Hacker Cinema
Pandora's Promise
2013 · Film · documentary · 89 min
Directed by Robert Stone
The atomic bomb, the specter of a global nuclear holocaust, and disasters like Fukushima have made nuclear energy synonymous with the darkest nightmares of the modern world. But what if everyone has nuclear power wrong? What if people knew that there are reactors that are self-sustaining and fully controllable and ones that require no waste disposal? What if nuclear power is the only energy source that has the ability to stop climate change?
8 positive1 neutralfrom 9 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
Videos commenters linked
From YouTube links in the comments below. Most are clips and trailers; “Full” means the uploader says so.
12 comments on Hacker News
Some of them already have recanted their previous stance. That's a large part of the Pandora's Promise documentary (a Sundance film): former anti-nuclear activists who reversed their stance.
I believe this was discussed in the documentary "Pandora's Promise."
A great documentary about this is "Pandora's Promise". In it quite a few previous sustainable energy (wind, solar) advocates lay out the problem: sustainable has too far to catch up and in order to get the developing world to high quality of life they need high energy consumption per capita fast. Only solution to this is a safe version of nuclear.
If it bleeds, it leads. The press will always seek to sensationalize any rare events to gain clicks / views.
For this reason, people vastly outweigh the risks of nuclear meltdown, terrorist attack, plane crash, child abduction, etc. So people are easily swayed to oppose nuclear development by fossil-fuel lobbying.
Since the government must give approval for nuclear plants, their development becomes a political issue, replete with fear-mongering and NIMBYism.
You're citing facts and calling for a balance of risk / reward for energy production, which is noble and should convince the HN crowd. But the reality of nuclear power is that it's political, and facts and politics do not cross paths very often :-)
The way to change public opinion is through education, so I suggest every go and watch Pandora's Promise, which is an excellent documentary about nuclear power.
I had the same attitude. What changed my mind were two documentaries: 1) Pandora's promise 2) Thorium remix
The simplest argument is that we will only ever need more power, and nothing else can deliver. Burning shit is about as primitive as it gets, and that nets us a lot more power than wind or solar ever will. They're good supplemental power sources...but they will never meet our current needs, let alone what's right around the corner.
So...electric cars are growing now. You know how much power it takes to charge one of those suckers? The battery matrix in a Tesla can power the average household for a couple of days. These things are going to triple our power needs.
In the end: human potential is directly tied to our ability to harness energy and apply it. Fossil fuels enabled us to greatly reduce the need for human labor, but already we're limited by them. And clinging to them (or futilely pretending we can ever reduce our global energy needs) only hinders progress toward a better tomorrow.
Nuclear energy's "drawbacks" are incredibly overblown. Waste fuel is compact (weights sound impressive, but uranium and its isotopes are incredibly dense and take up very little space) and more importantly is wasted. Fuel shouldn't be wasted, it should be reprocessed with breeder reactors and reused. And if coal plants' waste was all contained in a convenient solid block instead of the atmosphere, we wouldn't even be discussing replacing it.
Anyway...if you want to see a good documentary on the subject, check out "Pandora's Promise." It's told from the perspective of several figures who were anti-nuclear activists before becoming "enlightened," so to speak and realizing they were mislead.
Some of the most important I can think of:
- Watch the documentary called "Pandora's Promise"
- Don't throw away aluminum or other metals if you can help it, and don't litter
- Support organizations and companies that are good members of society, at least as best as you can tell
- Encourage and persuade other people to care. Coercion is not going to work better in the long run because any scheme will eventually fall apart and at that time we will all be a lot better off if people have some kind of internal understanding of these values.
James Hansen is often considered pretty noisy and alarmist. He was one of the first to raise the issue, thinks we can't afford to go above 350ppm (we're at 400), and recently published a paper saying sea level rise could be much worse than generally expected.
In his book Storms of My Grandchildren he strongly advocates nuclear power, especially GenIV designs. In particular he talks about the Integral Fast Reactor.
Plenty of other prominent environmentalists are advocating nuclear these days; the documentary Pandora's Promise highlights several of them. And James Lovelock, who invented the "Gaia" concept, has advocated nuclear for years.
