SeekerBlog

Impact of Pandora’s Promise. Here’s Rod:

I recently saw an exceptional commentary about Pandora’s Promise from a man who asked to be identified as ‘an angel working in the clean-safe-nuclear field’. He gave me permission to share this.

By the way, this movie Pandora’s Promise shows the path of prominent Green leaders towards the pro-nuclear position.

It is likely to be influential among people who respect these leaders. And useful to nuclear power advocates, green or otherwise.

(…) The point I would make, that the movie fails to make strongly enough, is that what we really need is leadership.

We need an Eisenhower or John F. Kennedy to set the goal of clean safe cheap energy technology within 5 years, and appoint young engineers and scientists to accomplish it.

(…) 

Leadership — exactly right. The US President is in the best position, and actually has the power to make this happen. E.g., to build the IFR through to utility scale pilot (that’s the easy part). More important, he has the power to bring together the US+EU+UK to work with China, India etc. to ramp up mass production of clean nuclear fast enough to really slash the amount of GHG from the coal plants that will otherwise be built. It just needs vision and political will. Sounds like “hope and change” to me.

Not surprisingly, Robert Stone does a wonderful job of describing how he arrived at Pandora’s Promise:

What if everything you thought you knew about nuclear power is wrong? This is the realization that came to several prominent environmentalists featured in my new movie Pandora’s Promise, premiering today at the Sundance Film Festival.

For decades the standard mantra of the environmental movement has been that nuclear power is evil and dangerous. The stars of my film, all prominent green campaigners including Whole Earth Catalogue founder Stewart Brand, Breakthrough Institute co-director Michael Shellenberger and UK environmental writer Mark Lynas, all used to believe this.

Like myself, they changed their minds largely because the climate is changing. Global warming today is real and increasingly threatening our way of life and our future. As Mark Lynas showed in his book Six Degrees, unless we drastically curb greenhouse gas emissions within a decade, temperatures will likely climb within this century to levels not seen on Earth for 50 million years. This threat challenges us all to get out of our comfort zones and reconsider our opinions.

Given that nuclear power does not produce greenhouse gases, and given the world will need to triple its energy production by 2050, it only makes sense to give nuclear energy a second look. But in the course of making this film and interviewing nuclear experts I came to understand that most of the things I once believed about nuclear were simply flat-out wrong.

I never knew that we’ve already developed a new generation of nuclear reactors that are physically incapable of suffering a meltdown, are fueled by the waste from the existing generation of nuclear power plants and are of a far less complex modular design. I call this Nuclear 2.0 because it solves our fuel supply problems — turns out we have enough stockpiled already to run the US for centuries.

I never knew that all of the long-lived radioactive waste produced by all 440 nuclear power plants around the world could fit into an average sized 7-11. Compare that to the waste produced by other industries, like the electronics industry, which deals in heavy metals which remain toxic forever and for which 75 percent of the millions of tons of waste is left unaccounted for.

I never knew that the official UN/World Health Organization certified death toll from Chernobyl (the worst imaginable nuclear disaster) stands at 56, rather than the million deaths propagated by many anti-nuclear groups. Moreover, there is no evidence that anyone was ever born deformed because of Chernobyl. In fact the scientists are now clear that the worst impacts of the disaster came because of the psychological trauma caused by excessive fear of radiation, not radiation itself.

The environmental campaigners who star in Pandora’s Promise have all spoken out about the need for nuclear in order to provide clean power — and all have come under attack for their views. As director, my position on this issue has been particularly puzzling to many people who know my work, especially as my first-ever film was the Oscar-nominated Radio Bikini, telling the story of how U.S. nuclear bomb tests destroyed the lives of Pacific Islanders and U.S. servicemen.

Actually, I am as committed as I ever was to a world without nuclear weapons. Indeed, advanced nuclear reactors are the only way we know of to dispose of the world’s stockpile of weapons-grade plutonium. We can literally turn swords into ploughshares by recycling these weapons, along with todays stockpile of nuclear waste, into clean, carbon-free electricity.

Most anti-nuclear people I have spoken to have an unshakeable belief that we can solve climate change entirely with renewable power. This is another myth — at the moment wind and solar provide less than 2 percent of global electricity, and to imagine we can scale this up to 100 percent in a couple of decades is science fiction. In no way is this an anti-renewables message, however — I believe that we need all the tools we can get our hands on and all of us in the film are strong proponents of wind and solar power.

Making this film has really shaken my beliefs — but in a good way. I no longer believe that we are necessarily doomed to an unpleasant future where human civilization is threatened by warming and overpopulation. We actually have enough energy to eliminate poverty and provide better lives for the 9.5 billion people who will be alive in 2050.

But I now realise we cannot do this without nuclear power. And I hope that after watching Pandora’s Promise, other people like me who care about the future will be open-minded enough to change their minds like I have done.

I wish we could vote at Sundance!

Tim Wu at Slate has another excellent review of Pandora’s Promise: If You Care About the Environment, You Should Support Nuclear Power. Snippets: 

A good, politically charged documentary often seizes on what the audience already believes and throws fuel on the fire (see, e.g., the work of Michael Moore). A better such documentary tries to convince its audience that what it takes for granted is flat-out wrong. Pandora’s Promise, which premiered at Sundance, does just that. It makes the utterly convincing case that anyone who considers themselves an environmentalist or takes climate change seriously should favor more nuclear power.

