ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the theoretical and practical significance of the issue of resources for the hazards process. It examines how an analysis of the discursive logic of hazard-mitigation transformations is useful for explaining variations in the possibility of detection, and how the latter can act to change levels of hazardousness and vulnerability among the poor. A critical inquiry into the role of detection in establishing levels of hazardousness and vulnerability is one alternative to relying solely on historical rates of loss, and better suited to a notion of hazards as potentials. A hazard is a potential failure in the mitigation or system of mitigations that is designed to nullify an object, event, location or actions ability to cause harm to persons. The nuclear power industry provides an informative example of how hazards and mitigations are discursively transformed by state and corporate techniques of persuasion.
