Nuclear Weapons Production Research Articles

Review: Waste-Pretreatment Technologies for Remediation of Legacy Defense Nuclear Wastes

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is responsible for retrieving, immobilizing, and disposing of radioactive waste generated during the production of nuclear weapons in the United States. The general strategy for treating the radioactive tank waste consists of pretreating the wastes by separating them into high-level and low-activity fractions. The high-level fraction will be immobilized in a glass form suitable for disposal in a geologic repository. The low-activity waste will be immobilized in a waste form suitable for on-site. This paper reviews recent developments in the application of pretreatment technologies to the processing of the DOE radioactive tank wastes.

Contamination of Alpine snow and ice at Colle Gnifetti, Swiss/Italian Alps, from nuclear weapons tests

Plutonium is present in the environment as a consequence of atmospheric nuclear tests, nuclear weapons production and industrial releases over the past 50 years. To study temporal trends, a high resolution Pu record was obtained by analyzing 52 discrete samples of an alpine firn/ice core from Colle Gnifetti (Monte Rosa, 4450 m a.s.l.), dating from 1945 to 1990. The 239Pu signal was recorded directly, without decontamination or preconcentration steps, using an Inductively Coupled Plasma - Sector Field Mass Spectrometer (ICP-SFMS) equipped with an high efficiency sample introduction system, thus requiring much less sample preparation than previously reported methods. The 239Pu profile reflects the three main periods of atmospheric nuclear weapons testing: the earliest peak lasted from 1954/55 to 1958 and was caused by the first testing period reaching a maximum in 1958. Despite a temporary halt of testing in 1959/60, the Pu concentration decreased only by half with respect to the 1958 peak due to long atmospheric residence times. In 1961/62 Pu concentrations rapidly increased reaching a maximum in 1963, which was about 40% more intense than the 1958 peak. After the signing of the Limited Test Ban Treaty between USA and USSR in 1964, Pu deposition decreased very sharply reaching a minimum in 1967. The third period (1967-1975) is characterized by irregular Pu concentrations with smaller peaks (about 20-30% of the 1964 peak) which might be related to the deposition of Saharan dust contaminated by the French nuclear tests of the 1960s. The data presented are in very good agreement with Pu profiles previously obtained from the Col du Dome ice core (by multi-collector ICP-MS) and Belukha ice core (by Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, AMS). Although a semi-quantitative method was employed here, the results are quantitatively comparable to previously published results.

The Decay of Communism: Managing Spent Nuclear Fuel in the Soviet Union, 1937‐1991

AbstractThe aim of this article is to explore the dynamics of spent nuclear fuel management in the Soviet Union, from the origins of nuclear engineering in the 1930s to the collapse of the country in 1991. Spent nuclear fuel is analyzed in relation to other components of what is referred to as the “nuclear fuel system,” such as nuclear weapons production, breeder reactor development, uranium enrichment, and the operation of nuclear power plants. The article shows that spent fuel management in the Soviet Union centered on military applications from the 1940s up to the 1960s, after which enormous efforts were devoted to exploiting military competencies for civil purposes. A “tandem” system was partly realized in this context, in which spent fuel from VVER nuclear power plants, submarine reactors, and research installations was reprocessed and used for the production of RBMK (Chernobyl‐type) fuel. The plutonium gained did not find any use, however, due to failures in fast breeder developments. RBMK spent fuel was not reprocessed. The Soviets never officially discussed the option of direct disposal of RBMK fuel and strictly distinguished between “spent fuel” and “nuclear waste.” Facing stagnation in reprocessing and breeder technology, the development came to focus increasingly on expanding interim storage capacities. But far‐reaching R&D efforts in the field of nuclear waste management and storage methods meant that the Soviet Union, at the time of its collapse, had accumulated a considerable competence that might turn out to be of great value, should a direct disposal strategy be officially considered in the future.

Chinese nuclear forces, 2010

The authors write about China’s nuclear arsenal, one known for its obscure and opaque nuclear delivery systems and even more inscrutable nuclear weapons storage and production. Despite the secrecy, the authors are able to present an inventory of the country’s land-based missiles, submarines and sea-based missiles, aircraft, cruise missiles, and provide information on the nation’s warhead storage and production.