A growing number of environmentalists support nuclear. James Hansen, for example, advocates advanced nuclear in his book Storms of My Grandchildren. Several other very prominent environmentalists talk about their conversion to nuclear advocacy in the documentary Pandora's Promise.
And we could cut CO2 emissions from industrialized countries quite soon, with the right kind of nuclear power. ThorCon, for example, has a design for a molten salt reactor using existing technology, which could be built in modular form at a rate of 100GWe capacity per year by a single shipyard. It'd be safe, very proliferation resistant, six times more fuel-efficient than conventional reactors, and as cheap as natural gas. Their only problem is that the NRC won't let them do anything.
75% of U.S. coal plants are scheduled for retirement within the next decade. Air pollution from coal kills thousands of Americans per year, according to the American Lung Association. We have lots of shipyards. We have a historic opportunity here, if the government will get out of the way.
> Fukushima happened
Yes it did, and it finally pushed me over the edge into full support for a nuclear renaissance (I was leaning before). Let's recap what happened:
1. A Tsunami of unexpected size hit Japan, overwhelming sea walls and other technical infrastructure, and as a result killing somewhere between 15000 and 19000 people. Most drowned, but 165 died of fire.
2. One of the many pieces of technical infrastructure that was hit and wasn't able to cope was an old nuclear power plant with severe safety deficits.
3. Yet there have been zero casualties of the resulting meltdown (and future predicted casualties are somewhere between low and non-existent). That's despite the fact that Tepco and the authorities appeared to be woefully unprepared.
165 people died of fires resulting from the Tsunami, a number much, much larger then the casualties from the meltdown. Banning fire and flammable substances would be a saner response to the Tsunami than banning nuclear power.
Your source [1], the Wikipedia article on nuclear accidents is the most ringing endorsement of nuclear power I can think of. Did you have a look at the "fatalities" column? It reads 0 or 1 for all of the accidents except the one in Idaho falls, where the number is 3. Do you know what the death toll of other energy sources is? Forbes put together the statistics[2], and the results are staggering: even in the relatively safe USA, the death-rate per Trillion kWh for Coal is 15000. Worldwide it is 150000 and in China 280000. Nuclear is 90.
Again, the gap is so staggeringly huge as to beggar belief, but it tallies with other sources. Now I'd obviously prefer that number to be zero, but that option is not available on the menu, so I'd like the least bad option, and nothing else comes close (even solar and wind are higher).
In terms of waste, I just want to reiterate what others have stated: technically, it is a solved problem, the problems are purely political, because of an unreasonably scared populace and spineless populist politicians. Heck, ash from coal plants is more radioactive than nuclear waste[3][4].
Now there are problems, for example being stuck with a military reactor design that whose express purpose was to make bombs, whereas other designs are much, much safer and would burn waste[5], but those can be overcome and even with those problems it is a damn good option, so good that many thinking environmentalists have come around[6][7]. Alas in Germany everybody "knows" that nuclear is bad, so our Dear Leader decided to cave in to popular demand, no matter how brain-dead.
If you haven't seen it "Pandora's Promise"[8] is also really worthwhile.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor_accidents_in_the_United_States
[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/
[3] http://www.researchgate.net/post/Why_is_coal_ash_more_radioactive_than_nuclear_waste_and_what_is_the_exact_reason
[4] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor
[6] http://e360.yale.edu/feature/stewart_brands_strange_trip_whole_earth_to_nuclear_power/2227/
[7] http://archive.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2007/11/moore_qa
[8] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1992193/plotsummary
Pandora's Promise is a very interesting documentary about plain nuclear fission power, created by an environmentalist who decided to think for himself and investigate the power source that his movement hates.
The film highlights much of the misinformation campaign about fission, with particular emphasis on Chernobyl. I highly recommend watching, no matter the what you believe about nuclear power.
> "Cancel the funding of all nuclear power projects, like the ITER project"
This is so very sad indeed. Fusion and fission are entirely different technologies, and both show immense promise to meet the energy needs of the future.
Don't be so sure... In cinema's this year: Pandora's Promise: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fm8SVLOacQ