‘Nuclear Review: Oliver Stones New Documentary Makes A Powerful Case For Nuclear Power
In the compelling and must-see documentary Nuclear Power, Oliver Stone presents a landmark and historic case of how nuclear power has fallen victim to the jigsaw puzzle of perception and reality. Nuclear power is considered dangerous: too dangerous to be a major part of our energy needs. The reality, says Stone, is that nuclear power is clean, plentiful and safe, and the dire reality of our energy crisis—the specter of climate change—is the promising but stable rise of renewables like wind and solar. Nuclear power is not an essential part of our most pressing energy needs.
These are two sides of the debate and because they have been formed for a long time, at first glance one may not see much potential for change. But this is where documentaries like Nuclear Energy come in. I think if you look at this film with an open mind, it might influence people's perceptions of nuclear power in the same way An Inconvenient Truth about climate change does.
For decades, anything to do with the word nuclear power was the initial fear. In the anti-nuclear resistance movement rooted in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it united all "nuclear" things: nuclear weapons and nuclear power. Everything is bad . This is why leftists make a ritual of mispronouncing the word "nuclear" for "nuclear" in the non-nuclear era. They're basically saying: Nuclear capability is built into this technology. Therefore, it should be considered as poison.
If you reject this idea, believers will repeat it as if it were an obvious mantra: "Really? You're crazy. Six words: Three Mile Island. Chernobyl, Fukushima. Fear of nuclear catastrophe is an ancient fear that undermines the enduring consensus of ideologies. anti-nuclear. Pro-Atom." Since the position is interpreted as an anti-nuclear position, it is not possible to have a reasonable discussion on this issue.
Few would say out loud that the fear of a nuclear catastrophe has been a myth for decades. For example, no one died in the Three Mile Island disaster (but the sudden release of the 1979 disaster film The China Syndrome helped raise awareness of the loss of life). Everything comes with risks, but the new generation of nuclear power plants has more structural safety measures than Three Mile Island, Chernobyl or Fukushima.
And for those who are tempted to view this argument as extreme wish-fulfillment, Stone invites us to find the power that goes along with it. namely: major sectors around the world. After leaving the United States, nuclear power presented a very different picture. It has been used for decades to power the economy of a bright Eurosocialist country like France, which now derives 70% of its energy from nuclear power. (Every French citizen produces, on average, a third of the carbon emissions of every United States citizen.) Even in the United States, things can change. Anti-nuclear stances have been the subject of conversation among liberal progressives for years, but now 60% of Americans say they support nuclear power. (Today, 20 percent of America's energy is generated by nuclear power.)
The issue of nuclear power, which can free us from our severe dependence on fossil fuels, is raised at the beginning of this film. A decade ago, major documentary filmmaker Robert Stone (Chasing the Moon, Oswald's Ghost) - nothing to do with Oliver - made Pandora's Promise, a more straightforward version of the Oliver Stone case. : Nuclear power has been unjustly hated and a growing number of environmentalists believe it will be our savior if we are to escape the slowly burning atmosphere of climate change. Pandora's Hope premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and I will never forget that conversation. I said how great the film was to me, and the reply was unavoidable, "But it only shows one side!" Do I really think? Is that your objection? For 30 years we have heard cases against nuclear power. Here's an 87 minute documentary about nuclear power. No one seemed to want to listen.
The same could happen with Stone's film Nuclear, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival a month ago and is still seeking distribution. But by Joshua S. Goldstein and Stefan A. This is how Stone, who made the film based on the book Bright Future by Quist (written by Stone and Goldstein and read by Stone), describes the historical background of nuclear power. I challenge you not to find anything significant.
Stone spoke of the atomic bomb, "the original sin of Hiroshima and Nagasaki," which, he said, was a "common victim." (We saw embarrassing pictures of public schools with ducks and animal shelters.) He explained: “I once believed that environmentalists were right and nuclear power was dangerous. We are very illiterate in our own way and have unwittingly equated nuclear war with nuclear power.