Mercury contamination in the riparian zones along the East Fork Poplar Creek at Oak Ridge

Oak Ridge (Tennessee, USA) has a history of mercury (Hg) contamination in its aquatic and soil environment associated with past nuclear-weapons production activities at its Department of Energy (DOE) sites. Three different riparian zones along the Lower East Fork Poplar Creek were investigated in order to study Hg distribution and transformation in surface soils. The surface soil samples collected from these areas showed higher total Hg on an average (129.08mg/kg) and higher total organic carbon (5.50%) in the upstream soils compared to the other two downstream locations that contained only 31.78 and 19.98mg/kg total Hg and 2.88% and 1.65% of TOC on average, respectively. Further, methyl Hg concentrations were also comparatively higher in case of the upstream soils (30.10μg/kg) than that of the downstream sites (5.69 and 4.05μg/kg). The study showed a plume-like dispersion of Hg in the terrestrial environment along the creek, with decreasing Hg concentrations with distance from the Hg source zone. Also, the transformation of Hg in the soils was found to have been influenced by the soil TOC contents.

Ethics for Environmental Health Research: The Case of the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Industry

Exploitation of workers and communities based on class and race has profoundly influenced occupational and environmental health. During production and testing of nuclear weapons in the United States, class and race have affected exposures to radiation and other hazards as well as protection programs and monitoring of exposures. This situation has contributed to health disparities and has hindered advancement of research into the health effects of ionizing radiation and other exposures from nuclear weapons production. Organizing by workers and affected communities can bring about a better understanding of the health effects of ionizing radiation as well as more ethical research practices.

The polonium-210 public health assessment: the need for medical toxicology expertise in radiation terrorism events.

In 1989, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) brought together a group of subject matter experts to form the Radiation Studies Branch (RSB). CDC tasked the RSB staff with assessing potential environmental health impacts of radiation released from US Department of Energy nuclear weapons production facilities. Shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks, however, the mission of the RSB expanded to include (and to focus on) preparing the nation’s public health community, healthcare providers and citizens for intentional (i.e., terrorism-related) radiological incidents, accidents involving exposures to radiation, and unintentional environmental releases of radioactive materials. In late 2006, an event occurred in the UK for which the RSB was uniquely suited to respond. The radioactive isotope polonium-210 (Po) was deliberately used as a weapon against one person and, perhaps accidentally, released into the environment. Initially, it was unclear how many bystanders might have been unintended victims of the radioactive chemical. Some of those bystanders included American citizens travelling abroad at the time. The health physics and medical staff of the RSB promptly responded to requests for assistance from the US Department of State and the Health Protection Agency (HPA) of the UK to screen American citizens who had possibly come into contact with Po during their travel abroad. RSB staff also provided guidance and advice to individual citizens and to their physicians, to the US Department of Health and Human Services, to the media, and to the public at large about potential risks of adverse health effects from internal contamination. Finally, RSB staff helped coordinate the collection of biological specimens from concerned US citizens and provided interpretation of those results. In the autumn of 2006, residents of and visitors to London were held hostage by something they could not see, hear, smell, or taste: the radioactive isotope, Po. The apparent target of this deadly substance was a single individual—a former KGB agent who was an outspoken critic of the Russian government, Alexander Litvinenko. Indeed, approximately 3 weeks after the isotope had been smuggled into England and poured into his tea, Mr. Litvinenko succumbed to Po poisoning. But although this Russian dissident was the specific target, by the end of November, British officials had identified others who had been contaminated—presumably inadvertently—with this radioactive material. In the interim, other officials were discovering a forensic trail of Po throughout London and its suburbs. The spread of radiological material into the environment (whether by means of explosion or by simple dispersion) is what defines a radiological dispersal device (RDD) event. Inadvertent releases of radiological material may reasonably be classified as RDD “type” events as well. In Goiânia, Brazil (1987), for example, metal scavengers

Carcinogenic Interactions between a Single Inhalation of239PuO2and Chronic Exposure to Cigarette Smoke in Rats

