To many, debates over nuclear fission are a thing of the past, obscured by an ever-rotating wheel of issues, from income inequality to the erosion of our privacy. The Cold War is over. We have more important things to worry about. But as the environmental movement scrambles to deal with ever increasing and long looming problems, and countries are showing no signs of backing out of their nuclear programs, it’s a topic that’s worth bringing back to the table.
Two new works, vast in scope but different in focus, explore the current debates over nuclear energy, one by observing its past and the other by hazily predicting its future.
Although it believes its involved in demythologizing everything we know about nuclear energy, “Pandora’s Promise” is actually a standard advocacy documentary that frames its reactionary premise within a banal personal narrative. As the film proclaims, director Robert Stone, who made “Radio Bikini,” the Academy Award-nominated anti-nuclear weapons documentary in 1988, had a eureka moment: What if everything he learned in decades involved with the environmental movement was wrong? Forget about nuclear weapons proliferation; what if nuclear energy not only has positive uses, but is the answer to solving many of the world’s problems?
And for all we know, he may be right. Stone is not alone in struggling to turn the tide on nuclear energy and has amassed a team of supporters to fill in the blanks, including Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Rhodes (“The Making of the Atom Bomb”), environmentalist Stewart Brand, and others. But the film takes on the tone of gee-whiz bewilderment, using these strong voices not to begin a conversation with the audience, but to make you feel like you’re behind the curve because you’re own eureka moment hasn’t arrived. “Pandora’s Promise” lacks a strong argument, hoping that the popular and authoritative talking heads will be enough to convince the viewer that they need to buy what’s being sold.
It wouldn’t be so bad if the film just owned up to its completely biased approach to the topic. Instead, it takes on the view that it’s being objective by allowing the voice of the opposition to be heard. But in a film aimed to please, and where real arguments are hard to find, the filmmaker presents activists still engaged in an anti-nuclear stance as cartoonish buffoons. Show oppositional voices or not, engage with their arguments or ignore them, but to pretend you’re presenting an unbiased portrait while actually mocking those who disagree only foregrounds a lack of clear ideas.
On the other side of the spectrum is Rudolph Herzog’s “A Short History of Nuclear Folly,” recently published by Melville House. The writer, son of filmmaker Werner Herzog, is not afraid to put his biased view up front. The book, he says, displays “how people in the past approached a new technology with a nearly fatal mixture of frivolity, naivete, and unscrupulousness, and how they allowed economic and global-political interests to trump social and ecological reason.”
While “Pandora’s Promise” engages in a black-and-white, good or bad scenario, Herzog’s book is a more nuanced, if comical, presentation of nuclear’s complicated history, like “Dr. Strangelove” happening behind closed doors. The book moves from the Hollywood production of “The Conqueror,” a ridiculous film starring John Wayne as Genghis Kahn and shot in Snow Canyon, where the dust blown in from nuclear tests may have possibly killed The Duke and eight other members of the cast and crew, to irresponsible handling of nuclear medical technology in Brazil, with a lot of bumbling scientists in between.
What both works refuse to engage, in different ways, is the moral argument. “Pandora’s Promise” promises that what they’re telling is the truth. But what if it isn’t? What are the consequences of buying into a nuclear plan that may not work? Fukushima was only two years ago — are we ready for that again? “Nuclear Folly” completely skims over many of the major events of nuclear catastrophe — Fukushima, Hiroshima, Chernobyl — because, it seems, they don’t necessarily fit nicely into Herzog’s narrative. The fallout is too tragic.
The debate will rage on, even if behind closed doors. It’s not clear if either of these works will make a dent in the public consciousness and spark a conversation over the future of nuclear fission, or if the questions they pose can ever be answered. It’s a double-edged sword. Or as Gernot Zippe, whose work developing centrifuges increased the risk of nuclear proliferation, told the BBC in 2008: “With a kitchen knife you can peel a potato or kill your neighbor.”