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Documentary, Pandoras Box Part 6 - A Is For Atom
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00:00I dreamt last night, the moon was so bright, it melted the walls away.
00:07And it wasn't alarming when I saw Prince Charming come into my bedroom and say...
00:15Let me persuade you to come to the place where tomorrow meets today.
00:22Ooh!
00:23If you were a scientist, you were in.
00:42Yeah!
00:46Ah!
00:47Your excellent science, I am your faithful servant.
00:57Let the marvel!
01:00Building a new world.
01:13When did all this begin, Dad?
01:14The sun is a very old story. It's so old it's hard to say when it really began.
01:20It could have been back in 1540 when Copernicus identified the Earth as a speck of dust moving in an orbit around the sun.
01:27Or it could have been in 1905 when a young German physicist arrived at a fundamental truth.
01:32That matter could be converted into energy and expressed it in the equation E equals MC squared.
01:37Then there were other dates.
01:391937, the first industrial atom smasher.
01:421942, the first nuclear chain reaction.
01:451945, the bomb.
01:47Somewhere in the course of these events, the dawn came up on the atomic era.
01:52It's going to have a tremendous effect on our town down there, son.
01:55It will be felt in every town in America.
02:02And it won't matter if they make ships or shoes or ceiling lights.
02:06With atomic power, it will come benefits to mankind that we can as yet only imagine.
02:10I've got a call with the governor.
02:13Sir, I do. I think you've got to talk to him immediately.
02:15Do it immediately. We're operating almost totally in the blind.
02:19Is that information is empty to us?
02:20The blind is non-existent. I don't know a couple of blind men.
02:25Now I'm staying around making the station here.
02:32Thank you, sir.
02:53In 1945, in the aftermath of war, scientists were heroes,
02:57particularly the physicists who had built the atomic bomb.
03:01They are men, said Life magazine,
03:04who wear the tunic of Superman and stand in the spotlight of a thousand suns.
03:09In the public imagination, atomic scientists had harnessed a terrifying power
03:14which could literally reshape the world.
03:16We knew the world would not be the same.
03:19I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita.
03:24Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
03:32I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
03:38Many of the scientists who had worked on the atomic bomb
03:41felt a deep sense of guilt about what they had done.
03:44They were convinced they now had a moral duty
03:47to use the immense forces they had unleashed to better, peaceful purposes.
03:51What they did not foresee were the demands that would be made on them
03:56when their science came out of the laboratory
03:58and into the world of politics and big business.
04:01They would lose control and be forced to compromise and to deceive.
04:05So all of a sudden we found that, as scientists and technologists,
04:17we were capable of changing, in a massive way, the framework in which society functioned.
04:23I and many others felt that nuclear power represented a major energy future for the world.
04:34You have to understand that this was the first time that mankind had ever found an energy source
04:43which wasn't a routine natural phenomenon.
04:46Fire, of course, comes every time a lightning strikes a forest.
04:49Nuclear power was something else completely. We made it.
04:55And our ability to give the world a, what appeared to be, and still does appear to be,
05:01a limitless energy source for the future, was, to any scientist and engineer,
05:07probably the most exciting philosophic concept you could find.
05:10Today, as Shippingsport, Pennsylvania, we began building our first atomic power plant of commercial size.
05:19Mankind comes closer to fulfillment of the ancient dream of a new and a better Earth.
05:26The scientists have provided us with an example of nuclear science at work.
05:31In this baton, there is a small source of neutrons.
05:37I bring this source of neutrons over to this place in which we have uranium,
05:44and we set up a bit of atomic fission.
05:48This will move the marker on the scale and finally light the light, and the project will be started.
05:52The President of the United States has just started off electronically the ground-breaking power shovel,
06:021400 miles away in Shippingsport, Pennsylvania.
06:06In this general mood of enthusiasm for science, politicians began to look to atomic power as more than just cheap electricity.
06:14It became the way to a better world.
06:17It was a year of great hope.
06:21Just that Stalin died,
06:24came to the power of Hrushchev,
06:27and the atomic energy was considered as a tool
06:32to achieve the best quality of the population of the world.
06:39Even though we were all hypnotized by the Lenin's logic.
06:46There is a logic in Lenin's.
06:48Communism means Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country.
