great celebration. Then, in the late sixties, we began selling these bythe tens, so it became a real business.The plants were sold oftenbefore they had even been designed. The power company accepted on faith themanufacturer's claims that because the reactors were big, they would achieveeconomies of scale. These sales were then cited to the next buyer as proof ofthe soundness of the manufacturer's claims. In the process, the reactors becamebigger and bigger and it worked. The two corporations [Westinghouse andGE] sold dozens ofplants, 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'scommand. Man is building a brighter future for his children and his children's children in the new world of the Atomic Age ..."But senior nuclearscientists were worried about safety in these enormous plants. At the centre ofthe reactor was the uranium core. Its heat powered the generators. The coreswere now so large that if, for any reason, the flow of water to keep them coolwere lost, they would melt. The scientists feared that such a core would thenburn its way through the floor of the containment shell. In theory, there wouldbe nothing to stop it emerging on the other side of the world.They called it the "China syndrome".The doubters included AlvinWeinberg, the man who had designed the original submarine reactor.Alvin Weinberg, Director, Oak Ridge National Laboratory19551974 As long as the reactor was as small as the submarineintermediate 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-hundredmegawatt reactors and thousand megawatt reactors, you couldnot guarantee this because you could, in some very remote situation, conceive of thecontainment being breached by this molten mass... ...and that change, I would assert, occurred as aresult of this enormous economic pressure to make the reactors as large as possible.In 1964, a team ofscientists working for the [US] Atomic Energy Commission studied the possible consequences of a nuclearaccident. They concluded: "We have found in our present study nothinginherent in reactors, or in safeguard systems as they have now been developed,which guarantees either that major reactor accidents will not occur or thatprotective safeguard systems will not fail. Should such accidents occur, verylarge damages could result."[Alvin Weinberg] ... and that's when the nuclear dream began to fallapart.In 1965, scientists advisingthe [US] Atomic EnergyCommission tried to force the manufacturers to make their reactors safer.[From an unidentified (black-and-white) TV current affairs or news-styleprogramme] [Presenter:] "Good evening. Well, as I'm sure you'veheard, we're going to have an atomic power plant here inNew York. The Atomic Energy Commission has granted to Consolidated Edison permission tobuild a nuclear steam electric generating [sic] station at Indian Point inWestchester County."Westinghouse had alreadybuilt a small atomic plant at Indian Point. Now they applied to the AEC for alicence to build a giant reactor on the same site. At the same time, GeneralElectric proposed