It’s exceedingly rare to watch a documentary that can actually change your mind about an issue. I would say that even documentaries that I love (most of them left-wing “issue” docs but some are about larger than life individuals or bizarre true-crime cases) aren’t giving me a world information that I didn’t have before.
So how exciting it is to watch “Pandora’s Promise,” the wonderfully counterintuitive doc that just might change your mind on the benefits of nuclear power. Most environmentalists (like myself) don’t like nuclear power out of fears that it’s unsafe or somehow dooming the planet to be even more toxic than it already is. What “Pandora’s Promise” does, beautifully, is lay out the case for nuclear power, and expose just how irrational the fear of it is.
I’ll say this: it got me to see that I was looking at something the wrong way. And I’m hard-pressed to remember a time Alabama Liberal has said that before.
The film exposes how it was really big oil—-not environmentalists—-who killed the nuclear power movement back in the 70’s since that was (and still is) the only viable competitor. [One of the many plot lines in Cloud Atlas dealt with this as well, but obviously this is a little more grounded in truth.]
And, less comfortably, it shows how wind and solar power may not be able to keep up with the demands of a third world ready to move into a first-world power grid: A little known fact is that wind power grids have natural gas back-ups that are used to power it during slow-wind periods.
It also debunks the myth of conservation, i.e. that we’ll all somehow be using less power in the future rather than more. The film suggests that if the developing world really begins to consume energy in the quantities that the first world does (and there’s no way that they won’t), then we’ll either be environmentally doomed by current standards or nuclear power will have to be utilized as the only real, clean-energy competitor to fossil fuels. [And yeah, the film doesn’t shy away from Fukishima, but it also shows exactly how that specific case…and how it can easily be prevented in the future.]
What can I say? I’m a sucker for an eye-opening documentary that can actually lay out a strong case. Watching this is like watching a top trial lawyer lay out exactly why his client isn’t the bad guy you think he is. After it, I thought maybe the dreaded “Nuclear Power Plants!” da-da-dummm might not be so bad after all.