Pandora's Box, subtitled A Fable From the Age of Science, is a six part 1992 BBC documentary television series written and produced by Adam Curtis, which examines the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism.
The episodes deal, in order, with communism in The Soviet Union, systems analysis and game theory during the Cold War, economy in the United Kingdom during the 1970s, the insecticide DDT, Kwame Nkrumah's leadership in Ghana during the 1950s and 1960s and the history of nuclear power.
The series was awarded a BAFTA in the category of "Best Factual Series" in 1993.
A Is for Atom
The final episode was named after a 1953 General Electric propaganda film that explained nuclear power and features artfully chosen footage from this film. The episode is an insight into the history of nuclear power. In the 1950s scientists and politicians thought they could create a different world with a limitless source of nuclear energy. But things began to go wrong. Scientists in America and the Soviet Union were duped into building dozens of potentially dangerous plants. For business reasons, General Electric and Westinghouse decided that the types sold would be versions based on the reactors used in nuclear submarines, but sold with dubious claims made about their cost effectiveness and safety.
However, in 1964, at AEC it was found that while small reactors were safe, the bigger core sizes as used in power plants were potentially susceptible to China syndrome - an accident where the reactor core could melt through the bottom of the reactor containment vessel. A study showed that this could potentially happen, and if it did it would cause very large damages. These concerns were largely kept from the public. The episode goes into some detail over attempts to find solutions for the China Syndrome issue.
In the Soviet Union, reactors were considered too expensive until Brezhnev came to power. Under his reign, Anatoly Petrovich Alexandrov designed cheap reactors that were produced at high speed, with very few safety features, sometimes not even containment vessels. This was publicly criticised by experts, but the experts were sidelined.
In Britain, by 1974, delays of its native advanced gas cooled reactor powerplant caused Britain to adopt the American PWR design of reactors.
However, in America it was being discovered that safety systems that had to work to avoid meltdown could not be guaranteed to work reliably in the complex circumstances in a nuclear reactor. Tests run on the emergency core cooling systems to deal with pipe breaks, performed on AECs test models in Idaho in 1971, repeatedly failed; often the water was forced out of the core under pressure. It was discovered that the theoretical calculations had no correspondence with reality. Nevertheless, they had not necessarily proved that they wouldn't work on a real reactor, so they decided to carry on with mandated safety systems, that the best evidence suggested, may well not function in the event of an accident.
Engineers and scientists and regulators that tried to publicise the potential issues found that their concerns were not published, and these issues remained largely unknown to the public, and nuclear power had a high degree of confidence with the public.
Then came the disasters of Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986 which changed public views on the safety of this new technology. It revealed that the industry had hid the problems and unpredictable nature of these types of reactors, and that they had imposed risks on the public, without consultation.
The documentary ends with the points that the forms of the reactors were chosen only for business reasons. There are very broad range of scientific and engineering options which were not explored. Therefore, perhaps nuclear power should be led by public decisions and redeveloped, but from a more morality-centred point of view.
