In the
modern world, a certain level of scientific literacy is important for
understanding the latest discoveries in climate change, genetics, information
technology, and other fields that have a direct bearing upon the lives of
millions of people. However, there are many people within the United States who
are effectively unable to grasp the concepts involved in scientific discovery.
According to study published in the MIT
Technology Review, only 28 percent of Americans are
“scientifically literate.”
The
ability to understand scientific concepts is important for the overall vitality
and well-being of a civilization. The Islamic world was an early leader in
science during the Golden Age of Arabic beginning around the year 800. After several hundred years
of producing wondrous scientific achievements, such as charting the stars and
inventing mechanical water clocks, a growing climate of religious intolerance
towards the scientific enterprise doomed much of the Muslim world to becoming a
technological backwater. Similarly, the fall of Rome caused many discoveries to
be lost for nearly a thousand years and precipitated what is known today as the
“Dark Ages” in Europe: a time of superstition and low standards of living.
Likely
due, in part, to prevent a similar fate from befalling us, several public
figures have come forth. These individuals attempt to make the often-dry and
technical aspects of science accessible to the general public. Modern
techniques used for communicating science to the masses include television programs,
interviews, podcasts and popular social media channels.
Carl
Sagan, perhaps the most charismatic astrophysicist who ever lived, was one of
the early leaders in this type of science communication. Sagan was not only an
effective communicator but also a top-rate scientist with more than 600
published scientific papers to his name. In 1980, his Cosmos television
series was broadcast and captured the imagination of millions who were
entranced by the broad and beautiful vistas of the natural universe as portrayed
by Sagan. He wrote many scientific books for lay audiences, including Pale Blue Dot and the novel Contact, which was later turned into a
major motion picture.
It can
be said that the most notable present-day counterpart to Sagan is Neil deGrasse
Tyson, astronomer and cosmologist. He is the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and also
works for the American Museum of Natural History. For anyone who saw last
year’s reboot of the Cosmos
program, it’s clear that Sagan’s influence on the starry-eyed Tyson
went far beyond their one-time meeting on Cornell’s campus. Sagan’s personal beliefs in
the cultural power of space and space travel were also reflected in Tyson’s speech as the Keynote presenter at
the 2013 National Space Symposium.
Commenting
of the consequences of space exploration insofar as their effect on America’s
intellectual health is concerned, he said:
So what
are the current problems here in America? Not in other parts of the world. Our
economy is in the toilet. Hardly anyone is interested in the STEM fields,
meanwhile our best minds are going overseas. Politicians are pretty sure they
have a solution to that, let’s get better science teachers, how about our jobs
going overseas, how’s about moving some tariffs and contracts? People are not
innovating so we put money in innovative initiatives. There things are all band
aids people. They don't work.
Proposing
a doubling of NASA’s budget, he continued, saying:
Whatever
the motives, be they geopolitical, military, economic, space becomes the
frontier, and you know every week that some new innovation is going to be
proposed, new patents are going to accepted. Space is exciting. These
innovations make headlines, and these articles filter down the educational
pipeline, everybody in school knows about it. You don't have to set up programs
to convince people that being an engineer is cool, they will know it just by
the cultural presence of those activities.
You do
that it will jump start our dreams. And you know that innovation drives
economies, especially true since the industrial revolution.
Convinced
that we’ve stopped dreaming about tomorrow, Tyson argues that NASA is needed
for more than just scientific progress. A national effort to become more
involved in the exploration of the cosmos will, he claims, reinvigorate our
collective culture as well as the economy.
Despite
provoking controversy from certain religious groups, Tyson has also frequently
appeared on popular shows like The Colbert Report to promote the funding
of science and interest in scientific endeavors among the public at large. He
has been a leader in using social media to engage with his fans, with more than
3 million followers on
Twitter.
Bill
Nye is another vocal advocate for science in mainstream culture. A former
mechanical engineer at Boeing, Nye hosted a television show called, Bill Nye the Science Guy, throughout the '90s. He used
humor and easy-to-replicate experiments to demonstrate to children how
scientific concepts relate to everyday life. Since the conclusion of his show,
Nye has frequently appeared in other shows and series with a scientific bent,
including 100 Greatest Discoveries and The Eyes of Nye. In recent
years, Nye has used his stature and popularity to advocate for the reality of
global climate change, encouraging sustainable energy and the importance of
scientific literacy.
While
it seems impossible to construe better science education as a bad thing, the
aforementioned champions of scientific rationality nevertheless face serious
challenges. Because many of the issues that they care about most are
politically charged, they often encounter opposition from people on the other
side of the facts. This has led some of their adversaries not only to question
the validity of certain views held on specific topics, but overall value of
science and its capacity to illuminate the natural order of the universe.
