LAURENCE DELINA
BANGKOK, Thailand: The design, construction, operation and management of nuclear reactors require a systems-centered, immensely powerful, authoritarian but inherently unstable technological approach. Langdon Winner made this argument in his opus, The Whale and the Reactor, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1986. A classic reading in the discipline of science, technology and society, or STS, Winner’s book constructs a nuclear power plant as a socio-technological artifact, blurring the social and the technological. In the Philippines, this concept carries weight in discourses surrounding the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP)—a hot topic in 2016, and will presumably be so in 2017 and many more years to come.