Rats were exposed once by inhalation to plutonium-239 dioxide ((239)PuO(2)), resulting in chronic alpha-particle irradiation of the lung, and exposed chronically to cigarette smoke to examine carcinogenic interactions between the two exposures. F344 rats were exposed to (239)PuO(2) to achieve an initial lung burden of 0.5 kBq and then exposed 6 h/day, 5 days/week to cigarette smoke at 100 or 250 mg particulate matter/m(3) for up to 30 months. Exposure to cigarette smoke increased the cumulative radiation dose to lung by slowing the clearance of (239)PuO(2). (239)PuO(2) alone did not affect survival, but the higher cigarette smoke exposure shortened survival in females. Combined exposure to (239)PuO(2) and cigarette smoke acted synergistically to shorten survival in both genders. The combined effects of cigarette smoke and (239)PuO(2) were approximately additive for lung hyperplasia and adenomas but were strongly synergistic for carcinomas. Differences between observed incidences and incidences predicted by survival-adjusted models accounting for increased radiation dose revealed a substantial component of synergy for carcinomas above that attributable to the radiation dose effect. The synergy for malignant lung tumors is consistent with findings from uranium miners and nuclear weapons production workers. These results bolster confidence in the epidemiological findings and have implications for risk assessment.

China's Perspective on a Nuclear-Free World

A new wave of interest in the complete elimination of nuclear-weapons is washing over international security institutions. Although the goal of a nuclear weapons-free world is as old as the nuclear...

Stephanie Cooke . In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age . New York : Bloomsbury . 2009 . Pp. 488. $27.00.

As Stephanie Cooke notes early in her invigorating book, “The civilian nuclear enterprise is more politicized than any other industry, even oil, because of its close link to nuclear weapons” (p. 5). This is an observation worth thinking about. Immediately after World War II, the hope for civilian nuclear power—energy “too cheap to meter,” in the words of Lewis Strauss, President Dwight D. Eisenhower's chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)—promised both bounty and redemption for American scientists and politicians. Yet this vision of a utopian future was but the outer surface, masking the vast archipelago of sites involved in nuclear weapons production. The AEC mostly made bombs, but it did not talk about that part much. Historians have sniffed out the military side of the story, and the historiography of nuclear weapons has (pardon the pun) mushroomed in recent years. Yet nuclear power, the civilian face of the military juggernaut, has not received comparable attention. Cooke's great merit is to take a journalist's trained eye (she has covered the industry for almost thirty years) to the history of nuclear matters with power generation front and center. Instead of nuclear energy being tacked onto a history of weapons, the weaponry is subordinated here to a history of power generation. All of the usual stops of the American weapons narrative are here: the Manhattan Project, testing in the South Pacific, the Cuban Missile Crisis. But we also get Atoms for Peace, Three Mile Island, Yucca Mountain, and a worldwide tour of nuclear power: Soviet (with Chernobyl); British (with Windscale); Israeli, Indian, and Pakistani (with bombs); and Iran's ventures into the dark nucleus of uranium and plutonium atoms.

The Forsaken: The Unfinished Business of Making Plutonium in Russia

For Nadezhda Kutepova, the path to becoming a human rights lawyer started in her hometown in the Southern Russian Urals. I met Kutepova in the summer of 2009 while doing research on Ozersk, a closed city specially built in the 1940s for workers of the vast Soviet plutonium plant called Maiak. One thinks of a nuclear site as being staffed with highly educated scientists and technicians, gingerly and knowledgeably running complicated machinery to irradiate uranium and process it into plutonium. But unlike a weapons lab, a plutonium plant is a vast factory employing thousands of blue-collar workers who push carts, run bulldozers, measure solutions, plumb, build, scrub, repair, and guard doors. And like most factories, the plutonium plant polluted liberally. In fact, plutonium production is the messiest stop on the vast assembly line of nuclear weapons production.

Market Power in Uranium Enrichment

Four firms dominate the international uranium enrichment market. Simultaneously, the nations that host enrichment facilities strongly discourage other nations from developing enrichment capacity, given its potential use in nuclear weapons production. Therefore, these four firms benefit from the exercise of national power to prevent entry into this market. This paper shows that these firms also benefit from increasing returns to scale. In similar national situations, this industry would be regulated or nationalized. This is because free markets do not necessarily lead to a socially optimal long-run equilibrium where the industry is necessarily concentrated, such that there is no proliferating entry, but is sufficiently diverse, so that no one national group can dictate prices, contract terms, or non-proliferation policy. Therefore, some form of international regulation might be necessary to discourage enrichment technology proliferation and assure enrichment supply at reasonable prices.