Additionally, in certain subsets of the population, science is perceived to be
a dull business, only of interest only to “nerds” and other socially
maladjusted individuals.
It's
clear that understanding facts about the world around us will likely become
even more important as scientific discoveries play an ever-increasing role in
daily affairs. The strength of the United States as a society will hinge on the
ability of the electorate and government officials to enact policies that
promote a better understanding of science and the natural world. Science
communicators therefore have an important role to play in educating the public
on matters that affect every one of us.
Space as Culture by Neil DeGrasse Tyson (Keynote speech at the 28th National Space Symposium)
Beth
Kelly is a is a freelance writer from Chicago, IL. A lifelong fan of
Carl Sagan, she has always nurtured a passion for both science and
literature. In her free time, you can find her training for triathlons,
shooting film photography or teaching her pet rabbit new tricks. You can
find her on Twitter at @ bkelly_88
He who was close to us
from far off seemed to have come
into our uncanny homeland.
Only a searching for traces
with a divining rod of words
that quivered in his hand.
Across conflagration sites
and burying places
he followed it,
through to raving madness on Suffolk heaths. Is this the promised land?
Earlier the dark had encroached,
but he moved on,
through all those nightmares
undaunted made his way.
That dust became light for him
we know from three lines alone: So soundless I glided scarcely stirring a wing high up above the earth . . .
Translated, from the German, by Michael Hamburger.
An essayist as well as a poet, Hans Magnus Enzensberger is one of Germany’s most important writers.The latest English edition of his nork is Lighter Than Air: Moral Poems, translated by David Constantine (Bloodaxe Books, 2002)
Source: Irish Pages, Vol. 1, No. 2, The Justice Issue (Autumn - Winter, 2002/2003), p. 136
[From unidentified 1950s promotional film featuring father and son
characters looking across a bay at a city]
[Son:]"When did all this begin, Dad?"
[Father:]"Well, son, it's a very old story; it's... so old, it's hard to
say when it really began...
Could've been
back in 1540, when Copernicus identified the Earth as a speck of dust moving in
an orbit
around the Sun... or it could've been in 1905, when a young [Swiss] German physicist
arrived at a
fundamental truth – that matter could be converted into energy – and expressed
it
in the
equation E = mc2. Then there were other dates... 1937: the first
industrial atom-smasher;
1942: the
first nuclear chain reaction; 1945: the Bomb. Somewhere in the course of these
events,
the dawn came
up on the atomic era. It's going to have a tremendous effect on our town down
there, son...
It'll be felt in every town in America. And it won't matter whether they make
ships
or shoes or
sealing wax; with atomic power will come benefits to mankind that we can as yet
only
imagine."
A is for ATOM
In 1945, in the aftermath of
war, scientists were heroes – particularly the physicists, who had built the
atomic bomb. "They are men", said Life magazine, "who
wear the tunic of Superman and stand in the spotlight of a
thousand suns."
In the public imagination,
atomic scientists had harnessed a terrifying power which could literally
reshape the world.
[From footage of]Robert Oppenheimer, chief scientist, Manhattan Project [in The Decision to Drop the Bomb (1965)?]
"I knew the world would not be the same. I
remembered the lines from the Hindu scripture,
the Bhagavad Gita: "Now
I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
"I suppose we all thought that, one way or
another."
Many of the scientists who
had worked on the atomic bomb felt a deep sense of guilt about what they had
done. They were convinced they now had a moral duty to use the immense forces
they had unleashed [for] better, peaceful
purposes. What they did not foresee were the demands that would be made of them
when their science came out of the laboratory and into the world of politics
and big business. They would lose control and be forced to compromise and to
deceive.
Dr. Chaunc[e?]y Starr, physicist, Manhatt[a]n Project 1943–1946
So, all of a sudden we found... that, as scientists
and technologists, we were capable of changing
in a massive way the framework in which society
functioned.
I and many others felt that nuclear power represented
a major energy future for the world. You
have to understand that... this was the first time
that mankind had ever found an energy source
which wasn't a routine natural phenomenon [on Earth]. Fire, of course, comes
every time []
lightning strikes a forest; nuclear power was
something else completely – we made it. And our
ability to give the world [] what appeared to be – and
still does appear to be – a limitless energy
source for the future, was, to any scientist and
engineer, probably the most exciting philosophic[al]
concept you could find.
[From footage of a TV address made by] President Eisenhower, September 1954
"Today, [in] Shippingport, Pennsylvania,
we began building our first atomic power plant of
commercial
size.
"Mankind comes closer to fulfilment of the
ancient dream of a new and a better Earth.
"The scientists have provided us with an example
of nuclear science at work. In this baton
[which he is holding
in his hands] there is a small source... of neutrons. I bring this source of
neutrons over
to this place in which we have uranium and we set up a bit of atomic fission.
This will
move the marker on the scale and finally light the light [to which he points] and the
project will
be started."