06:55Electrification is a nuclear energy plus Soviet power means communism.
07:01At the very same time as Eisenhower began construction at Shippingport,
07:11Russia suddenly announced it had already built the world's first nuclear power station.
07:16What the Soviets did not reveal was that it took more electricity to run the plant than it produced.
07:21Then in 1956, another country entered the nuclear race.
07:27In this case, the atom's role was to recapture the glories of the past.
07:32Tomorrow, Her Majesty the Queen, here at Calder Hall in Cumberland,
07:37is to open the first nuclear power station in the world to operate on an industrial scale.
07:42Our prosperity in the Victorian era, wrote the government's scientific advisor, Lord Charwell,
07:49was due to the men who put Britain 80 years ahead in the use of steam power.
07:54Our prosperity in the coming century will depend on learning how to exploit the latent energy in uranium.
08:01Uranium. Well, now that is uranium.
08:05That little black thing I'm holding in my hand, two pounds of that size of uranium,
08:10and the potential energy which could be given off by this when properly used,
08:17is equal to the energy, or the heat if you like the word better,
08:20produced by 2,600 tons of coal.
08:25That is uranium.
08:27Atomic scientists, by a series of brilliant discoveries,
08:32have brought us to the threshold of a new age.
08:35It is with pride that I now open Calder Hall, Britain's first atomic power station.
08:44The British government announced that by 1965, half the country's electricity would come from nuclear power.
08:50Now, Dr Leslie, we, see it seems to me, in the building of this great place and its operation,
08:57have actually got ahead of the Russians and of the Americans.
09:01Yes, the atom is on its way to brighten our towns and to help manufacture our most dependable and indispensable household servants.
09:10In the late 50s, the Atomic Energy Commission made films that portrayed an atomic future in America.
09:16Scientists designed nuclear cars, planes and rockets.
09:20Others predicted whole new cities powered by vast atomic engines.
09:25If somehow a product could be atomic, it had to be good.
09:29...which are now being developed with atomic energy.
09:31Even your toothpaste may be a product of the atomic age.
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24:45to clean all the other types of energy.
25:15and from the reactor core were pumped into giant open ponds.
25:45Complete safety for the attending personnel is insured at the atomic power plant.
25:52The slightest radioactive contamination can be detected with the aid of radiation monitors.
25:59At the exit of the washroom, there is a galsimetric installation.
26:04This will not let you out if there is the slightest trace of radioactivity about you.
26:09At the end of the 70s, when the era of Brejney reached its apoges,
26:25it happened to the maximum development of nuclear energy,
26:29and it became clear that many people saw it.
26:33The attempts to solve this problem by working records were not needed.
26:39It was needed to be published in a large journal.
26:43Corey Arkin and a fellow engineer wrote an article in the newspaper Communist.
26:48It openly challenged Alexandrov.
26:50It criticised the lack of safety in the design of the plants,
26:53where they were sited,
26:55and the growing question of what to do with the nuclear waste.
26:58It caused a sensation.
27:00There was a special press conference,
27:02where it was said,
27:03that this is a statement,
27:05that this is not true,
27:07that this is not true,
27:08although it was very clear to many people,
27:10because it was, I would say,
27:11that this is a scientific mafia
27:13with Alessandrov,
27:15the Institute of Atomic Energy.
27:17Well, it took a comfortable position,
27:19because all the awards,
27:21the awards, the awards,
27:22the awards,
27:23the awards,
27:24and all the, as we say in Russia,
27:26because the awards and the awards were sold,
27:29and the awards and the awards were sold
27:32to universities at other institutions.
27:34Well, this is a very bit of life,
27:37a very hard life.
27:39Britain, meanwhile, struggled just to make her plants work.
27:44So far, the first of the advanced gas-cooled reactors
27:48being built here on the Kent coast at Dungeness
27:51hasn't produced a single watt of electricity.
27:55Ordered at a cost of £80 million
27:58and due to be commissioned in 1972,
28:01it might just start producing electricity in 1977.
28:05And really, nobody has a clue
28:07how much it's going to cost us.
28:09So, why is it that things have gone wrong?
28:14For a start...
28:15It is with pride...
28:17When Corder Hall was opened,
28:20we were leading the world by three years.
