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Thesis ID: CBB898540521

Irradiating Eden: The El Verde Experiment and the Atomic Energy Commission's nuclear prospecting in Latin America, 1954-1970 (2016)

Celso, Baldivieso, Jr. (Author)
Brown, Kate (Advisor)

University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Brown, Kate

URI: https://search.proquest.com/docview/1831918999?accountid=12964

Publication Date: 2016
Physical Details: 153 pp.
Language: English

Outside Links

Academia.edu

Technology and government Government sponsored science Pollution, radioactive Radioactivity Nuclear and radioactive waste Nuclear testing Atomic energy; nuclear power 20th century, late Puerto Rico Latin America

With this thesis, I connect the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’s large-scale ecological research in the El Verde rainforest in Puerto Rico during the 1960s to an experimental nuclear weapons program known as Project Plowshare. I show how the AEC masked a bureaucratic investigation at El Verde as a strictly academic pursuit. I argue that the AEC and its contracted scientists at the Puerto Rico Nuclear Center, led by the pioneering systems ecologist, Howard T. Odum, conducted perverse experiments using highly radioactive sources and isotopes to damage and monitor tropical biota, and predict how radioactive elements would percolate through waterways and into food webs in rainforests following nuclear detonations. I contend that El Verde was a continuation of research linked to the Plowshare program—a program contested in the United States—which American nuclear prospectors expanded into Puerto Rico and Latin America as they planned a nuclear-blasted transoceanic canal in Panama.

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Citation URI

http://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB898540521/

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