Pandora's Promise

The nuclear industry is a death industry.

It's a cancer industry.

It's a bomb industry.

It's killing people and will for the rest of time.

Well, why doesn't President Obama know this?

He's an intelligent man. He's got 2 little girls he loves.

What the hell does he think he's up to, supporting the nuclear industry?

It's wicked.

Do you mind if I use the "F" word?

Can I use the "F" word?

We can get rid of all these fucking nuclear plants right away

because we can switch to solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, ocean thermal...

all that energy is available to do today.

We can shut all the nuclear plants

and all the coal, all the oil and all the gas plants.

We can shut them down.

We have the technology.

It's called "Solartopia."

As a life-long environmentalist, I'm against nuclear.

But what if what I have been thinking all this time

and what my friends have been thinking all this time, is wrong?

STEWART BRAND Founder and Editor of Whole Earth Catalogue

It's been interesting to see how people respond to

my pro-nuclear power position.

Because they respect me for my books about nuclear weapons,

they know that I'm a liberal Democrat and they are puzzled.

RICHARD RHODES Pulitzer Prize winner for "The Making of the Atomic Bomb"

I was against nuclear power.

All I had to say was Three Mile Island, Chernobyl,

atomic bombs, atomic weapons.

My mind was made up, definitely.

So I needed a lot of input.

The research I did, and the scientists I interviewed, and so on.

Going and visiting, and seeing for myself.

GWYNETH CRAVENS author, "Power to Save the World"

I was under no doubt

that my whole career and my whole reputation

as an environmental activist, communicator

was at risk if I talked publicly about

having changed my mind about nuclear power.

I'd have been much better if I had only just keep my mouth shut.

But I couldn't do that.

MARK LYNAS Environmental Activist

Whenever you change your mind so radically,

like those of us that have become pro-nuclear have changed our minds,

you start to wonder what you were thinking.

I mean, what exactly was going on?

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER - President and Co-founder, The Breakthrough Institute

You know, the more you peel that onion, the more strange things you've figured out.

...a top radiation issue in Tokyo...

from the nuclear power plant Ai at Fukushima Daiichi.

Now today, 4 of the 6 reactors there remain in states of danger.

A nuclear accident is one of the biggest media stories it's possible to have.

...reactor number 3, this is the one whose fuel contains a mix of plutonium...

In my first blog entry, within the first 2 or 3 days of it happening,

I didn't know what the scale of the radiation release was going to be,

I didn't know whether people were going to be injured.

The fact that this was happening live on TV and that there were explosions,

you know, this was a nuclear power station blowing up.

Clearly, this situation was out of control.

The Chief Cabinet Secretary has asked the residents of Tokyo

not to hoard bottled water.

So you have these awful images of total devastation from a tsunami,

and the story was a nuclear power accident.

It all got muddled together.

Some people on the West Coast of the United States worry

- that the radiation could travel 5,000 miles... - I hadn't been pro-nuclear all that long

before the Fukushima plant started to melt-down.

It's hard to watch that happening and not insert the question of

whether or not this is an energy source that is really safe.

Radioactive isotopes will likely reach California...

but experts say those levels are so low, they certainly fall within safe limits.

Now, a large network of radio monitors is keeping close tabs on all of this.

The long-term effects of all of this, obviously, still to be determined.

I thought: "I've got to keep my head, you know,

"I could really lose it here, and I could just panic."

JAPAN A year later

What do you think, Mark?

- I feel like a bit of an idiot, actually. - Why?

I don't know, because it's sort of...

I'm wearing radiation clothing.

It shouldn't be necessary.

SPECIAL SECURITY ZONE FUKUSHIMA POLICE DEPARTMENT

It must be absolutely awful to have your town wiped out by a tsunami

and earthquake, and you can't even come back and rebuild,

because the whole place is contaminated by radiation.

Even if it's not massively contaminated, it's contaminated enough

that it scares the shit out of you. And I think that's...

you know, nobody can look you in the eye and say: "You shouldn't be worried."

Um, you know, there's no other energy source that does this,

that leaves huge areas contaminated by this strange invisible presence

which, you know, is potentially deadly, you know.

Everything has it's drawbacks, everything has it's risks

but this is something that is unique to nuclear.

I guess I can understand why people are scared of nuclear power as a whole.

You know, it's um...

it's kind of eerie.

So, um, yeah, I would say I'm having a wobble.

