On Saturday afternoon, the Tales From Planet Earth film festival screened a rough cut of Robb Moss and Peter Galison’s Containment, a documentary that argues for the pressing need to consider the long-term timelines of nuclear waste. “Long-term” is key, too. After all, the festival’s theme this year focused on “futures.” It’s all too fitting then that a subsequent film, Pandora’s Promise, takes a similarly far-sighted approach to nuclear energy, albeit a far more optimistic one.
As award-winning director (and UW-Madison alumnus) Robert Stone is quick to address, championing nuclear power plants comes with some cultural baggage — consider Homer Simpson’s bumbling workplace antics or anxieties borne out of The China Syndrome. Stone also anticipates the hesitant viewer with former nuclear skeptic “talking heads” interspersed with an overly hefty background of nuclear programs: nuclear science’s World War II origins in the 1940s; Cold War tensions in the 1950s; fears of impending meltdowns in the 1970s and -80s. Stone’s condensed history is a rich one, and the physicists and science writers he employs are his personal textbook’s polished hardcover.
Not all of Stone’s nuclear advocates are clearly credentialed, however. Journalist Gwyneth Cravens is featured prominently as a nuclear proponent, but Stone presents but a threadbare justification for why she (and several others) is qualified to talk on the subject in the first place. Having watched Stone’s documentary in such close proximity to the more prohibitory messages in Containment, it’s difficult not to second-guess the wholehearted endorsement in Pandora’s Promise. Can nuclear energy really be this good? One sequence in particular, featuring a globe-trotting Geiger counter, implies as much. Stone slyly juxtaposes radiation levels at the Fukushima site with those in well-populated cities, cities with seemingly far higher levels of radiation it would seem. This patchwork of Geiger counters that loom in the foreground of the Paris skyline or a Brazilian beach prove Stone to be a slick filmmaker — but it’s all just a little too cute.
Pandora’s Promise feels cherry-picked, and Stone is far too keen on trumpeting the nuclear option merely by process of elimination. Fossil fuels are bad. Coal emissions are really bad. Is “nuclear” the best option simply because it isn’t any of those other ones? To its credit, the film comes from a noble place. Nuclear energy curtails concerns of accelerating the “11th hour” state of climate change and doesn’t overtly contribute to already peak greenhouse gas levels. Tales’ screening was even prefaced with a survey on the audience’s understanding of global warming and energy limitations. A follow-up panel discussion revealed tensions around Pandora’s Promise‘s argument, with several pro-nuclear sentiments even finding vocal protest from those in attendance. After seeing the film myself, I feel fairly convinced of nuclear energy’s positive potential. Just don’t ask me why.