ABSTRACT
It is no easy matter to identify the effects of work organization on the health of outside company employees performing maintenance operations in nuclear power plants. As we know, ICRP experts have estimated the decrease in life expectancy that may be attributed to exposure to a given collective dose level. By ICRP probability calculations, approximately 1000 man-sievert implied a loss of life expectancy of 880 years for French power plants between 1977 and 1996. We have also seen that 80% of the damage is suffered by outside employees in the nuclear industry. But how can we move from this abstract evaluation, which reifies and thereby masks the reality of death, to actual
knowledge of personal rather than anonymous cases, of premature death from been exposed to radiation in the workplace? This was one of the questions our study sought to answer.
