Union Of Concerned Scientists Research Articles

Reproducing Cultural Identity in Negotiating Nuclear Power: The Union of Concerned Scientists and Emergency Core Cooling

This paper advances the concept of `cultural identity' to account for the nexus between structure and practice in technological negotiations. It describes how the formation of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), and that group's subsequent discourse and nonverbal actions, both reproduced the established identities of group members and contributed to negotiations that reconstituted those identities. In particular, UCS claims about emergency core-cooling systems in nuclear plants were congruent with the combination of a shared ideology, the social interests of MIT faculty, and established principles of engineering design. The cultural analysis of identity reproduction shows the opposition between cognitive and social phenomena to be a significant distinction framing action in Western culture. The analysis also suggests that new attention be given to the relationship between the constitutive and reproductive functions of discourse and nonverbal action.

Risk Assessment and Uncertainty

Risk assessments done by the Ford Foundation-Mitre Corporation and the Union of Concerned Scientists agree on the hazard probabilities and consequences associated with commercial nuclear fission, but make opposed recommendations regarding using atomic energy to generate electricity. The UCS risk analysis decided against use of the technology; the Ford-Mitre study advised in favor of it (Union of Concerned Scientists 1977; Nuclear Energy Policy Study Group 1977; Cooke 1982, p. 334).The two studies agreed on the data but made different policy recommendations because they followed different methodological rules at the third, risk-evaluation, stage of assessment. (The first two stages are risk identification and risk estimation.) The Ford-Mitre research was based on the widely accepted Bayesian decision criterion that it is rational to choose the action with the best expected value or utility, where ‘expected value’ or ‘expected utility’ is defined as the weighted sum of all possible consequences of the action, and where the weights are given by the probability associated with each consequence.

Study takes critical look at missile defense

The chemistry community has chosen to take no role in the debate that has raged for three years over whether the U.S. should again produce chemical weapons. And life scientists have remained relatively silent as alarmist, if poorly documented, stories about the use of bioengineering in the development of biological weapons have placed NEWS ANALYSIS the unfettered exploitation of the new biologies in potential jeopardy. However, in contrast, the scientific community is responding widely and knowledgeably to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)—the administrative manifestation of President Reagan's March 1983 call for a massive research program on the feasibility of a complete defense of the territory of the U.S. and its allies against nuclear ballistic missiles. One of the first responses to what has now become known commonly as Star Wars came from the Union of Concerned Scientists. In 1984 this organization combined two of its reports, one of which it had started before President Reagan's ...

Declaration on the nuclear arms race: Union of concerned scientists

Declaration on the nuclear arms race: Union of concerned scientists

Prose and controversy — An editorial

For quite some time the citizens of this area of eastern New England and Cape Cod, where your editor has his summer residence, have been bombarded with a steady stream of propaganda concerning the unsafe nature of nuclear reactors for power generation. The current target is Boston Edison's Pilgrim 1 plant, and the Union of Concerned Scientists have set up headquarters in Plymouth and have issued news releases alleging that the plant represents a continuous hazard to the people of this community. One of the leaders of the UCS, acting as an intervenor, succeeded in halting operation of this plant for several months, until the go-ahead was finally given.

A generation in search of a future

To many executives and practicing engineers, the turmoil in the universities has been a bewildering phenomenon. At the Fourth of March meeting at M.I.T. to protest the misuse of science and engineering (IEEE Spectrum, April 1969, p. 8), Professor George Wald of Harvard-notable for his undergraduate teaching as well as for the research on vision that brought him a Nobel Prize-addressed the question of what is worrying the young. He spoke without a text, but a tape preserved his eloquent indictment of the way things are. The standing ovation it evoked is testimony that his talk resonated strongly with the minds of the audience convoked by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an M.I.T. faculty group. It is printed here, with his permission, for the insight it gives into the ferment which, though less strong on engineering campuses than in some other places, is giving social relevance a strong place in the values and professional aspirations of the next generation of electrical engineers.