28:25I can only feel terribly sad
28:27because I've seen that lead...
28:32thrown away.
28:34I find it difficult to put it any other way.
28:39A nuclear-generating plant is as harmless as...
28:42It's as harmless as a chocolate factory.
28:45But a lot more nuclear power is needed.
28:47Nuclear power.
28:49The power to keep America turning on...
28:51In America, the enormous nuclear plants ordered in the 60s
28:56were nearing completion.
28:58The engineers in charge were beginning to discover
29:00the trap they had set themselves
29:02by failing to redesign the containment.
29:05If a molten core could not be contained,
29:07then the emergency systems to prevent a meltdown
29:10would have to work whatever happened.
29:12The engineers had to anticipate everything that could possibly go wrong.
29:16In the enormous complexity of the plants,
29:19this was proving impossible.
29:21One of the main things we began to discover
29:26is that our theoretical calculations
29:31did not have a strong correlation with reality.
29:35While the regulations required emergency car cooling systems,
29:41pumps and valves,
29:43we didn't really have any basis for knowing
29:45that those pumps and valves would actually prevent
29:48a meltdown of the reactor.
29:50Because the degree of complexity of trying to predict
29:53what will happen inside a huge reactor
29:56in the midst of a pipe break,
29:58we couldn't make any judgments
30:00because we didn't have any facts on which to make judgments.
30:03During the winter of 1971,
30:06a series of tests of emergency core cooling systems
30:09were performed at the AEC's private testing site in Idaho.
30:13Accidents were simulated in a small model of a reactor.
30:17In each case, the emergency systems worked,
30:20but the water failed to fill the core.
30:23Often it was forced out under pressure.
30:26Despite this, both the industry and senior members of the AEC
30:30argued that the full-size safety systems were safe enough.
30:35I think what happened was the federal government
30:41and the nuclear industry decided that the absence of proof of danger
30:47was almost as good as proof of safety.
30:50In other words, even though we had done experiments that cast doubt
30:53on whether the safety systems would actually work if we had an accident,
30:58we still had that backup that, well, maybe an accident won't happen
31:04while we continued to work to perfect the design of the emergency system.
31:10Now, we couldn't announce to the public
31:12that we, having told the public that the plants were safe,
31:16we now had to disclose to them we were wrong,
31:19and then the fact that all these safety systems we told you about
31:22actually they might not do any good,
31:24my goodness, the uproar would have been,
31:26we all probably would have been fired,
31:28that would have been the end of this wonderful technology
31:30from the standpoint of us,
31:33and we just couldn't admit that we had been wrong.
31:37And plus, of course, you understand with this one experiment,
31:39it didn't prove that the emergency systems wouldn't work in all circumstances.
31:44I call it.
31:47What is your principal concern right at this minute?
31:50Well, my principal concern is that we got an accident
31:53that we've never been designed to accommodate...
31:55On March 28, 1979, a series of human and mechanical errors
31:58at the Three Mile Island plant exposed the core.
32:02It reacted with steam and produced hydrogen, which exploded.
32:05None of the emergency teams could understand
32:07what was going on inside the reactor.
32:10Then suddenly, this helicopter detected a large radioactive cloud
32:13drifting towards the nearest town.
32:16The voices of the commissioners in charge of the disaster
32:18were recorded by a dictaphone that had been left running on a table.
32:22What were the timescales involved there?
32:25Hours.
32:26Hours before what?
32:28Before you had a core melt.
32:30Before you had a core melt?
32:31You would have hours till when you were generating fission products
32:35in a core melt kind of situation through the containment.
32:38I think, you know, we got the best we got, Joe.
32:41And they're not coming up with answers.
32:43We got the...
32:44Well, don't you think as a precautionary measure
32:46there should be some evacuation?
32:51Probably, but I must say it's operating totally in the blind,
32:55and I don't have any confidence at all, but in order of evacuation
32:58we won't move people from a place where they've already gotten
33:01a piece of the dose they're going to get into an area
33:04where they will get, you know, they will have had .5 of what they were going to get
33:09and now they'll move someplace else and get 1.0.
33:13Now, Joe?
33:14Yes, sir?
33:15It seems to me I've got to call the governor.
33:16Yes, sir. I do.
33:17I think you've got to talk to him immediately.
