From Calamity Mesa to Boyertown, Pennsylvania: Risk, Radon, and Regulation in Cold War America

In the boom uranium mining industry in the American Southwest during the postwar 1940s and 1950s, the first casualty was occupational safety, and that lapse engendered a harsh legacy: roughly fifty percent of the miners developed lung cancer over the next ten to twenty years, apparently due to their excessive exposure to the decay products of radon gas emitted by the uranium ore. Several decades later, in the mid-1980s, radon returned to the realm of public health and public policy when high levels of radon gas found in private homes in Pennsylvania and New Jersey set off an indoor radon scare and compelled the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to set standards for residential environments. In this paper, these two related crises about radon exposure are employed as a heuristic for extracting and examining the multiplicity of social, economic, political, and cultural concerns that are mobilized around a scientifically-informed regulatory decision.