1979’s “The China Syndrome” helped wrongly form America’s image of nuclear energy for decades.s (IPC / Ronald Grant Archive / Mar)
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‘Nobody can look you in the eye and say you shouldn’t be worried” about nuclear energy, says British environmentalist author Mark Lynas in the new documentary “Pandora’s Promise,” which opens Friday.
Lynas is shown putting on a hazmat suit and visiting the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, where three nuclear reactors melted down completely in 2011 after being ravaged by an earthquake and a tsunami. A huge area was evacuated due to the fear of radiation poisoning and cancer.
“There’s no other energy source that can do this,” Lynas says, referring to the fallout. As his radiation detector beeps madly, he says, “I would say I’m having a wobble.”
Who wouldn’t? Nuclear energy isn’t like coal or gas or oil or even wind turbines or solar panels. It’s complicated. To most of us, it’s opaque. And from the lonely bald man in Sector 7G on “The Simpsons” to “The China Syndrome,” the no-nukes movement and many environmental groups, the anti-nuke camp blasts us with the notion that nuclear power plants are going to give us cancer, poison our water, create demon mutant fish and, every so often, melt down catastrophically as thousands, maybe millions, die or are seriously sickened. Most of us simply don’t follow nuclear power closely enough to have an informed opinion about it. So we let the culture do the work for us.
And the culture is unanimous: Nuclear power is scary.
But we love our iPhones, each one of which (when you account for the harvesting of the materials that went into it, its production, the servers that feed it, etc.) uses as much energy as a refrigerator. The rich world keeps consuming more energy, and hundreds of millions in Brazil, India and China are joining the global middle class. Worldwide, energy use is projected to triple, or perhaps quadruple, by the end of the century.
So we keep on burning more coal — not only the leading fuel on the planet but still the fastest-growing one.
New York City filmmaker Robert Stone, like the five experts who are the principal subjects of his documentary, began with the same impeccable environment-first attitude they did. Stone was nominated for an Oscar for his 1988 anti-nukes documentary “Radio Bikini,” about the dire consequences of American bomb testing on the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific.
Now Stone, who will be debating Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on nuclear power at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, NY, tomorrow night at 7:30, sheepishly admits that he confused what nuclear bombs do with what nuclear energy does. So many of our ideas about fallout and cancer rates are tied to the former, not the latter.
What the culture doesn’t tell you but “Pandora’s Promise” does is that:
* There is no way to produce energy that’s entirely safe.
* Worldwide, some 3 million people die each year from causes related to fossil-fuel use. The nuclear industry, which causes only a handful of deaths, is far less deadly than even the solar-panel business. The only energy source that is causing fewer annual deaths than nuclear power is wind.
* At Chernobyl, an extremely poorly designed facility made primarily for weapon fuel, hundreds of thousands participated in the cleanup after the 1986 disaster. Yet the UN, the WHO and other international organizations can tie only about 50 deaths directly to the disaster. Perhaps 4,000 lives will be shortened by cancer (a 3% increase) in an area where 5 million people were contaminated by the radiation. At the three neighboring reactors in the same building, people simply went back to work. Villagers returned to their homes nearby.
* All the nuclear waste generated in US history could fit in 10-foot-high barrels covering a single football field. Only about 1% of that material has a scary half-life.
* Next-generation nuclear reactors will be able use recycled nuclear waste for fuel, making nuclear power a renewable resource and massively reducing the amount of waste on Earth. These reactors can also be built so that there will be no danger of overheating.
* The widely advertised fallout disaster after Fukushima never happened. Zero deaths resulted from the plant explosion or the radiation leakage from the accident, though some died in the panicky evacuation of the area.
* Twenty percent of America’s energy is already nuclear. New Jersey and Connecticut get about half their energy from nukes. In Vermont, it’s 75%. In France, 80%.
Stone’s film is very much structured as a sequel to “An Inconvenient Truth,” complete with images of hurricanes and an overheating planet. But the idea that the entire world is going to sign up for a Kyoto-style treaty that massively cuts down on emissions, at a gargantuan price, is “a hallucinatory delusion,” says one environmental activist interviewed in the film, Michael Shellenberger.
