meltdown of an American nuclear powerplant. "Don't get sold on nuclear power. We can't paythe price."[Jane Fonda addressing the crowd at an anti-nuclear power rally in front ofthe US Capitol building, September 1979] "...their energy policy will benefit the nuclearindustry and the oil companies; and they've given only lipservice to the solar industry..."There were protests againstnuclear power throughout the world. In the public's imagination, it wastransformed from something good to something bad. Much of the anger was turnedon the nuclear scientists. It emerged that they had deliberately concealed manyof the risks and uncertainties they had discovered at the very time when theywere publicly promoting the wonders of nuclear power.Dr. Alvin Weinberg, interviewed 1966 "We would, in effect, have solved the energy problemforever permanently which, in itself, is just anextraordinary new dimension in human experience; to have energy, which is theultimate rawmaterial..."Alvin Weinberg, Director, Oak Ridge National Laboratory19551974 We recognised there was a risk, but we always deemedthe 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'ssomething 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 neveroccurred to me to... to ask this question. The nuclear enterprise had always been... well, itstarted out as a secret enterprise, of course; and the notion of the public being intimately involved invery complicated technical issues issues which went way beyond the competence of any member of thepublic it just didn't seem that that was the right way to do it. And I think the basic question is: "Can modernintrusive technology and liberal democracy co-exist?"[Voiceovered translation of what ultimately is revealed to be the playbackof a cassette tape] "I keep in my safe records of the operators'telephone conversations on the eve of the accident. It makes one'sskin crawl to read them. One operator telephones another and asks: "Theprogram here stateswhat must be done, but a lot has been crossed out..?" The other thinks fora moment and thensays: "Act according to what has been crossed out." "In Kiev, we set off for the nuclear powerstation. It didn't enter my head that we were moving towards anevent on a planetary scale. On the following day, when I went into the ruins ofthe reactor in anarmoured troop carrier, I had that sense of anger that there were no solutions,no technicalremedies worked out in advance. Of course, we had said such an accident couldonly happen oncein a thousand years; but who said that this once would fall in our year1986?"Yurii Scherbak, Ukrainian journalist and MP [after switching off the tape playback; subtitled] That was Valeri [sic] Legasov, one of the heroesof Chernobyl. He suffered a strange and tragic fate. I met him in autumn 1986.Legasov had been one of themain architects of Russia's nuclear programme. Now he led the fight atChernobyl, repeatedly flying throughthe radiation above the blazing reactor.As with Three Mile Island,an improbable sequence of errors had