US nuclear weapons policy after the Cold War: Russians, 'rogues' and domestic division

Introduction 1. The policy-making process. Actors involved in nuclear weapons policy. The annual nuclear policy budgetary process 2. American nuclear weapons policy at the end of the Cold War 3. Nuclear weapons policy under George H. W. Bush. Key decisions. Nuclear arms control. Nuclear forces. 'Rogue' states and nuclear planning. The nuclear weapons production complex. Conclusion 4. Nuclear weapons policy under Bill Clinton. Nuclear forces. Nuclear arms control. Russia, 'rogues' and nuclear planning. The nuclear weapons complex. Conclusion 5. Nuclear weapons policy under George W. Bush. Nuclear policy and the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review. Nuclear forces. Nuclear arms control. The nuclear weapons production complex. Conclusion 6. Post-Cold War trends in nuclear weapons policy 7. The influence of ideas on nuclear weapons policy. Three competing 'idea sets' Idea set 1: Managing the drawdown of Cold War nuclear forces Idea set 2: Responding to nuclear proliferation through progress in arms control and disarmament Idea set 3: Responding to nuclear proliferation by re-orienting Cold War nuclear weapons policy to a post-Cold War war-fighting policy Conclusion 8. Domestic politics and nuclear weapons policy. Policy inertia. Political disinterest in nuclear weapons policy. Military disinterest in nuclear weapons policy. Nuclear conservatism and neglect. Conclusion

The Six‐Party Talks and the Future Denuclearization and Rehabilitation of North Korea

The Korean Six‐Party Talks that are focused on North Korea's nuclear weapons programs reveal contending interests and motives among the participating six governments. Each government has been challenged and several have had to make compromises while nevertheless protecting what they view as their core interests. The Talks are making incremental progress on the “action for action” denuclearization arrangements resulting from the September 2005, and February and October 2007 multilateral agreements. The Talks are also creating the basis for strategic changes in Northeast Asia involving the future rehabilitation of North Korea and, beyond that, possibly a new cooperative security system in the region. This article moves on to analyze three possible strategic outcomes of the Talks: (1) Complete weapons denuclearization of North Korea, a Korean Peace Treaty, the rehabilitation of North Korea, and a new security regime in the region; (2) Partial denuclearization of North Korea amidst South Korea engagement with North Korea as South Korea/US deterrence continues; (3) Breakdown of the Talks and Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea resumption of nuclear weapons production. The paper concludes with recommended policies to encourage outcome (1).

Remediation of Groundwater Contaminated by Nuclear Waste: A Workshop on Accelerating Development of Practical Field‐Scale Bioremediation Models; An Online Meeting, 23 January to 20 February 2008

A Web‐based workshop sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy Environmental Remediation Sciences Program (DOE/ERSP) was organized in early 2008 to assess the state of the science and knowledge gaps associated with the use of computer models to facilitate remediation of groundwater contaminated by wastes from Cold War era nuclear weapons development and production. Microbially mediated biological reactions offer a potentially efficient means to treat these sites, but considerable uncertainty exists in the coupled biological, chemical, and physical processes and their mathematical representation.Individuals from academia and DOE laboratories with expertise in modeling or microbiology and experience involving groundwater bioremediation participated in the workshop, which involved 10 hours of online meetings over a 5‐week period in early 2008 via linked audio and video communication. The objective of the workshop was to narrow the communication gap between modelers and microbiologists, engineers, and scientists, who tend to look at problems from different and sometimes divergent perspectives.

