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

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.

The good: It's good to see a film that advocates science and reason for the purpose of spreading an important message that is far overdue. I think the interviewees were well selected from pools of both scientific experts and relate-able, intelligent, concerned citizens who all present the overwhelming and long-known evidence for nuclear power's safety and use.

The bad: A 45-60 min version could have been equally informative. There's a lot of bad editing and poor documentary style, sometimes laughably so, and the narrative thread gets rather weak as it's stretched to meet minimum feature length. Many poor pro-nuclear arguments and some inflammatory material is thrown in the mix which diminishes film's documentary integrity.

I am an advocate of objectivity in public policy debates: Attacking the Nebula and breaking through the fog of misconceptions. I found Pandora's Promise an excellent film to re-ignite the dialog and cause people to re-examine their nuclear/anti-nuclear positions; hopefully with objectivity. The film will not likely convert one from an anti-nuclear bent to a pro-nuclear one—the topic is too complex and emotionally deep an issue and an hour and a half is too short a time for a real debate. But rather, the film should cause people to question the whether or not their beliefs are based on sound-bites or by evidence.

Environmentalists traditionally have been anti-nuclear particularly since nuclear pollution is such an emotionally frightening topic and not easy to put into context. It therefore is quite natural to believe that zero emissions is the right number. But as carbon dioxide, which was once considered a benign gas, enters into our public debate with greater concern and frequency, emissions of carbon dioxide, indeed any kind of emissions, become more and more relevant. This makes Pandora's Promise timely and relevant.

By presenting environmentalists who once were anti-nuclear but now see it a different way, and by interviewing some experts in the nuclear field, Robert Stone, takes us through a journey of discovery, as we see how some of the most common perceptions about nuclear power have little connection to solid reason. The overarching theme of the film is that when presented with facts and well-grounded research—i.e. objectivity—old anti-nuclear positions can be reversed.

As I watched the film, I made a few notes about some of the information presented and afterward spent a bit of time on the researching some of the points presented. Largely, I found good corroboration and am comfortable saying the film fairly addressed some of the many nuclear myths perpetuated over time.

While the film is largely balanced, it does succumb to the temptation of attacking an extreme position in making its case. A "60 Minutes"-type ambush of the vocal anti-nuke Helen Caldicott, making her look the fool is not debate. She is a side-show with unsupportable viewpoints. Attacking her only serves to make a nuclear advocate rejoice, but does little to inform a thinking anti-nuke. Another weakness in the film is a shallow and overly narrow handling of nuclear technology. The film dwells far too long on the integral fast reactor (IFR). The advantages and disadvantages of an IFR is in of itself a wide and broad topic which could take many hours and days to adequately explore. But there is no IFR in operation nor in construction today, so it seems quite odd when speaking about the merits of nuclear power, so much time was spent on a reactor design which is not part of the nuclear infrastructure.

So, while there is a great deal more to debate and discuss on the topic of nuclear power, Pandora's Promise presents a great case for a renewed debate, particularly amongst those interested in energy and global climate changes.

This film interviews several environmentalists and peace campaigners who have changed their mind on nuclear, and explores the reasons why they have changed their mind from "anti" to "pro". The film doesn't gloss over the disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima; some of the speakers visit these locations in person and acknowledge their unease in a thoughtful way, but they also press on and discuss quantitatively whether people have been poorly informed about the actual dangers. The film is a myth-buster, which gives the open-minded viewer the chance to compare polemics with facts that the viewer can verify. The film makers take a radiation dose meter around the world, showing on screen the readings in capital cities, inside a nuclear power station, in aeroplanes, on a beach in Brazil (to which people flock for its natural radiation), near Fukushima, and near Chernobyl. Viewers who like me love numbers are advised to take a sheet of paper and pen to note down the readings at the beach, near Fukushima, and near Chernobyl. No doubt the main response to this film will be a brawl between "pro" and "anti" people, most of whom have not seen the film. They all need to calm down and watch this film.

Some people compare this film with An Inconvenient Truth. I think Pandora's Promise is a better documentary.

Contrary to what other reviewers say, it is not "propaganda by the nuclear industry" - only a couple of the people involved in the film were ever employed by the nuclear industry; most of the people interviewed are genuinely independent thinkers, mainly environmentalists, with no hidden agenda, who have taken the trouble to look at facts and data, and who have been willing to imagine that their opinions might be wrong. This is a trait to be admired.

See the film, study the facts, then decide. (And, incidentally, I should say the film's photography is great!)