In this general mood of
enthusiasm for science, politicians began to look to atomic power as more than
just cheap electricity. It became the way to a better world.
Prof. Yurii I. Koryakin, Head of Research, USSR
Institute of Power Research [subtitled]
They were years of great hope. Stalin had just died [and] Khruschev had come to
power. We
believed atomic power would lead to a better life for
everyone. On top of all this, we were
hypnotised by Lenin's slogan: "Communism equals
Soviet power plus the electrification of the
whole country."
Atomic power was seen as the way to communism.
At the very same time as
Eisenhower began construction at Shippingport, Russia suddenly announced [that] it had already built the
world's first nuclear power station. What the Soviets did not reveal was that
it took more
electricity to run the plant
than it produced.
Then, in 1956, another
country entered the nuclear race. In this case, the atom's role was to
recapture the glories of the past.
[Footage of (presumably) 1950s
Britain]
[Voiceover:] "Tomorrow, Her Majesty the Queen, here at
Calder Hall in Cumberland, is to open the
first nuclear
power station in the world to operate on an industrial scale."
"Our prosperity in the
Victorian era", wrote the government's scientific adviser, Lord Cherwell,
"was due to the men who put Britain eighty years ahead in the use of steam
power. Our prosperity in the coming century will depend on learning how to
exploit the latent energy in uranium."
[From TV footage of]Richard Dimbleby[presenting the] BBC outside broadcast [of the] opening of Calder Hall [nuclear
power station]
"Uranium... [He picks up and
holds a cartridge in his hand] Well, now, that is uranium. That little black
thing I'm
holding in my hand: two pounds of that [form] of uranium. And the
potential energy
which could
be given off by this when properly used is equal to the energy – or the heat,
if you
like the word
better – produced by two-thousand six-hundred tons of coal. That is
uranium."
[From footage of the Queen's opening address]
"...atomic scientists, by a series of brilliant
discoveries, have brought us to the threshold of
a new age ...
It is with pride that I now open Calder Hall, Britain's first atomic power
station."
The British government
announced that by 1965, half the country's electricity would come from nuclear
power.
In the late fifties, the [United States] Atomic Energy Commission
made films that portrayed an "atomic future" in America. Scientists
designed nuclear cars, planes and rockets. Others predicted whole new cities
powered by vast atomic engines. If, somehow, a product could be "atomic",
it had to be good.
Vladimir I. Merkin, designer of first Soviet
civilian reactor [subtitled]
It was a golden age. Scientists and engineers were
bursting with ideas. Suddenly anything
seemed possible; the power of science was limitless.
[Unidentified footage, mostly landscapes filmed from low-flying aircraft
(American, 1950s?)]
[Voiceover:] "Science for the world – a dynamic world,
moving rapidly, flying, reacting to flashes
on the radar
screen; watching schedules where everything is calculated down to seconds and
fractions of
seconds ... Science has permeated our very existence and can no longer detach
itself
..."
[More unidentified footage, here (presumably) of the site for a nuclear
power plant]
[Voiceover:] "The station is to be situated on the shores
of a forest lake. During the rest period, a
magic silence
reigns around the building site ..."
But now, just when the
scientists were being swept along on a wave of publicity, they began to
discover it was going to be far more difficult to produce nuclear power than
they had first thought. The problem was the cost of building the reactors; they
were proving too expensive to compete with conventional fuels. In the Soviet
Union, this led to increasing pressure to build fast, often without proper
protection from nuclear radiation. In February 1957, the planner in charge of
the whole nuclear power programme died from an accidental burst of
radioactivity.
[Vladimir I. Merkin]
We came under pressure to cut costs; there was a
desire for this energy to be cheap and widely
available. Although we understood [that] reactors had to be safe, we
always had to keep costs
uppermost in our minds.
We moved so fast [that] there simply wasn't time to
take all the precautions. Maybe that's why
safety began [sic] to be neglected – in
particular, the possibility of a huge accident.
Then, in October 1957, there
was a major accident in Britain.
[Newsreel clip]
[Voiceover:] "Emergency at Windscale atom plant [sic] – and the milk from
two-hundred square
miles of
farmland is condemned as radioactive."
The core of the reactor
caught fire and spewed high levels of radioactivity across northwest England.
The radioactivity released was far worse than the public was told. It led some
scientists to question the speed at which the technology was being pushed to
compete with fossil fuels. They included the scientist who had built
Windscale, Christopher
Hinton. He had been put in charge of implementing the Government's plans for
cheap electricity.
Sir Kelvin Spencer, Chief Scientist, Ministry
of Power 1954–1959
Hinton was a thoroughly honest man; and when he found
that all sorts of bogus tales had been
told about the relative costs of electricity from
nuclear energy, he was shocked – he told me this,
that he was absolutely shocked.
