It was in the first half of the 1940s, during the wartime Manhattan Project, that significant quantities of nuclear waste were first generated. In the early decades its management and disposal were often seen (so the account generally goes) as a small technical problem of concern to just a few, one whose solution could be counted on to appear with the natural progress of science and engineering. Fifty years later, of course, it is not a small problem, nor even solely a technical one. The issue's political repercussions are well-known, particularly from drawn-out confrontations over repository siting and from charges of mismanagement and negligence that have damaged public trust. But more has changed than just that.

Research in nuclear waste management has become an engineering field with national centers, international exchanges, and multiple annual conferences. Where early research anticipated some small but manageable program of investigation, leading to readily satisfiable requirements for disposal extending for perhaps a few hundred years, the field now takes on problems of modeling and experimentation as complex as any to be found, operating with time scales lengthened to tens of millennia and more, and under safety constraints as stringent as any ever imposed. The interdisciplinary inquiry has come to include not only geologists, materials scientists, health physicists, and nuclear engineers, but also, more recently, political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, even semioticians. And some of its most intractable problems, ones demanding multibillion-dollar responses, have proved to be exactly those created by the easier solutions of earlier years.

Over the space of six decades, the conception of the technical problem has changed dramatically.  The study is organized around three related questions: 

• What sort of technical problem has nuclear waste been perceived to be, at different points on this trajectory? What were taken to be its magnitude and character, its relation to other sorts of waste problems?
• What sorts of suggestions have been offered for solving it? By whom was it to be solved, with what tools, and in what manner?
• And how have these perceptions — of the problem, of the solution — been shaped by the governmental contexts in which the subject was addressed, which were both internally heterogeneous and internationally diverse?