Nylon and Bombs: DuPont and the March of Modern America (review)

Reviewed by: Nylon and Bombs: DuPont and the March of Modern America Jody Roberts (bio) Nylon and Bombs: DuPont and the March of Modern America. By Pap A. Ndiaye. Translated by Elborg Forster. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Pp. vii+289. $45. Pap A. Ndiaye's fascinating book traces the creation, rise, and fall of the chemical engineer in American society over the course of the twentieth century through the eyes of DuPont. By linking nylon to atomic bombs, two icons of American ingenuity, he demonstrates the intricate ties between the military and civilian society. Three characteristics unite the two seemingly disparate artifacts of Ndiaye's title. First, and most obviously, these objects perhaps more than any others have come to symbolize the twentieth century as a modernist adventure and playground for technologists and technocrats. Nylon, the synthetic creation that conquered the social world by demonstrating its superiority over its natural rivals, sits adjacent to the atomic bomb, the embodiment of our society's ability to harness and break apart nature's most fundamental structures. Side by side, the two reveal our ability to control all that nature has, and to outsmart it as well. Bombs and nylon also emerge as products uniquely shaped by a new class of engineers—the chemical engineers. The need to mass produce nylon and bombs offered them generally, and more specifically those at DuPont, an opportunity to position themselves as engineers of the modern era. Chemists and physicists found themselves left to the laboratories while the engineers constructed the institutions—material and organizational—to supply the vast quantities demanded by consumers. Last, nylon and bombs are both products of new sources of wealth coupled with the rise of consumerism in the United States. As Ndiaye spells out in the book, new cash flows that emerged during and after World War II did not go away once the war ended. The long cold war ensured continued funding for the construction of a permanent military-industrial complex, especially geared toward the production of nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, economic growth in the United States meant more people spending more money on everyday items, particularly those not available during the war, such as nylon. The rise of consumerism, as Ndiaye points out, characterizes both the government and the civilian population. And yet, though separate, [End Page 493] they are not distinct. Again, it was DuPont's ability to ably manage mass production of tremendous volumes of chemicals that made both the rise of nylon and of nuclear weapons possible. What Ndiaye has done is pull together as best as possible the micro, meso, and macro creation stories of the last century. If the story is told only from the perspective of the engineers, the reader loses sight of the political wrangling that took place between DuPont (the company and the family) and the federal government as well as the more general rise of the consumer culture. If the story is told from the perspective of the political landscape, one misses exactly how this strange new breed of engineer emerged from obscurity to become one of the most profitable and powerful classes of engineer in America. And if it is told only from the perspective of the rise of consumerism, one misses the ways in which nylon and the bomb are born together from a technical and political culture unique to the mid-twentieth century. But then Ndiaye's story takes a strange turn. Under pressure from mounting environmental concerns, a return to the "natural" fibers of the world, and a decrease in cash flow as the cold war tapered off, chemical engineers began their fall from grace. This, Ndiaye claims, is one mark of the end of the modernist project in America. While it may be safe to say that chemical engineers do not hold the positions of prominence and public support they once did, this supposition needs to be unpacked. The recent "essential2" advertising campaign by the American Chemistry Council speaks directly to this point, indicating that Ndiaye is correct in his diagnosis of public skepticism, but perhaps overstepping the evidence when it comes to the continued construction of our synthetic planet. Understanding exactly how chemical engineers...

Patenting the Bomb

During the course of the Manhattan Project, the U.S. government secretly attempted to acquire a monopoly on the patent rights for inventions used in the production of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. The use of patents as a system of control, while common for more mundane technologies, would seem at first glance to conflict with the regimes of secrecy that have traditionally been associated with nuclear weapons. In explaining the origins and operations of the Manhattan Project patent system, though, this essay argues that the utilization of patents was an ad hoc attempt at legal control of the atomic bomb by Manhattan Project administrators, focused on the monopolistic aspects of the patent system and preexisting patent secrecy legislation. From the present perspective, using patents as a method of control for such weapons seems inadequate, if not unnecessary; but at the time, when the bomb was a new and essentially unregulated technology, patents played an important role in the thinking of project administrators concerned with meaningful postwar control of the bomb.