In the 1980s, nuclear power, never truly popular, contracted an image problem to rival Lance Armstrong or even Penn State football. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were so downright terrifying that the public immediately lost its appetite for the stuff. Invisible, cancerous, deadly: Radioactivity hits all of our deepest fears. Hiroshima, Fukushima, Silkwood—the words themselves seem to poison the air.

But our fears may be way out of proportion to the actual risks, Pandora’s Promise says. Truth is, no one has actually died in the United States as a consequence of a nuclear power accident, while coal kills more than 14,000 people a year (mainly through particulate pollution). In terms of worldwide mortality rates, nuclear is scary, but it kills fewer people per watt of power than coal, oil, and even solar. (People fall off rooftops when installing solar panels.) Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accident in history, though it killed many people at the time, has had surprisingly limited long-term effects, according to scientists. Perhaps, like many people, I picture Chernobyl as Hell on earth—but animals and people are actually living there again, and the radiation is at merely background levels.

It’s a question of alternatives. The film centers on a new breed of scientists and environmental activists who were once ardent foes of nuclear power, but now think there is no better option. Greens are all against fossil fuels, but the new breed think that pinning our our hopes entirely on wind and solar actually increases our dependence of such environmentally devastating energy sources. Everyone loves the idea that we could just install more efficient light bulbs and live off windmills and solar panels, but that’s a dangerous fantasy, one that makes us blind to the hard choices we face.

(…) 

Owen Gleiberman knows the typical Sundance slant — very left, very organic, very feel-good-policy preferences. It will be very interesting if Pandora’s Promise gets support in this crowd:

When was the last time you saw a documentary that fundamentally changed the way you think? It’s no secret that just about every political and socially-minded documentary shown at Sundance is preaching to the liberal-left choir. The issue may be dairy farming, human rights abuses in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the marketing of AIDS drugs, or Occupy Wall Street (to list the topics of four festival docs this year), but the point of view is almost always conventionally “progressive” and orthodox. So when Robert Stone, who may be the most under-celebrated great documentary filmmaker in America (watch Oswald’s Ghost if you want to touch the elusive truth of the JFK assassination), arrived at Sundance this year with Pandora’s Promise, a look at the myths and realities of nuclear power, he was walking into the lion’s den. For this isn’t a movie that preaches to the choir. It’s a movie that says: “Stop thinking what you’ve been thinking, because if you don’t, you’re going to collude in wrecking the world.”Pandora’s Promise is built around what should be the real liberal agenda: looking at an issue not with orthodoxy, but with open eyes.

In Pandora’s Promise, Stone interviews a major swath of environmentalists, scientists, and energy planners, all of whom spent years being anti-nuclear power — and then, as they began to look at the evidence, changed their minds. The film begins with a deep examination of the psychology of the anti-nuclear view: how it took hold and became dogma. It goes all the way back to 1945, of course, and the horror of the atomic bomb. From that moment, really, the very word nuclear was tainted. It meant something that was going to kill you, in the form of lethal radiation that you can’t see. By the time of the “No Nukes” protests of the ’70s, to be “anti-nuclear” was to conflate nuclear weapons and nuclear power into a single category of scientific evil, a point of view whipped up, over the years, into a doctrinaire frenzy of righteous fear and loathing by anti-nuclear activists like Dr. Helen Caldicott and reinforced by movies like The China Syndrome and even, in its benign satirical way, The Simpsons.

Stone, a lifelong environmental lefty himself, unravels that thinking. The film’s incredibly articulate — and deeply progressive — spokemen and women explain the nuts and bolts of why nuclear power, manufactured with the sophisticated breeder reactors that are available today, is fundamentally clean, efficient, and, yes, safe. As Richard Rhodes puts it in the movie: “To be anti-nuclear is basically to be in favor of burning fossil fuels.” Pandora’s Promise makes a powerful case that in an age when former Third World countries, striving for modernization, are beginning to consume energy in much vaster amounts (and why shouldn’t they have the right to do so?), none of the alternative energy sources that are commonly talked about by environmentalists (wind, solar, etc.) can begin to fill the planet’s energy needs. Only nuclear energy can. That’s why France, faced with its own energy crisis several decades ago, went nuclear. (Eighty percent of France’s energy is now generated by nuclear power plants.)

Ah, you say, but what about Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima? The ultimate issue raised by nuclear power — the one that, according to conventional progressive thinking, stops the pro-nuclear argument right in its tracks — is, of course, the issue of safety. And the very names of those three locales cast a dark mythological shadow. You hear them and think: Meltdown. Radiation poisoning.Death. Disaster. But this is where, as a society, we desperately need more filmmakers like Robert Stone. Carefully, piece by piece, without hysteria and without dogma, he looks at the evidence of what actually happened during those three infamous catastrophes: the reality of the damage, and the reality of the aftermath. The results, if you truly listen to them, are almost spectacularly counterintuitive. They won’t leave you shaken. They will begin to shake you out of your old tired ways of thinking.

The most startling argument mounted by Pandora’s Promise is that the rise of nuclear power is not merely a good thing, but probably inevitable, because it is, in fact, the only way that we can power the planet and save it at the same time. In what has to be the ultimate liberal-documentary irony, Stone demonstrates that the dire threat of global warming all but demands nuclear power as the key to its solution. Without it, the debate will go on, but carbon dioxide will continue to fill the atmosphere, and liberals everywhere, caught up in reflexive modes of environmental “activism” that are now not just complacent but perilously out-of-date, will continue to let their anxieties trump reality.