He realised that the estimates of the cost of nuclear
energy compared with the costs of coal
energy were cooked; and when I [asked] him "Why didn't you do
anything about it?", he said:
"Well, I couldn't, because the thing's gone too
far."
You see, so much had been committed [by] then to a nuclear future
... It must've been some billions
that they'd already spent. It was too late.
[From Harold Wilson's address at the]Labour Party Conference[in]1963
"It is, of course, a cliché that [] we're living at a time of
such rapid scientific change that our children
are accepting
as part of their everyday life things which would've been dismissed as science
fiction a few
years ago.
"We're living, perhaps, in a more rapid
revolution than some of us realise."
The politicians were now
committed to nuclear power. In 1960, a Labour politician, Anthony Wedgewood
Benn, suggested an idea for a party political broadcast. To the hymn Jerusalem,
the camera would rise from waving
fields of corn to reveal an
atomic plant.
[Back to Harold Wilson's conference address]
"... the conscious, planned, purposive use of
scientific progress, to provide undreamed-of living
standards and
the possibility of leisure, ultimately, on an unbelievable scale."
Nuclear scientists were now
being carried along by a political enthusiasm for what science could achieve.
Yet few of them, in Britain, America or the Soviet Union, knew how to fulfil
the promises they had made.
[From] ATOMIC ACHIEVEMENT, [a] Westinghouse promotional film
[Voiceover:] "There's a new dawn breaking over our
world: the hopeful dawn of the atomic era.
What
benefits..."
But two large American
corporations, Westinghouse and General Electric, had already invested millions
of dollars in nuclear technology. For them, there was no way back. In 1961, the
new chief executive of General Electric told
his staff: "We're going
to ram this nuclear thing through."
[Voiceover:] "... we can move forward to new and even
greater achievements in the atomic era.
This is the
hope that awaits us, in this new dawn's early light."
Control over nuclear
technology had passed from the scientists to the industrialists. They were now
about to take an enormous gamble: to make nuclear power not only practical, but
profitable.
[?[Bertram Wolfe], ?[General Manager], GE Nuclear Energy]
I'm Bert Wolfe [sp?]; I head General Electric's peaceful nuclear power programme.
...and this is a building which is made to model an
actual [sic] boiling-water reactor ... We can
come right over here to a facility where down low in
the cavity there is the boiling-water reactor.
General Electric and
Westinghouse took the simplest form of nuclear reactor – originally designed
for
submarines – and redesigned
it on a gigantic scale. These were then offered to power companies at knockdown
prices. The manufacturers decided to bear any extra costs themselves. They
gambled they could start a bandwagon which would make the nuclear business
profitable. The key figure was the salesman.
[?Bertram Wolfe]
We would sell one at a time; and each time we sold
one, we'd have a celebration – I can recall
when we had meetings and someone would come in and [say] "We sold a plant to
(somebody)!"
and we'd all stand up and shake hands and... go out
for lunch and have wine and toast each
other... It was a great celebration.
Then, in the late sixties, we began selling these by
the tens, so it became a real business.
The plants were sold often
before they had even been designed. The power company accepted on faith the
manufacturer's claims that because the reactors were big, they would achieve
economies of scale. These sales were then cited to the next buyer as proof of
the soundness of the manufacturer's claims. In the process, the reactors became
bigger and bigger – and it worked. The two corporations [Westinghouse and
GE] sold dozens of
plants, at home and abroad. Only Britain refused to succumb.
[From a]General Electric promotional film [A is for Atom (1952)?]
[Voiceover:] "A giant of limitless power at man's
command. Man is building a brighter future for
his children –
and his children's children – in the new world of the Atomic Age ..."
But senior nuclear
scientists were worried about safety in these enormous plants. At the centre of
the reactor was the uranium core. Its heat powered the generators. The cores
were now so large that if, for any reason, the flow of water to keep them cool
were lost, they would melt. The scientists feared that such a core would then
burn its way through the floor of the containment shell. In theory, there would
be nothing to stop it emerging on
the other side of the world.
They called it the "China syndrome".
The doubters included Alvin
Weinberg, the man who had designed the original submarine reactor.
Alvin Weinberg, Director, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
1955–1974
As long as the reactor was as small as the submarine
intermediate reactor – which was only sixty
megawatts – then the containment shell was absolute.
Now, that's not quite right, because –
[Adam Curtis, interviewing off-camera,
interrupts:]When you say "the containment shell was absolute",
do you mean it was safe?[Weinberg:] It was safe. But when you went to six-hundred
megawatt
reactors and thousand megawatt reactors, you could
not guarantee this – because you could,
in some very remote situation, conceive of the
containment being breached by this molten mass...
...and that change, I would assert, occurred as a
result of this enormous economic pressure to
make the reactors as large as possible.