33:18To do it immediately. We're operating almost totally in the blind.
33:22His information is ambiguous.
33:24Mine is non-existent.
33:25I don't know, you know, a couple of blind men
33:29now have to stagger out and make a decision, sir.
33:33Don't we know that it's been stopped?
33:35We just saw a lot of talk communication with the control room.
33:39For four days, the engineers at the plant watched helplessly
33:42as a bubble of hydrogen grew inside the damaged reactor.
33:45What they feared most was a further massive explosion.
33:50But they knew that if they tried to force the bubble out of the reactor
33:53it might move downwards and completely uncover the core.
33:57They would then face the nightmare of a meltdown.
34:01The engineers were trapped by the consequences of an accident
34:04no-one could have anticipated.
34:06It was a point they made to the commissioners again and again
34:09during the incident.
34:11It's a failure mode that's never been studied.
34:14It's just, it's unbelievable.
34:19Well, the thing that impressed me was
34:23how little we really knew about the situation.
34:27It was very hard to figure out what was happening.
34:33There was a lot of confusion on everyone's part, both on the company's part and the government's part,
34:40and a lot of other people who were participating.
34:42And I think this had a very strong effect on the public.
34:47Basically, to see all the men in the white suits or white lab coats who were supposed to know, on TV, basically scratching their heads, made a lot of people wonder whether things were as much under control as they had been told.
35:05Three Mile Island.
35:06Three Mile Island.
35:07The President's commission estimated the cost of the accident could reach $1.8 billion.
35:12That's a lot of money to pay for a power plant that may never work again.
35:17But Three Mile Island wasn't the first nuclear accident, and it won't be the last.
35:20In 1979 alone, there were 20 nuclear incidents that could have led to the catastrophic meltdown of an American nuclear power plant.
35:29Don't get sold on nuclear power.
35:32We can't pay the price.
35:34Their energy policy will benefit the nuclear industry and the oil companies, and they have given only lip service to the solar industry.
35:41There were protests against nuclear power throughout the world.
35:48In the public's imagination, it was transformed from something good to something bad.
35:53Much of the anger was turned on the nuclear scientists.
35:57It emerged that they had deliberately concealed many of the risks and uncertainties they had discovered at the very time when they were publicly promoting the wonders of nuclear power.
36:05We would, in effect, have solved the energy problem forever, permanently, which in itself is just an extraordinary new dimension in human experience, to have energy, which is the ultimate raw material.
36:20We recognize that there was a risk, but we always deemed the risk to be really acceptable.
36:27But now, I guess, I'm more mature, older.
36:36I realize that the decision of what is acceptable is not something that we technologists can make.
36:45It's something that the public makes.
36:47Why did you think it was something you could make then?
36:49You know, I guess it never occurred to me to ask this question.
37:06The nuclear enterprise had always been, well, it started out as a secret enterprise, of course,
37:13and the notion of the public being intimately involved in very complicated technical issues, issues which went way beyond the competence of any member of the public.
37:30It just didn't seem that that was the right way to do it.
37:33And I think the basic question is, can modern intrusive technology and liberal democracy coexist?
37:48The power rises sharply.
37:52The rated power level is exceeded.
37:53I keep in my safe records of the operator's telephone conversations on the eve of the accident.
38:03It makes one skin crawl to read them.
38:06One operator telephones another and asks,
38:09the program here states what must be done, but a lot has been crossed out.
38:14The other thinks for a moment and then says, act according to what has been crossed out.
38:18In Kyiv, we set off for the nuclear power station.
38:22It didn't enter my head that we were moving towards an event on a planetary scale.
38:28On the following day, when I went into the ruins of the reactor in an armored troop carrier,
38:33I had that sense of anger that there were no solutions, no technical remedies worked out in advance.
38:40Of course, we had said such an accident could only happen once in a thousand years.
38:44But who said that this once would fall in our year, 1986?
38:51This is the voice of Valery Legasov,
39:01an academic, one of my heroes in my story,
39:07a person of an extraordinary and tragic life,
39:11a person with whom I met in the summer of 1986.
39:17Legasov had been one of the main architects of Russia's nuclear program.
39:21Now he led the fight at Chernobyl,
39:23repeatedly flying through the radiation above the blazing reactor.
