Pandora's Promise

As an Environmentalist, and someone who cares deeply about the fate of the planet, Pandora's Promise was a refreshing look at the reality of Nuclear Energy.

As a society, we face some tough choices. The traditional environmental movement opposes Nuclear Energy, instead favouring Solar, Wind and other renewables. Unfortunately they cost considerably more than burning fossil fuels, and no amount of technological advancement will change this - it's just way too cheap to dig up coal and chuck it in a furnace. And that's exactly what's happening the world over.

Over 1000 new coal plants are planned worldwide(1). Coal is a killer. Coal plants pump out far more radiation than nuclear power plants, due to the radioactive elements present in coal, which are released into the atmosphere by the burning. Particulates alone are responsible for over 13,000 deaths *per year* in the United States(2), and some estimates say over 100,000 deaths per year in China. This doesn't include coal mining accidents. Even the best coal mines in the US kill over 30 people per year(3). Coal mining killed over 6000 people in China alone in 2004 (3).

Coal is a *killer*. We need to stop burning it. It has killed far more people than nuclear power ever has, and this is something that a lot of people in Environmentalist movement just simply ignore.

Many Environmentalists claim to believe in science - certainly when conservatives deny climate change, environmentalists point to the science. Yet they bury their heads when it comes to Nuclear.

Nuclear Energy has killed *zero* people in the United States (4). There were no deaths after the accident at Three Mile Island, and zero deaths as a result of Fukushima (4). Chernobyl was a catastrophic accident and indeed did lead to many deaths, 56 (4) direct deaths and potentially as many as 4000 premature deaths due to cancer (4), but these figures pale into significance next to the figures on coal.

So how can the environmental movement be so opposed to nuclear? It just does not make sense.

I am in favour of Wind and Solar power, but the wind and the Sun don't provide power 24 hours a day. There are no economic storage methods. We need base load power. We need cheap energy.

So what can provide CO2 free, safe and cheap energy? Nuclear power can. It's a perfect ally of renewable power. Nuclear energy is a natural phenomena, it is responsible for 50% of the heat at the Earths core, without which the planet would be as dead as Mars - without a molten core, solar winds would strip the earth of it's protective outer layer.

Existing Nuclear has many problems, but these are solvable. Unfortunately in the 50s and 60s the world settled on Light Water Reactors. These use Water as a coolant. Because water boils at 100^C, too low a temperature for efficient power production, reactors have to keep the water under pressure to get temperatures high, effectively creating pressure cookers kept at 300 atmospheres. This leads to high cost, and any fault results in steam escaping. In Fukishima, when it lost coolant, the high temperatures disassociated the hydrogen and the oxygen, creating an explosive gas mixture at the top of the building which is what exploded, spreading radiation particles from the reactor core. It just does not make sense to use Water as a coolant.

Nor does it make sense to use solid fuels. All existing reactors use solid fuel, which results in incomplete burn up, approximately 1% of the fuel is used. This produces a large amount of spent fuel, which must either be reprocessed, or stored as waste.

There are solutions. In the 60s, at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, a radically different design was developed, called the Molten Salt reactor. Unfortunately Pandora's Promise didn't cover this at all, but this design solves almost all the problems with existing nuclear power.

In a Molten Salt reactor(6), rather than having solid fuel rods with high pressure water in a pressurised reactor container, you instead dissolve the nuclear fuel in a salt. Thanks to the salt being a liquid, the fuel circulates, allowing 99% of the fuel to be burned, producing just 1% of the waste of existing reactors. Because the salt is already molten, you can't suffer a "meltdown". If the reaction starts to go too fast and get too hot, the salts expand and the reaction slows down - it's inherently self regulating. A failsafe is to have a passively cooled drain tank attached to the reactor - a fan blows over the pipe between the reactor and the drain tank, freezing some of the salt in the tube. If the building loses all power, the fan stops, the plug melts, and the fuel drains into the tank. What's more, reactors of this type can be used to burn existing spent nuclear fuel.

So with an MSR, you have completely safe nuclear energy, vastly reduced waste, with a vastly simpler design. MSRs can also use Thorium as a fuel instead of Uranium, an element as abundant as Lead that's safe to hold in your hand and is produced as byproduct of mining, making it free - people will pay you to take it away.

I'd highly recommend people who care about the environment watch this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4

Not all nuclear power plants are equal. Nuclear Power is as far as I'm concerned, humanity's last hope to avoid catastrophic runaway climate change, and I'm desperately fearful that we won't embrace it. If we don't embrace it, the planet is doomed.

References:

1: http://goo.gl/DIksK

2: http://goo.gl/0g8kF

3: http://goo.gl/DOXyb

4: http://goo.gl/B17dt

5: http://goo.gl/i8Qc1

6: http://goo.gl/1LxQs

I had read one review that labeled this as a "mess" but I still wanted to watch it. After doing so, I found it to be very informative and I learned much more about nuclear energy than I have seen anywhere else. I have to believe that the reviewer who labeled it simply as a mess, could in fact be someone who is so against nuclear energy that they feel others should not see opposing viewpoints.