In 1964, a team of
scientists working for the [US] Atomic Energy Commission studied the possible consequences of a nuclear
accident. They concluded: "We have found in our present study nothing
inherent in reactors, or in safeguard systems as they have now been developed,
which guarantees either that major reactor accidents will not occur or that
protective safeguard systems will not fail. Should such accidents occur, very
large damages could result."
[Alvin Weinberg]
... and that's when the nuclear dream began to fall
apart.
In 1965, scientists advising
the [US] Atomic Energy
Commission tried to force the manufacturers to make their reactors safer.
[From an unidentified (black-and-white) TV current affairs or news-style
programme]
[Presenter:] "Good evening. Well, as I'm sure you've
heard, we're going to have an atomic power
plant here in
New York. The Atomic Energy Commission has granted to Consolidated Edison
permission to
build a nuclear steam electric generating [sic] station at Indian Point in
Westchester
County."
Westinghouse had already
built a small atomic plant at Indian Point. Now they applied to the AEC for a
licence to build a giant reactor on the same site. At the same time, General
Electric proposed a massive plant just outside Chicago. The scientists on the [AEC's] Advisory Committee on
Reactor Safeguards were worried that a core melt
so close to large cities
could cause a disaster.
They drafted a letter to the
chairman of the AEC, Glenn Seaborg, which would, by law, have to be published.
It said they would only agree to the plants if the manufacturers redesigned all
future reactors to stop a molten core escaping if an accident, however
unlikely, occurred. Seaborg was an ardent proponent of large reactors.
Glenn Seaborg, interviewed 1966
"We think that it will be possible to build huge
nuclear power reactors that will produce electricity
at the rate
of millions of kilowatts and [use?] salt seawater at the rate of hundreds of millions of
gallons a
day..."
Seaborg asked for the letter
not to be published. "The impact on the industry might be serious",
he said, "and the public might misunderstand it."He and his fellow commissioners would deal
with the problem in private.
Dr. Glenn Seaborg, Chairman, AEC 1961–1971
All I can say is that we... tried to take such steps
as we could to follow their advice [and] make the
changes that would make them safe.
[Adam Curtis, interviewing,
off-camera:] So what did you say to the manufacturers?
[Seaborg:] We... had meetings with the manufacturers and
discussed the issue with them. I think
they were doing the best they could and I don't know
if we ever made a tremendous push to try
to get them to change their whole manufacturing
system.
[Curtis:] Why not?
[Seaborg:] Oh, I think it was at that time not regarded as
a feasible approach.
Dr. David Okrent, Chairman, Advisory Committee on Reactor
Safeguards 1966
We asked General Electric to come in and discuss how
they might cope with this; and, in effect,
they came in and showed problems that would arise
with their containment and indicated
that
they didn't think they wanted to continue selling
power reactors if they were going to have to
deal with the core-melt problem.
Westinghouse showed something called the "core
catcher", but no proof of how it would work.
Neither company was anxious to deal with the problem,
obviously.
[Adam Curtis, interviewing, off-camera:] Weren't General Electric,
in effect, threatening you?They're
saying "If you insist on this, then we'll just
pull out of – "
[Okrent:] It was a kind of threat, I think, yes.
[Back to Glenn Seaborg]
[Curtis:] What would've happened if you had said "I
think these plants that are being built – these
enormous plants – by General Electric and
Westinghouse are potentially dangerous."?What
would have happened if you'd said that?
[Seaborg:] Well, that's a hypothetical
question... I –
[Curtis:] You had the power to do it.
What would've happened?
[Seaborg:] I don't think we had the power to stop them...
well, we could've refused to license them,
of course, but, again, I think that in the context of
the times, it's... not a question that makes
much sense.
Indian Point and the other
reactors were built without the redesign the Committee had asked for. Instead,
the AEC ordered a massive upgrading of the capacity of the emergency cooling
systems, to prevent a core from ever
melting. In effect, the
manufacturers had got their way. But they had set a terrible trap for themselves.
In contrast, in the Soviet
Union, the grandiose nuclear plans of the 1950s had remained on the drawing
board. The Soviet planners were unconvinced they could be constructed cheaply.
The physicists and engineers spent
their days designing
reactors that would not get built.
Then, in the mid-sixties,
Brezhnev came to power. He believed that the road to communism lay through
giant technological projects. The nuclear power programme began again. It was
dominated by Anatoly Alexandrov, a famous physicist who had designed what was
known as the "RBMK" reactor. His team planned giant versions to be
built around Soviet cities.
[Anatoly Alexandrov (presumably), subtitled]
I believe and I've always believed that nuclear power
is incredibly important. No other fuel – neither
gas nor oil, nor, to a lesser degree, coal – can see
humanity through even the next thousand years.
Atomic energy is ecologically cleaner than any other
form of energy.
