Nuclear Now opens with a quote from Marie Curie, “Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.” This sets an important tone for the first two thirds of the film.
Directed by Oliver Stone, Nuclear Now is a documentary about nuclear power which attempts to make a positive case for its use as a means to help combat climate change. The documentary is fairly comprehensive in terms of covering the pros and cons, and it builds convincing arguments as to why humanity needs nuclear power. It also has an original score by Vangelis! Viewers familiar with the science and history of nuclear power may not find a lot that’s new here, though. Still, it’s nice to see so much useful information presented persuasively in a single documentary.
Nuclear Now can be divided thematically into about five main parts: history, science, politics, climate change, and new technology. Starting off, we get some background on how nuclear power was developed for military submarines and aircraft carriers way back in the 1940s. In the U.S., the same person who led the effort to create nuclear power propulsion systems led the creation of the first major designs for civilian nuclear power plants.
By the 1970s, counter culture started to push back on nuclear power, despite its early promise of clean energy. Nuclear energy became erroneously conflated with nuclear war. The Three Mile Island accident happened in 1979, the same year the nuclear power disaster movie The China Syndrome hit theaters.
Nuclear Now then sets that aside and takes a broader view by delving into the science of nuclear power. The documentary explains where radioactivity comes from, what it really is, and doles out commonly known statistics about radiation in our daily lives. Things are somewhat simplified for the average viewer, but it’s still clearly assumed that the audience will be able to understand nuance.
We also get some economic and environmental justification for the use of nuclear power. For example, we learn that the electrical power output of a pinky’s worth of uranium fuel is equivalent to one ton of coal burned in a coal power plant. Nuclear Now also says that if all of the nuclear power plants in the world were somehow converted to coal, we’d end up releasing an additional two billion tons of carbon dioxide, and notes how coal power plants are statistically far more dangerous and deadlier than nuclear power, even when accidents are factored in.
The documentary refers to nuclear as a “proven source of energy” and a “natural energy source,” as it transitions from the science to the early hopes for nuclear power in the 1950s. We learn about President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace campaign, and how the Sierra Club and Ansel Adams initially embraced nuclear power as a clean, environmentally friendly source of power. Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, eventually reversed course and became pro-nuclear.
Unfortunately, Greenpeace, environmental organization Friends of the Earth (which Nuclear Now alleges was funded by oil companies), and the “seven sisters” (seven major oil companies) began lobbying against nuclear power as early as the 1950s. Their arguments ultimately revolved around scare tactics, like claiming that any amount or type of radiation was bad, which has never been supported by science.
Ralph Nader comes onto the scene in Ohio in the 1970s with an anti-nuclear agenda and manages to gain enough popular support to prevent as many as eight nuclear power plants from being built in the state, including one that was already “97% complete.” Nuclear Now points out that these power plants were replaced with coal power plants. This leads a bit more credence to the simplistic nuclear-replaced-by-coal statistics referenced earlier, especially when later in the film the outstanding problems of scaling battery technology for solar and wind power are explained. Phasing out nuclear in the short term means increasing our reliance on coal and natural gas through 2050.
Nader and activist Jane Fonda toured the U.S. on an anti-nuclear power agenda after the Three Mile Island accident, which is actually not known to have harmed anyone. The only two other nuclear power accidents that have ever occurred were those in Chernobyl and Fukushima, in 1986 and 2011, respectively. Nuclear Now reiterates that there have only ever been three nuclear power accidents, and of those three, only Chernobyl has caused documented harm to people or the environment. The documentary does a great job of not minimizing the scope of the Chernobyl accident and the harm it caused, while still making clear that it was caused by a combination of poor reactor design and poor leadership.
Similarly, the Fukushima accident could have been avoided with a better reactor facility design that took into account the possibility of truly catastrophic tsunamis. Still, at Fukushima there has been extensive research to determine if any harm has been caused to the local residents, and none has been found. I happened to be living in Seoul, South Korea, at the time of the Fukushima accident and I recall the extra precautions we took when it rained, in case radioactive material had somehow made it into the atmosphere. Later we learned this had not actually happened.
Interestingly, Nuclear Now doesn’t take this opportunity to discuss nuclear reactor building regulations in the U.S. or other countries. Nor does the documentary ever delve into the costs of building nuclear power plants or mining uranium, and it doesn’t compare the end-to-end carbon footprints of various power sources.
Instead, the last section of Nuclear Now before the closing summary is a fun but quick discussion of different contemporary reactor designs, from breeder reactors (which can reuse spent fuel), to Chinese designs, and finally the newest designs for advanced and ultra-safe reactors that are being tested in the U.S. This includes Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and Microreactors.
Interestingly, Nuclear Now also gives a brief outline of how nuclear power infrastructure could be augmented to desalinate/purify water efficiently and produce hydrogen. The hydrogen could be used as a source of stored power for vehicles and industrial uses where electricity may be less efficient.
AIPT Science is co-presented by AIPT and the New York City Skeptics.
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