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Short abstract:

This paper calls for a shift in the containment philosophy of pollution regulation towards porosity whereby porosity becomes the measure of pollution's ubiquity and the health of residents becomes measures for understanding how chemicals enter lifeworlds through the containment's porous boundaries.

Long abstract:

Tummalapalle, Kudankulam, and Mayapuri are three irradiated sites along India's nuclear fuel cycle. In these three sites, while the safety design features are claimed to effectively contain irradiation, people living around them face health issues. While pollution standards and nuclear safety standards are layered atop each other to ensure effective containment (Shaik Ali 2024), the health standards of the community remains divided (Howey and Naele) and disintegrated from pollution and nuclear governance. That is, despite the increased health ailments in these communities, the health authorities face difficulties in establishing the cause of disease to nuclear operations as they rely on nuclear expertise. With accounts from sensory ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2021, this study advances health-based articulation of pollution's ubiquity rather than those based on nuclear standards. The tensions between health and nuclear governance systems, mediated by pollution control governance authorities provide a critique of expert hegemony in addressing human health, as the paper claims through concepts like radioporosity (Shaik Ali 2023) and layered governance.

STS scholarship has focused on the discursive leakages from the nuclear containment (Kinsella) translating the containment into a techno-scientific imaginary (Kim and Jasanoff). This imaginary provides the epistemological grounds for quantifying overflows from the containment (Burch) than providing a protection-based response to the health affects the overflows cause. This paper calls for a shift from the containment philosophy of pollution regulation towards porosity as the measure for pollution's ubiquity whereby the altered health of residents becomes measures for understanding how chemicals becomes porous.

Angerer, Marie-Luise, Hannah Schmedes and Christian Schwinghammer. n.d. "Technologies of Containment: Ontologies of Porosity, Leakiness and Holding." ZeM. https://www.zem-brandenburg.de/en/projekte/technologies-of-containment-2/

Burch, Karly Ann. 2019. “When Overflow Is the Rule: The Evolution of the Transnational Nuclear Assemblage and Its Technopolitical Tools for Framing Human–Radionuclide Relationality.” Geoforum 107 (December): 66–76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.10.011.

Howey, Kirsty, and Timothy Neale. 2022. “Divisible Governance: Making Gas-Fired Futures during Climate Collapse in Northern Australia.” Science, Technology & Human Values 20 (10): 1–30.

Kim, Sang-Hyun and Sheila Jasanoff. 2015. Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. University of Chicago Press.

Kinsella, William J. 2001. “Nuclear Boundaries: Material and Discursive Containment at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.” Science as Culture 10 (2): 163–94.

Shaik Ali, Misria. 2024. "The Alterlife of Disabled Fetal Imaginary," In Medical Technology and the Social, edited by Kate Burrows. Lexington Press.

_______. 2023. “Experiments on Radioporosity: A Response to Decaying Trust at YSR District, Andhra Pradesh.” Centre for 21st Century Studies, May 10. https://www.c21uwm.com/2023/05/10/experiments-on-radioporosity-a-response-to-decaying-trust-at-ysr-district-andhra-pradesh/