But the anti-nuke camp is full of desperate dreamers like the absurd environmentalist Bill McKibben, who envisions turning back the clock on human progress in a world where health, quality of life and longevity are directly related to energy consumption.
He wrote in The Guardian: “We might decide that the human enterprise (at least in the West) has got big enough, that our appetites need not to grow, but to shrink a little, in order to provide us more margin. What would that mean? Buses and bikes and trains, not SUVs. Local food, with more people on the farm so that muscles replace some of the oil.”
Sorry, but only a few hippie hipsters want to raise their own chickens and pedal to work, and even they aren’t giving up their iToys. Meanwhile, the peasants of India and China want meat and electricity and cars and hospitals, in the tens of millions. A planet that uses less energy is not an option. And solar and wind, which bring their own well-documented problems (hello, transmission lines) cannot scale up quickly enough to meet the challenge. “I’m honestly quite angry at others who were propagating that myth,” Shellenberger says in the film.
Yet the most obvious zero-emission solution is already here.
Stone’s interviewees are serious people who have thought about these problems and changed their minds about nuclear power. They include, in addition to the highly regarded Brit blogger Mark Lynas, liberal Democrat author Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer-garlanded author of “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”; Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and a kind of Abraham Lincoln of the Age of Aquarius; author Gwyneth Cravens, who worked at The New Yorker and Harper’s, and Shellenberger, a green crusader labeled a “hero of the environment” by Time magazine.
All five, after much consideration and weighing of the facts, decided that nuclear is the future.
“I’m against nukes,” says Brand. “But what I’ve been thinking all this time, and what my friends have been thinking all this time, is wrong.” Adds Shellenberger, who allows that the culture made him biased against nuclear power, “You start to wonder: What was I thinking?”
Around the time of the Three Mile Island accident and the coinciding release of the anti-nuclear Jane Fonda-Michael Douglas film “The China Syndrome,” irrational fear of nuclear power became a frenzy.
“We will see more Harrisburgs,” Fonda is seen screaming at a no-nukes rally around that time. “We will see more leaks. We will see an increase of the cancer epidemic.”
In fact, the Harrisburg Three Mile Island mishap, a contained partial meltdown, killed no one, and the American Journal of Epidemiology concluded there was no increase in radiation-linked cancer in the six years following the 1979 “disaster,” which history will more properly label an “incident.”
Stone has great fun explaining, with a Geiger counter in hand, that nature generates background radiation that is all around you at all times. The release of radiation at Three Mile Island was so small that, in the worst-affected neighboring areas, the dose was only about a third of the natural radiation Americans receive.
After the Fukushima meltdown, where the amount of radiation released into the air was about one-fifth that of Chernobyl, George Monbiot, another environmental writer with a huge following, pointed out in The Guardian: “A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.”
“Atomic energy,” Monbiot continues, “has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.”
Casual observers, though, think: “Fukushima! Yet another reason to fear nukes!” Even though sifting through the facts produces the opposite reaction.
The Indian Point nuclear plant 30 miles north of Manhattan is facing the strong possibility of being closed down by Gov. Cuomo, who has also extended the now 5-year-old moratorium on harvesting relatively clean natural gas by fracking.
Both of these moves, of course, would have been lustily supported by a Manchurian Candidate whose real purpose was to increase coal usage in the Empire State. Cuomo isn’t going to prevent New York from continuing to consume more energy, and today New York City is about 25% powered by Indian Point nukes. (Do you glow in the dark? Does your goldfish have two heads?)
Germany, which has vowed to ditch nuclear power in an irrational post-Fukushima panic, has massively ramped up its solar usage (to about 5% of the country’s power) but is building huge coal plants to make up the difference. Germany already emits double the greenhouse gases per capita as its clean-fuel neighbor, France.
So France is swearing to cut back massively on nuclear power, too. And the coal industry smiles.
“A madness is taking hold,” Lynas wrote in The Guardian. “More people die each day from coal pollution than have been killed by nuclear power in 50 years of operation, and that is even before factoring in the impact on global warming.”
If there’s one idea in today’s energy discussion that’s head-in-the-sand reactionary, morally obtuse and anti-science, it’s the anti-nuclear position. May “Pandora’s Promise” explode the myths and unleash a mushroom cloud of facts.
Kyle.Smith@nypost.com