Nuclear Now by Oliver Stone – putting nuclear energy back on the table – Physics World

Nuclear Now by Oliver Stone – putting nuclear energy back on the table – Physics World

Time Stamp: June 26, 2023 9:43 AM

Robert P Crease wonders what lessons we can learn from Oliver Stone’s “messianic” new documentary movie Nuclear Now

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Nuclear Now – the new documentary movie from Oliver Stone – has a messianic flavour. Global warming is an existential threat. Humanity has the right technology to save itself. Malevolent forces stand in the way. But with leadership, courage and reason we can prevail – provided we turn to nuclear power, that is. For Stone, nuclear power has gone from hero to zero and back again.

Nuclear Now is packed with vivid and dramatic images, including crumbling glaciers, violent explosions, smoke-filled cities and flooded urban areas

Nuclear power was born right after the Second World War with a sterling future. Cheap, reliable and compact, it could power anything, supporters claimed, and forestall looming disasters. Like all Stone’s movies, Nuclear Now is packed with dramatic images, including crumbling glaciers, violent explosions, smoke-filled cities and flooded urban areas. Archival clips illustrate naïve mid-20th century predictions of vibrant, fully electrified and utterly clean, nuclear-powered cities in the 21st century.

But by the 1970s, nuclear power was a pariah. Intimately associated with nuclear weapons, it was said to emit dangerous levels of radiation and have the potential for accidents. Seeming to confirm the latter was the 1979 meltdown of a reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania (even though little to no radiation was released) and the 1986 explosion at Chernobyl, which spread plumes of radiation over Western Europe. Opposition to nuclear power, Stone says in a voiceover, became “glamorous, virtuous and lucrative all at once”.

The movie gives us lurid scenes of skull and gas mask-clad protestors holding posters of skeletons carrying dead babies, of Jane Fonda addressing an anti-nuclear rock concert in morally superior language, and of officials celebrating the closing of a nuclear power plant while holding glasses of what looks to be champagne.

Still more terrifying, anti-nuclear activists made irresponsible claims that fossil fuel was “clean” or easily able to become so. In one split-second clip in the movie, a leading anti-nuclear activist shouts: “Coal or oil, anything but nuclear!” What’s so stomach-turning is not only the technical ignorance of the remark, but the fraudulent sense of moral superiority it expresses, as well as how confident many people were at the time of its truth.

No Oliver Stone movie would be complete without a conspiracy theory. Here it’s oil and coal companies promoting the idea that the low levels of radiation associated with nuclear power are dangerous

A monster then loomed. Climate change had been there all along: skies had been warming, glaciers melting and seas slowly rising for decades. Until the 1980s, few humans had regarded the beast as a serious threat. No longer. But the only force that was truly able to combat it – according to the movie – was largely regarded as a pariah, beset by a cultural hysteresis that associated it with bombs and meltdowns.

No Stone movie would be complete without a conspiracy theory. Here it’s the role of oil and coal companies in promoting the idea that the low levels of radiation associated with nuclear power are dangerous (even though they are far lower than background radiation and ordinary medical treatments) and that fossil-fuel industries had corrupted leading environmentalists who had once championed nuclear technology.

Striking interviews, chilling images and vivid analogies come fast and furious. Most are a few seconds long – of smog, floods and tidal waves, of atoms and galaxies, of helpless, oil-drenched birds at the beach, and of US Senator James Inhofe dismissively tossing a snowball in the halls of Congress in 2015 to supposedly refute the idea that the climate is warming. Let’s hope that these clips are powerful enough to dent or soften the rationalizing defences and psychological shields that stand in the way of seriously considering nuclear power.

The simple and blunt message of Nuclear Now is: “We go nuclear or we die!” Does the message hold up? It depends on five premises: that climate change is an existential threat; that it’s caused by fossil fuels sending carbon dioxide and other poisons into the atmosphere; that energy consumption cannot be sufficiently cut back; that no other energy technologies even in concert can meet the demand; and that the byproducts of nuclear technology are much less dangerous than recognized.

One of the most powerful images in the movie is a scene of a few children playing on a long railway bridge high above a river. Suddenly and unexpectedly, a speeding locomotive comes into view, bearing down on the terrified kids. To try to run from the bridge would be futile; according to the voiceover by Nuclear Now’s co-writer Joshua Goldstein, that would be like thinking that we can rely on renewables.

With the unstoppable train speeding towards them, the desperate kids instead do the only thing that can save them: leap off the bridge into the water below, which is like turning to nuclear technology. “The jump is scary,” says Goldstein, “but it’s the train that’s gonna kill you.” While the kids know enough to jump – we see them doing it – we haven’t yet made up our minds whether to do it ourselves.

My main objection to the film is that it says nothing about yet another reason for opposition to nuclear power – that radiation evokes powerful and deeply entrenched terrors, as the historian Spencer Weart detailed in his insightful 1988 book Nuclear Fear. It is those terrors that make the opposition to nuclear power so difficult to confront – and leads many people to deny the existence of the train, or to believe that ways can be found to outrun it.

The critical point

The time is long gone, Stone’s movie forces us to think, when humans could ponder and judge nuclear power from a smug and superior distance. In the 21st century, that’s a fraudulent, reckless and morally self-congratulatory exercise, a consequence-free application of abstract if popular values. The virtue of Nuclear Now is that it puts nuclear technology back on the table as a possible energy source.

At the end of the movie, we see brief clips of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. They aren’t there to comment on the technical merits of nuclear technology, of course. Stone brings them in to invoke the moral and political courage needed to use it. Inevitably, though, the last words of the movie go to Stephen Hawking, our age’s saintly symbol of successful technological struggle against adversity. “Overcome the odds. It can be done,” Hawking intones, “it can be done.”

At moments like this, Nuclear Now is way, way, way over the top. But then so is the crisis that we face.

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