It's not always like that. In the 1950s, President Dwight D. Eisenhower planned to use nuclear power to generate massive amounts of electricity, and in 1953 he eagerly shared his vision with the United Nations. Eisenhower launched the Atoms for Peace program and appointed visionary US Navy Admiral Hyman Rickover. It was he who first came up with the idea of a nuclear-powered submarine to start a land-based nuclear power plant. (Construction year 1958.) The future will be completely electric! From the 1960s to the 1980s, 100 large reactors were built in the United States. France It opened its first nuclear power plant in 1964 and built 56 reactors between 1975 and 1990. Sweden and Canada have been part of this movement as these countries took major steps to phase out coal. Nuclear power is associated with the environmental movement and is supported by organizations such as the Sierra Club.
But the oil giants, dubbed the "Seven Sisters", are poised to go nuclear. "Nuclear" provides evidence that the Rockefeller family of investors Standard Oil promotes the false belief that even low levels of radiation are harmful to human health. Stone says it's an argument we agree with. He called it "pollution phobia" and said, "After all, we have created it on a planet full of uranium and surrounded by sunlight and cosmic rays." Our bodies are designed by nature and evolution to withstand low levels of radiation.
But this is not understanding. Nuclear power is said to be dangerous because the material from which uranium is based (pun intended) is inherently dangerous. If you want to talk about weird bed mates, consider this: The American oil companies were true partners in the anti-nuclear movement in the 1960s and 1970s, and they worked closely with the Greens to force change. Energy source comparable to fossil fuels.
But today, Stone suggests, for the first time since the 1950s, we can actually start a debate over new reasons relating to the hazardous environment of nuclear power and STFU. Simply put, this situation:
Want to talk about insecurity? Fossil fuels are dangerous . Not just as usual (they pollute, which is bad for you), but looking at them in a relatively new mainstream cultural way: the driver of climate change, the mother of all disasters, the mother of energy trends. It's killing the planet. This hinders future opportunities.
In general, it is more dangerous than nuclear power.
Related Idea: Our global demand for electricity will increase in the next few decades. Because three quarters of the world's population, who we call "poor", live in developing countries and need air conditioning, computers and other facilities from developed countries. How can this increasing demand for electricity be met without a greater increase in CO2 emissions? Add a wind turbine?
No one in Congress is against renewable energy except oil executives and Republican representatives. Definitely not Oliver Stone. Wind and solar energy will have an important place in the future. But again we hit the perception/reality wall. Since the era of non-nuclear weapons, the view that renewable energy, which is now a major growth industry, is a great organic way to produce energy to replace the dirty dangers of coal. That looks fantastic. The reality is that even at the current rate of growth, renewable energy will not be able to produce all the electricity our world will need for decades to come. We cannot rely on them to fill the gaps .
Stone points out that middle-class culture has become a matter of personal virtue in reducing one's carbon footprint: recycling, electric cars, using green appliances - these things want to improve. And... make a difference. But they don't. What they're doing is actually progressive fantasy (you could say it's good consumer culture). That's not to say that launching an electric car won't make a difference; of course. Stopping climate change is not enough.
Over the past decade, Oliver Stone has been making documentaries, whether he revisits the probing but grim portraits of Vladimir Putin and Fidel Castro or, more recently, the conspiracy thriller JFK: Through the Looking Glass. I've been a Stone fan at key moments (I think Natural Born Killers and Nixon are America's two greatest films), but I'm no conspiracy theorist. I think Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot JFK with three bullets from a Texas bookstore. But the gist, immersed in rock wit and truth-seeking, doesn't come from the feverish, dreamy politics associated with the director. His argument for nuclear power is sound, down to earth, journalistic. But don't take my word for it. If "Nuclear" gets a distributor, look for the film. This is demanding and must be seen.
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