The idyllic picture of a
nuclear Eden masked a reality in which safety was barely even considered. The
reactors were built at great speed to cut costs and to fulfil the Soviet plan.
Some had no protective containment at all, despite the high[?er] pressures of steam. Large
amounts of water, contaminated by radiation from the reactor core, were pumped
into giant open ponds.
Prof. Yurii I. Koryakin, Head of Research, USSR
Institute of Power Research [subtitled]
A decision was taken to build huge million-kilowatt
reactors. The first was completed in 1973 and
many others followed. But, in the headlong rush to
finish on time, all sense of proportion was
lost.
[Film excerpt featuring workers at a (presumably) Soviet nuclear plant
showering and checking themselves for radiation]
[Voiceover (in English):] "Complete safety for the attending
personnel is ensured at the atomic power
plant. The
slightest radioactive contamination can be detected with the aid of radiation
monitors.
At the exit
of the washroom, there is a [..?..] installation. This will not let you out if there is the
slightest
trace of radioactivity about you."
[Yurii Koryakin (subtitled)]
Under Brezhnev, things started to fall apart. Theft
and negligence were rife. In the late seventies,
the Brezhnev era reached new heights of corruption just
as we were building more atomic plants
than ever. Our efforts to solve this problem
internally failed completely, so we went public.
Koryakin and a fellow
engineer wrote an article in the [journal]Kommunist. It openly challenged Alexandrov.
It criticised the lack of
safety in the design of the plants, where they were sited and the growing
question of what to do with the nuclear waste. It caused a sensation.
[Yurii Koryakin (subtitled)]
At a press conference, our article was called a pack
of lies, but people knew we were right. The
scientific mafia led by Alexandrov was firmly in the
saddle – all those medals and foreign trips.
There's a Russian saying: "Cake for some, knocks
for the rest."Ordinary engineers
like us got
kicked in the teeth. It often happens like that in
life.
Britain, meanwhile,
struggled just to make her plants work.
[From an episode of] Tomorrow's World [broadcast in]1975
[Presenter (Michael Rodd?):] "So far, the first of
the advanced gas-cooled reactors being built here
on the Kent
coast at Dungeness hasn't produced a single watt of electricity. Ordered at a
cost
of £80
million and due to be commissioned in 1972, it might just start producing electricity
in
1977 – and
really, nobody has a clue how much it's going to cost us.
"So, why is it that things have gone wrong?For a start, – "
Christopher Hinton, interviewed 1974
"When Calder Hall was opened, we were leading
the world by three years ... I can only feel terribly
sad, because
I've seen that lead... thrown away – I find it difficult to put it any other
way."
In America, the enormous
nuclear plants ordered in the sixties were nearing completion. The engineers in
charge were beginning to discover the trap they had set themselves by failing
to redesign the containment. If a molten core could not be contained, then the
emergency systems to prevent a meltdown would have to work, whatever
happened. The engineers had to anticipate everything that could possibly go
wrong. In the enormous complexity of the plants, this was proving impossible.
Robert Pollard, reactor engineer, AEC 1969–1976
One of the main things we began to discover is that
our theoretical calculations... did not have a
strong correlation with reality. While the
regulations required emergency cooling systems – pumps
and valves – we didn't really have any basis for
knowing that those pumps and valves would
actually prevent a meltdown of the reactor, because
the degree of complexity of trying to predict
what will happen inside a huge reactor in the midst
of a pipe-break... we couldn't make any
judgements because we didn't have any facts on which
to make judgements.
During the winter of 1971, a
series of tests of emergency core cooling systems [using water] were performed at the AEC's
private testing site in Idaho. Accidents were simulated in a small model of a
reactor. In each case, the emergency systems worked, but the water failed to
fill the core. Often, it was forced out under pressure. Despite this, both the
industry and senior members of the AEC argued that the full-sized safety
systems were safe enough.
[Robert Pollard]
I think what happened was... the federal government
and the nuclear industry decided that the
absence of proof of danger was almost as good as
proof of safety. In other words, even though
we had done experiments that cast doubt on whether
the safety systems would actually work if
we had an accident, we still had that backup [of] "Well, maybe an accident
won't happen while
we continue to work to perfect the design of the
emergency system[s]."
Now, we couldn't announce to the public that we –
having told the public that the plants were
safe – [] now had to disclose to them [that] we were wrong and [that][] all these safety
systems
we told [them] about [] might not do any
good... my goodness, the uproar would've been... we all
probably would've been fired, there would've been the
end of this wonderful technology – from
[our] standpoint [] – and we just
couldn't... admit that we had been wrong; plus, of course, you
understand with this one experiment [that] it didn't prove the emergency
systems wouldn't work
in all circumstances.
28th March 1979,
Pennsylvania
On March 28, 1979, a series
of human and mechanical errors at the Three Mile Island plant exposed the core.
