The day I was born, the evening paper had a big story on its front page. Our local aircraft factory was working on a nuclear-powered aircraft. No nuclear-powered aircraft ever appeared, of course, but no one doubted that such a thing would be possible. The story is symbolic of the innocent light in which atomic power was seen in those far-off 1950s days. The sheer technological hubris of the era was to the fore in Britain’s Nuclear Secrets: Inside Sellafield (10 August), presented by the reliable Jim Al-Khalili. Sellafield, in Cumbria, was built in 1950 to make plutonium so Britain could have an atomic bomb; only afterwards was a decision taken to use nuclear fission to generate power for electricity. And no one gave much thought, if any, to how the lethal waste from the nuclear fue