Atomic Junction: Nuclear Power in Africa after Independence

Product Description

After Atomic Junction, along the Haatso-Atomic Road there lies the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission, home to Africa’s first nuclear programme after independence. Travelling along this road, Abena Dove Osseo-Asare gathers together stories of conflict and compromise on an African nuclear frontier. She speaks with a generation of African scientists who became captivated with ‘the atom’ and studied in the Soviet Union to make nuclear physics their own. On Pluton Lane and Gamma Avenue, these scientists displaced quiet farming villages in their bid to establish a scientific metropolis, creating an epicentre for Ghana’s nuclear physics community. By placing interviews with town leaders, physicists and local entrepreneurs alongside archival records, Osseo-Asare explores the impact of scientific pursuit on areas surrounding the reactor, focusing on how residents came to interpret activities on these ‘Atomic Lands’. This combination of historical research, personal and ethnographic observations shows how Ghanaians now stand at a crossroad, where some push to install more reactors, whilst others merely seek pipe-borne water.

Review

‘A carefully researched but also deeply personal history of nuclear science in Ghana. Osseo-Asare’s history takes us from Ghanaian nuclear scientists’ measurements of fallout from French nuclear tests in Algeria in the early 1960s through to Ghana’s acquisition of a nuclear reactor from China in the 1990s, and further into the present day. Commendable for its breadth of perspective and fascinating detail.’ Hugh Gusterson, George Washington University, Washington, DC

‘A meticulous historian with an ethnographer’s eye for rich detail, Osseo-Asare boldly overturns standard accounts of Cold War atomic science, placing Ghanaian aspirations for decolonized knowledge and talented black researchers at the center. A brilliant and utterly original rendering of one nation’s nuclear dreams that are at once liberatory and frustrated.’ Alondra Nelson, President of the Social Science Research Council

Book Description

An innovative account of the first nuclear programme in independent Africa, centring on the promises and perils of atomic research in Ghana.

Book Description

Examining the quest for nuclear power in Africa through the case of Ghana’s Atomic Energy Commission, this comprehensive history of nuclear research places archival sources alongside interviews with town leaders, physicists and entrepreneurs to explore the impact of these scientific pursuits on Ghanaian society.

About the Author

Abena Dove Osseo-Asare is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas, Austin, holds a secondary appointment as an Associate Professor in the Department of Population Health at the University of Texas’s Dell Medical School, and is a serving member of the editorial boards of Endeavour and Social History of Medicine. She is the author of Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa (2014), which was awarded the Melville J. Herskovits Prize in African Studies and the American Historical Association Pacific Coast Branch Book Prize.