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Background The ways in which the public understands nuclear waste affect nuclear waste policy and the actual disposal of nuclear waste. This paper traces the origins and the evolution of the public understanding of nuclear waste through an analysis of a sample of the historical record of the public discourse on the topic. Methods This paper employs sociocultural anthropology methods innovatively: rather than emphasizing the data collection aspect of participant observation, it emphasizes interpretive discourse analysis, sampling the archives of the New York Times as a de facto ethnographic repository of the U.S. discourse on nuclear waste spanning the years 1945–1969. Results Whereas no evidence of a public concept for nuclear waste is found in the chronologically first item of this study’s dataset, the chronologically last item implies a public conceptualization of nuclear waste that appears not too different from the one encountered today. Conclusions The paper illuminates especially the evolution of two key threads of environmental consciousness in the U.S. public discourse: as waste grew ever more harmful in the public understanding, the space available for disposing of it shrank and eventually disappeared.

Danger explodes, space implodes: the evolution of the environmental discourse on nuclear waste, 1945–1969