Beryllium's Public Relations Problem: Protecting Workers When There is No Safe Exposure Level

news magazine in April 2000, Bill Richardson, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), acknowl edged that his agency collaborated with the beryllium industry to defeat a 1975 attempt by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to reduce workers' exposure to beryllium, a collaboration that was brought to public attention in a 1999 investiga tion by Toledo Blade reporter Sam Roe.1 Priority one was production of our nuclear weapons, Richardson stated. [The] last priority was the safety and health of the workers that build these weapons.2 The Secretary's declaration was remarkable; rarely do the most senior officials in government admit deception that resulted in death and disability of its own citizens. Yet, for those in the public health community, the Secretary's candid announcement was long overdue. Scores of workers employed in the production of nuclear weapons had been diagnosed with chronic beryllium disease (CBD), a progressive and irreversible inflammatory lung disease, and there was increasingly powerful evidence that CBD was associated with expo sure at levels below the permissible exposure limit in place at the time. In response to this evidence, the beryllium industry waged a concerted campaign to delay a more protective workplace exposure standard. Eventually, when the scientific evidence became so great that it was no longer credible to deny that work ers developed CBD at levels permitted by an outdated exposure limit, the beryllium industry responded with a new rationale to delay promulgation of a more pro tective standard.

A different view on US-India nuclear pact

The item “US–India Nuclear Pact Gets Mixed Reaction” (Physics Today, February 2007, page 24) makes for amusing reading. I am dismayed at the one-sided and unbalanced coverage. I strongly disagree with the contention of Matthew Bunn from the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University that the US stands to gain “between not very much and nothing” from this pact. That India has opened 14 of its civilian nuclear reactors to International Atomic Energy Agency oversight is surely a step in the right direction; before the deal the reactors were all off bounds. Mohamed El Baradei, the IAEA’s director general, welcomed the pact enthusiastically. Surely, if the leader of the United Nations body whose mission is to prevent global nuclear proliferation endorses the agreement, it can’t really be the death knell of nonproliferation. ElBaradei speaks with much credibility, which the writer of the article blissfully ignored, instead giving free rein to obscure think tankers. Michael Krepon’s good guys–bad guys argument essentially echoes the chorus of the nonproliferation pundits who rule the numerous moribund think tanks of Washington, DC, and the Democratic party. Where is the comparison between India, a responsible non-proliferating democracy whose nuclear weapons are under civilian (not military) oversight, and Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea? Having nuclear weapons and yet not proliferating weapons or the associated technology is not “bad behavior” on the part of India. Unfortunately, “bad guys” such as Pakistan—thanks to nuclear scientist Abdul Q. Khan—have exported nuclear weapons development technology and rocket design to North Korea and possibly Iran. It’s a no-brainer, then, that the Bush administration has categorically refused a similar nuclear deal with Pakistan.Most important, the article utterly ignores the geostrategic and geopolitical ground realities in both South Asia and East Asia. India’s strategic attack-preparedness planning is concerned with China, not Pakistan. Current Indianmilitary readiness can ensure that India can take a first strike from Pakistan, its neighbor to the west, and retaliate massively. India can never realistically sign the nonproliferation treaty until it first has a bilateral treaty with China to cap that country’s nuclear weapons production and perhaps dismantle existing warheads.For nonproliferation, the world badly needs a better framework than the NPT, which has been dying a steady and slow death thanks to Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea. Nonproliferation, as it has been enforced, has not worked, and it is time to think of new approaches. Rogue states such as Iran and North Korea should not be allowed to enrich uranium and plutonium. They should be given nuclear fuel for supervised use in civilian reactors under the strict supervision of the IAEA, with all spent fuel taken back promptly by the suppliers so that it cannot be enriched for weapons production. The appropriate response for bad behavior is not knee-jerk economic sanctions that hurt only the general populace and not the governments, but the freezing of all assets held by those countries in foreign banks. Without foreign exchange, nefarious proliferation activities become much more difficult.© 2007 American Institute of Physics.

Neighbors, nuisances and noxious releases: Community conflict and environmental hazards in the atomic city

Drawing from in-depth interviews with over 120 respondents, participant observation, and document analysis, we examine differential perceptions of environmental harms in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, home of a U.S. Government nuclear facility. The Oak Ridge Reservation has a 50-year history of nuclear weapons production and a poor environmental record. In the 1980s, a series of environmental revelations occurred and in 1989, the entire Oak Ridge Reservation was placed on the Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund list. This sparked heated debates within the community over environmental hazards and ultimately led to conflict and dissension. We analyze residents’ perceptions of environmental harms and highlight the salient variables contributing to community dissension, including conflicting levels of government trust, length of community residence, employment, race/ethnicity, and environmental health/illness.