation to be "nuclear?" What is at stake in that label, and how do such stakes vary by time and place?