39:27As with Three Mile Island, an improbable sequence of errors had led to an explosion
39:31and a molten core that had now started to burn its way through the foundations of the reactor.
39:38A tunnel was frantically dug directly under the plant by hundreds of volunteers.
39:43Liquid nitrogen was poured in to freeze the ground underneath.
39:47By luck, the nitrogen gas also began to stifle the graphite fire.
39:51And then on the fifth day, for reasons that still no one understands, the core began to cool.
39:58Despite this, throughout the disaster and the terrible dangers,
40:03Legasov remained a staunch defender of nuclear power.
40:06The maximum dose was 0.7 roentgens per hour.
40:10Over the reactor, we got between 0.3 and 0.5 roentgens.
40:15Do you think we'll be able to have children?
40:21Yes, don't worry.
40:23Are you sure?
40:25I've been working with radioactivity since 1964.
40:29And I've got kids, don't worry.
40:31In the months that followed, Legasov changed his mind.
40:37In a long-taped interview with the then Soviet MP, Yuri Shcherbak,
40:41he gave a damning criticism of the whole nuclear power program.
40:45The problem, he said, was the demand that was made of the technology.
40:51Our meeting with Legasov was amazing.
40:55It was a wonderful conversation.
40:56He was very trusting, very honest,
41:00suddenly began to tell me all the pain,
41:04all the things he suffered in Chernobyl.
41:06It's easy to think or imagine that the enemy is the nuclear reactor,
41:11but the enemy isn't technology.
41:13I have come to the paradoxical conclusion
41:16that technology must be protected from man.
41:19In the past, the time that included the old reactors,
41:22the time that ended with Gagarin's flight into space,
41:26the technology was created by people who stood on the shoulders of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.
41:32They were educated in the spirit of the great humanitarian ideas,
41:36in the spirit of a beautiful and correct moral sense.
41:40They had a clear political idea of the new society they were trying to create,
41:46one that would be the most advanced in the world.
41:49But already in the generations that succeeded them,
41:54there were engineers who stood on their shoulders and saw only the technical side of things.
42:00But if someone is educated only in technical ideas,
42:04they cannot create anything new, anything for which they are responsible.
42:07The operators of the reactor that night considered they were doing everything well and correctly,
42:15and they were breaking the rules for the sake of doing it even better.
42:19But they had lost sight of the purpose, what they were doing it for.
42:23Then two years to the day after the accident, and for unknown reasons, Valery Legasov committed suicide.
42:35Oh, this world is at a tremble with its strength and mighty power.
42:47They're sending up to heaven to get the grimstone fire.
42:51Take warning, my dear brother, be careful how you plan.
42:54You're working with the power of God's own holy hand.
43:00Atomic power, atomic power, was given by the mighty hand of God.
43:09Atomic power, atomic power, it was given by the mighty hand of God.
43:17In the golden age of science, at the time when society had its most optimistic view of science,
43:33it basically had a wrong-headed view of science.
43:36It had the view that this form of the technology was the inevitable form that it had to take,
43:43and that if that was the form it took, then it must be the right form.
43:45Forty years later, we have a similarly naive view.
43:49It's no longer tinged by hope and optimism, it's tinged by pessimism and fear.
43:53But we still have this view that society can't shape technology,
43:58that the form that the technology takes is the form we must accept.
44:02And just as it wasn't true in 1950, it's not true today.
44:07This is not a story of technology run amok, although that's how many people would understand it to be.
44:12The history of nuclear power is a history of political and economic and social decisions being made about a technology.
44:21And the key decisions weren't made by the technologists, they were done in the business realm.
44:25What science and technology gives you is a range of possibilities, and those possibilities can take you in any number of directions.
44:34It's potentially a liberating force.
44:37But to get there, society has to stop sleepwalking and start realizing that it's not a scientific choice, it's not an engineering choice.
44:44It's a moral choice.
44:47Well George, does that answer your question?
44:49It sure does.
44:51It's given me a whole new perspective.
44:53After World War II, there was a scramble between America and the USSR to develop ever more powerful nuclear arsenals.
45:03If you're a digital satellite viewer, press red to find out more.
45:23Next here on UK TV History, we look at the definitive account of Hitler's death.
45:27To be continued...
45:52To be continued...
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