I thought it was very well compiled and the information and its accompanying documentation flowed smoothly. Yes, it may have a few segments that depicted some who disagree with the nuclear energy as being uninformed but, after watching the film, I have to agree.

It was interesting to see how some who were adamantly against this form of energy in the past, which includes a number of experts in that field, have changed their minds and are now in favor of it after researching the data.

I was also not aware of the different types of reactors and, how corners were cut to save money in just about every location where accidents have occurred with the remaining, being due to human error in that safety fail-safes were ignored, that could have prevented the accident as was the case in Three Mile Island.

Whether you are pro or against this form of energy, I would have to say that I highly recommend this film as one to include in your quest to be informed on the subject.

Plot

The atomic bomb and meltdowns like Fukushima have made nuclear power synonymous with global disaster. But what if we've got nuclear power wrong?

Cast

Made by Robert Stone, a totally unbias gentleman clearly who also did another similar documentary called Atomic Hope (2022).

Verdict

I becoming rather disillusioned when it comes to documentaries, I miss the days it was just a person doing a documentary film on a subject without bias nor agenda. Now the vast majority of documentaries feel forced, feel like propaganda, feel like they've been bought and paid for by an industry, feel politically motivated! I expected Pandora's Promise to feel the same but it doesn't, not exactly anyway.

Many people are saying this plays out like a commercial for nuclear energy and though I get the logic I'd disagree but it's far from unbiased.

You see it presents itself as featuring those who are pro-nuclear, those anti-nuclear and those on the fence. The trouble is, I don't believe it for a second. They're all pro-nuclear playing the role of people who need convincing that nuclear is good and their ridiculous one sided education is basically the entire documentary.

Does it address the criticisms? Yes, but it does it at such a gloriously skew angle it glosses over it and misdirects the viewer. The thing is amidst the misdirection are lies, and I don't appreciate this. When you resort to lies to get your point across, your point is lost entirely.

Pandora's Promise isn't a propaganda documentary, but it does have an agenda.

Rants

There are various accomplishments that governments and corporations have done involving swaying people into voting/fighting against their best interests such as convincing people in the US they don't want healthcare! That one always astounds me but what the fuel industry has done swaying people in favour of environmentally damaging options and making them hate environmentalists and valid alternatives is incredible!

The Good

Relatively well made

The Bad

Dishonest Agenda laden The dynamic of supposed anti-nuclear gone pro-nuclear is insulting.

Should awaken folks like my fellow Sierra Club members, NRDC & Greenpeace contributers, etc. to the folly of their organizations' uninformed, anti-nuclear stances.

The myths around radiation from nuclear plants are exposed clearly, as is the extreme variation in normal (background) radiation around the world, up in the air, etc. The director is innovative in how these facts are exposed to the viewer.

The movie also does an excellent job of deflating myths and downright lies about Chernobyl's effects, and the exploitation of that event by irresponsible people like Helen Caldicott who choose to spread fear and sell books rather than discuss the facts. The movie shows Ukrainians who never left their homes & church in the exclusion zone. To complement this, www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1Z5__IkaCs -- Chernobyl's radioactive wolves is an excellent documentary.

This film is much better than what people rank it. Not a surprise, as these reviewers are by far liberals who could not accept the message. I watched it on CNN. It was a very interesting film in many ways. I found most interesting the education of two of the old leading environmentalists. Who blatantly admit they were closed minded in their view of how energy production could be made feasibly. They slowly educated themselves to understand that wind and solar were not realistic options for producing the massive amount of energy that is needed globally and that it would be impossible for the globe to solve it's energy needs with just them. They admit feeling lied to and stupid for believing that wind and solar were going to solve the worlds problems. As someone who didn't need a video to state the obvious, I am left wondering how people can really believe those blatant lies. With out spoiling the doc and getting into specifics. This guy does a good job at taking a hard look at things. He does not say we should never use solar or wind. Simply it will never be enough and they use a natural gas when to keep the plants running when their is no wind or it's cloudy. And he's right. Nuclear is his better than the rest of the other options solution. As someone who personally thinks clean coal is a better option, I will say he makes a strong argument. My only, concern with his theory, is that he never talks about what to do with the spent fuel. These critics of the film are hell bent on 2 arguments. Conservation and solar. Conservation isn't put much into the video, but he clearly states in interviews that we will never conserve enough and we will always use more. Which studies and both common sense prove to be true. But he never address that fissile fuels can be made to burn cleaner. 1 thing he definitely got right. It's not just the US. The emerging world that is starting to use more and more energy is going to massively increase pollution. Which there is no fix. I am waiting for the day we start having the Chinese global debate for 1 child.