I can see why we'd want to do without nuclear power, I really can.

FUTABA 2 kilometres from Fukushima Daiichi

This parking lot is the hottest spot in the whole exclusion zone.

This place got some serious fallout, I think.

So, are you still pro-nuclear?

Um, am I still pro-nuclear?

Ask me in a few days, when I've had a chance to get my head around it, alright?

Are you still pro-nuclear?

To start the chain reaction, all we need is one neutron.

I think you can see what is going to happen.

Watch.

My first introduction to nuclear power was quite nice.

It was a Disney movie called: "Our Friend the Atom".

The atom was going to bring about a wonderful revolution

in the way we got our energy.

And, there was a nuclear powered submarine called the Nautilus...

that went under the North Pole and us kids were really enthusiastic about that.

And then, when I was in my early teens, Admiral Rickover came to give a speech.

And, my dad knew I was interested in science, so he took me.

Watch the control rods come out.

As the control rods come out, the reactor starts.

And water starts encirculating through here.

He was a wonderful speaker and he was very inspiring

about American technology and about the future

and he talked about nuclear energy being used to light up cities,

not just run submarines.

So, it was a generally positive notion.

I got into the nuclear business in early 1948.

Prior to that I was working on engines for the Tucker automobile.

Everything we had done, up until that time, that produced energy

was by burning something.

The enticement in the nuclear business was the fact that it was a new

LEN KOCH Engineer and Nuclear Pioneer

source of energy, a new way to generate heat.

But the equivalence is huge.

One pound of uranium, which is the size of my fingertip,

if you could release all of the energy,

has the equivalent of about 5,000 barrels of oil.

And that, to me, is amazing.

I worked at Argonne National Laboratory, in Idaho.

Which really was the headquarters in the world for nuclear power at the time.

We were building this first in the world experimental breeder reactor.

EBR-I was an experiment just to prove that the concept made sense, scientifically.

Everything happened just like we expected it to.

The reactors went critical.

Critical means that you have enough uranium so that it generates heat.

All the reactor does is generate heat.

The end product is steam,

and then once you have steam, it's the same whether you generate the electricity

with oil, or coal, or gas, or... just as long as you have a source of heat.

So, we generated electricity and then we hooked-up 4 light bulbs.

And we lit the light bulbs from atomic energy.

December 20, 1951

Nobody else had done it before.

But the fact that the whole nuclear business,

atomic energy, was started for a bomb, and used as a bomb...

and I think that put the negative side on it.

SAN ANTONIO, NEW MEXICO July 16, 1945

I'm just old enough to have conscious memory of World War II,

and the ending of World War II.

MONUMENT AT TRINITY SITE White Sands, New Mexico First nuclear test site

Nuclear bombs were not just a weapon.

They were a little window into some kind of Armageddon.

The photographs and the films and the stories

that came out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...

those things cut pretty deep.

So, you had this very strong residue of

this is not primarily an energy source, this is primarily a weapon,

uh, that we feel very badly about.

And then the testing went on and on.

We're hearing about the radiation from strontium-90.

And then the Russians were doing tests.

Ah, the Chinese were doing tests.

And before it really slowed down,

there were over 2000 tests with nuclear weapons.

I grew up having nightmares that my home town was bombed into oblivion

and I was the only survivor.

Those kids were in school doing duck-and-cover routines under the desks

and the back yard fallout shelters and all that stuff,

made it all pretty personal.

I grew up in an anti-nuclear family.

You know, my parents were children of the '60s.

They were liberals and environmentalists.

To actually believe in nuclear power was, by definition to be a dupe.

Every step along the way, measures will be taken

to guarantee that our plant at Connecticut Yankee

contributes to the beneficial

and harmonious development of the Connecticut Valley.

The Haddam Neck site will be artfully landscaped

so that the buildings harmonize with its wooded background.

Plans even call for an information and educational centre

for those wishing to visit the Haddam Neck project.

I actually visited the nuclear power plant with my buddies in high school.

And we knew enough to have a very sarcastic attitude

toward the tour they gave us.

They would say: "It's this clean source of energy,

"it's really safe, it doesn't have anything to do with nuclear weapons."

And we would just laugh, we thought they were all "tools,"

stooges of the nuclear industry and its propaganda campaign.

Of course, that gets reinforced for people in my generation with The Simpsons.

Warning: problem in sector 7-G.

7-G? Good God, who's the safety inspector there?