It reacted with steam and produced hydrogen, which exploded. None of the
emergency teams could understand what was going on inside the reactor. Then,
suddenly, this helicopter [from which (presumably) the footage onscreen was
shot] detected a large
radioactive cloud drifting towards the nearest town. The voices of the
commissioners in charge of the disaster were recorded by a dictaphone that had
been left running on a table.
[From the dictaphone recording (various voices)]
"...What was [?your time scale] involved there?"
"Hour." "Hour before what?" "Before we had
a core
melt." "Before you had a core melt?" "You... you would have
hours 'til when you were
generating
fission products in a core-melt kind of situation through the
containment..." "I think...
you know, we
got the best we got, Joe; and they're not coming up with answers – we got
the..."
"Well, don't you think as a precautionary
measure there should be some evacuation?"[long pause]
"Probably – but I must say it's operating
totally in the blind and I don't have any confidence at all
that if we
order [an] evacuation, we won't move people... [from?] a place where they've
already
gotten a
piece of the dose they were going to get into an area where they will get...
you know,
they will've
had point-five of what they were going to get and now they move someplace else
and get
one-point-oh..." "...Joe?" "Yes, sir." "I think [..?..] I've got to call the
Governor – " "Yes, sir,
I do think
you've got to talk to him immediately –" "to... do it immediately;
we're operating almost
totally in
the blind... [?this] information is [?ambiguous], mine is non-existent; I
don't know... [we're
like?] a couple of blind men... [..?..] stay around, make a decision here..."
"Don't we know that it's been stopped?"
"...just lost all communications with the control room..."
For four days, the engineers
at the plant watched helplessly as a bubble of hydrogen grew inside the damaged
reactor. What they feared most was a further massive explosion. But they knew
that if they tried to force the bubble out of the reactor, it might move
downwards and completely uncover the core. They would then face the
nightmare of a meltdown.
The engineers were trapped
by the consequences of an accident no-one could've anticipated. It was a point
they made to the commissioners again and again during the incident.
[Back (presumably) to the dictaphone recording]
"... this is a failure mode that's never been
studied; it just... it's unbelievable."
Dr. Victor Gilinsky, Nuclear Regulatory
Commissioner 1975–1984
Well, the thing that impressed me was... how little
we really knew about the situation. It was very
hard to figure out what was happening...
There was a lot of confusion on everyone's part –
both on the company's part and the government's
part – and [on the part of] a lot of other people who were participating;
and I think this had a very
strong effect on the public – basically, to see all
the men in the white [] lab coats, who are supposed
to know, on TV [] scratching their heads... I
mean, a lot of people wondered whether things were
as much under control as they had been told.
[From an American anti-nuclear power TV endorsement]
[Voiceover:] "Three Mile Island. The President's
Commission estimated the cost of the accident could
reach $1.8
billion. That's a lot of money to pay for a power plant that may never work
again.
"But Three Mile Island wasn't the first nuclear
accident and it won't be the last. In 1979 alone, there
were twenty
nuclear incidents that could've led to the catastrophic meltdown of an American
nuclear power
plant.
"Don't get sold on nuclear power. We can't pay
the price."
[Jane Fonda addressing the crowd at an anti-nuclear power rally in front of
the US Capitol building, September 1979]
"...their energy policy will benefit the nuclear
industry and the oil companies; and they've given
only lip
service to the solar industry..."
There were protests against
nuclear power throughout the world. In the public's imagination, it was
transformed from something good to something bad. Much of the anger was turned
on the nuclear scientists. It 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.
Dr. Alvin Weinberg, interviewed 1966
"We 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..."
Alvin Weinberg, Director, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
1955–1974
We recognised there was a risk, but we always deemed
the risk to be really [i.e. genuinely?] acceptable.
But now I guess I'm more mature – older... [and] I realise that the decision
[that it] was acceptable
is not something that we technologists can make; it's
something that the public makes.
[Adam Curtis, interviewing,
off-camera:] Why did you think it was something you could make then?
[Weinberg, after a long pause:] You know, I guess it never
occurred to me to... to ask this question.
The nuclear enterprise had always been... well, it
started out as a secret enterprise, of course; and
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 – it just didn't seem that that was
the right way to do it.
And I think the basic question is: "Can modern
intrusive technology and liberal democracy co-exist?"
[Voiceovered translation of what ultimately is revealed to be the playback
of a cassette tape]
"I keep in my safe records of the operators'
telephone conversations on the eve of the accident. It
makes one's
skin crawl to read them. One operator telephones another and asks: "The
program
here states
what must be done, but a lot has been crossed out..?" The other thinks for
a moment
and then
says: "Act according to what has been crossed out."
