This book deals with the everyday lives of people who work in or live near high-risk industrial establishments. To study this subject, I took the case of the nuclear industry, centring my research on the spent nuclear fuel reprocessing plant at la Hague on the western tip of the Cotentin Peninsula in Normandy.

It was the award of a research contract by the Social Sciences Commission of the French Ministry of the Environment in 1987 that prompted me to undertake a monograph on the plant, though I had actually begun thinking about it as far back as 1980, while on a visit to the region. Struck by the beauty of this coastal landscape and the harmony and silence of its little villages (in Norman dialect usage, really hamlets) tucked away down leafy lanes, I decided to stop there and do some ethnographic research. I was aware from the outset of the presence, up on the plateau a mile or so inland from these untamed shores, of a nuclear facility of some kind and of the fact that a second was being built alongside the first. I had even driven along the road that borders the site. However, though I had passed quite close I had either not noticed it or not wished to notice it. Nor did the people (residents of long standing, some local councillors) whom I approached to find out whether I might come and live at la Hague ever mention it to me.