"In Kiev, we set off for the nuclear power
station. It didn't enter my head that we were moving
towards an
event on a planetary scale. On the following day, when I went into the ruins of
the
reactor in an
armoured troop carrier, I had that sense of anger that there were no solutions,
no
technical
remedies worked out in advance. Of course, we had said such an accident could
only
happen once
in a thousand years; but who said that this once would fall in our year
1986?"
Yurii Scherbak, Ukrainian journalist and MP [after switching off the tape playback; subtitled]
That was Valeri [sic] Legasov, one of the heroes
of Chernobyl. He suffered a strange and tragic fate.
I met him in autumn 1986.
Legasov had been one of the
main architects of Russia's nuclear programme. Now he led the fight at
Chernobyl,
repeatedly flying through
the radiation above the blazing reactor.
As with Three Mile Island,
an improbable sequence of errors had led to an explosion and a molten core that
had now started to burn its way through the foundations of the reactor. A
tunnel was frantically dug directly under the plant by hundreds of volunteers.
Liquid nitrogen was poured in to freeze the ground underneath. By luck,
the nitrogen gas also began
to stifle the graphite fire. And then, on the fifth day, for reasons that still
no-one
understands, the core began
to cool.
Despite this, [Legasov remained a staunch
defender of nuclear power][throughout the
disaster and the terrible dangers].
[From TV footage of Valeri Legasov and ?volunteers; translation provided by
voiceover]
Valeri Legasov, Deputy Director, Atomic Power Institute
"...
The maximum dose was 0.7 röntgens per hour; over the reactor, we got 0.3 and
0.5 röntgens..."
[Someone:] "Do you think we'll be able to have children?"
[Legasov:] "Yes; don't worry."
[Someone:] "Are you sure?"
[Legasov, laughing:] "I've been working with radioactivity since
1964 and I've got kids – don't worry!"
In the months that followed,
Legasov changed his mind. In a long taped interview with the then-Soviet MP
Yurii Scherbak, he gave a damning criticism of the whole nuclear power
programme. The problem, he said, was the demand that was made of the
technology.
[Yurii Scherbak (subtitled)]
I had an amazing conversation with Legasov. Suddenly
he began telling me, very openly, about
the agony he'd been through at Chernobyl.
Extracts [translated] from Scherbak's interview with Valerii [sic] Legasov
[Voiceover:] "It's easy to think or imagine that the
enemy is the nuclear reactor. But the enemy isn't
technology. I
have come to the paradoxical conclusion that technology must be protected from
man. In the
past – the time that included the old reactors; the time that ended with
Gagarin's
flight into
space – the technology was created by people who stood on the shoulders of
Tolstoy
and
Dostoyevsky. They were educated in this period of the great humanitarian ideas;
in this
period of a
beautiful and correct moral sense. They had a clear political idea of the new
society
they were
trying to create; one that would be the most advanced in the world. But already
in the
generations
that succeeded them, there were engineers who stood on their shoulders and saw
only the
technical side of things. But if someone is educated only in technical ideas,
they cannot
create
anything new, anything for which they are responsible.
"The operators of the reactor that night [thought] they were doing everything
well and correctly –
and they were
breaking the rules for the sake of doing it [trying to do it?] even better. But they had
lost sight of
the purpose; [of]what they were
doing it for."
Then, two years to the day
after the accident – and for unknown [unconfirmed?] reasons – Valeri Legasov committed suicide.
[An extract from the
Buchanan Brothers' 1946 country-music hit "Atomic Power" plays as
footage from the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster continues]
Joseph Morone, nuclear [science] historian
In the golden age of science – at the time when
society had its most optimistic view of science – it
basically had a wrong-headed view of science. It had
the view that... this form of the technology
[he is gesturing toward the reactor containment
building behind him] was the inevitable form that it had
to take; and that if that was the form it took, then
it must be the right form.
Forty years later, we have a similarly naïve view –
it's no longer tinged by hope and optimism; it's
tinged by pessimism and fear – but we still have this
view that society can't shape technology; that
that the form [] the technology takes is the form we must
accept. And, just as [this] wasn't true in
1950, it's not true today.
This is not a story of technology run amok, although
that's how many people understand it to be;
the history of nuclear power is a history of
political and economic and social decisions being made
about a technology – and the key decisions weren't
made by the technologists; they were [made] in
the [realm of] business []. What science and technology gives you is a
range of possibilities; and
those possibilities can take you in any number of directions.
It's potentially a liberating force; but,
to get there, society has to stop sleepwalking and
start realising that it's not a scientific choice, it's
not an engineering choice – it's a moral choice.
[Back to the 1950s
promotional film used at the start of the documentary; the father and son are
now inside and have just
finished watching a film via a movie projector]
[Father:] "Well, George, does
that answer your question?"
[Son:] "It sure does... [It's] given me a whole new perspective – "
