Will "Pandora s Promise" Start A New Environmental Movement FOR Nuclear Power?

The last line in Pandora's Promise , Robert Stone's new documentary about the environmental advantages of nuclear power, comes from Michael Shellenberger, co-head of the Breakthrough Institute. "I have a sense that this is a beautiful thing, the beginning of a movement," he says. Provoking a new environmental movement in favor of nuclear power is a tall order, but a recent screening of Pandora's Promise suggests that it might play a part, for some intriguing reasons. Stone's film premiered at Sundance to positive reviews (Variety, Slate) and is scheduled for theatrical release this summer. It makes a convincing case for nuclear power as a carbon-free source of energy to reduce the harm of climate change in a world in which population is rising and the demand for electricity is soaring as the developing world develops. (For the record, I was already convinced; See Beware the Fear of Nuclear...FEAR) Nuclear power, Shellenberger says, can contribute to "...a world of seven to ten billion people, living resource-intensive high energy lives, without killing the climate." But beyond making a clear and compelling case, Pandora's Promise may persuade environmentalists to rethink their opposition to nuclear power because of the subliminal ways the film plays to the subconscious cognitive processes that shape our views about risk. Yes, it offers a lot of facts. (Too many, actually. The explanation for why we ended up with light water instead of breeder reactor technology is superfluous, as is the whole digression at the end about future reactor technologies, which hold a lot of potential but are a decade or more away.) But the reason those facts are likely to have persuasive impact is that the film hits a lot of the right emotional, instinctive, affective buttons that shape how people feel about risks such as nuclear power and climate change. One of the most powerful of those buttons is the influence of trust, and Stone is wise to use environmentalists as protagonists to make the environmental case. Each of the main speakers in the film establishes early on that, like all good members of the tribe, they were anti-nuclear too, at least at first, as if to say 'Trust me, I'm an environmentalist, like you'. "I grew up in an anti-nuke family. My parents were anti-nuclear. To us anybody who believed in nuclear power was by definition a dupe.", says Gwyneth Cravens, author of The Power to Save the World. Mark Lynas, author of The God Species, who helped organize radical environmentalist opposition to genetically modified food in Europe, says "We were against nuclear power. As an environmentalist, those two things go together." Stewart Brand, one of the original Merry Pranksters in the 60s and founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue, goes further, and notes how for the baby boom generation, the fear of nuclear power had little to do with the pros and cons of nuclear as a way to produce electricity. It grew directly out of fear of bombs, and fallout from atmospheric weapons testing, and cancer, all of which played key roles in the rise of the modern environmental movement. "Nuclear bombs were not just weapons. They were like Armageddon, the end of all we know," he says. "I grew up having nightmares that my home was bombed into oblivion." "There was Duck and Cover. It made it all pretty personal." Such confessions from the now pro-nuclear environmentalists in the film, that their own initial anti-nuke views were more the product of automatic enviro groupthink than informed independent analysis, and their acknowledgement that it felt scary to change their minds and go against the group - "I was at no doubt that my entire career as an activist was at risk if I went and talked (positively) about nuclear," Lynas - will likely challenge environmentalists in the audience to think for themselves, and not default to what the leaders of the tribe tell them to think, as people usually do. As in, Rachel Carson and Ralph Nader oppose nuclear power? Well then I do, too. Bill McKibben says stop the Keystone pipeline? Well then so do I. Stone also effectively undermines the trust in prominent anti-nuclear leaders, particularly Helen Caldicott. Calidcott tells a producer for the film that people who deny the science of climate change are "...idiots," adding " How dare they deny science." But the film accuses her of doing the same thing by denying the science regarding the death toll from Chernobyl. 20 years of research by the World Health Organization estimates the world's worst nuclear plant accident will cause a maximum of about 4,000 lifetime excess cancer deaths, but Caldicott claims Chernobyl may ultimately kill more than a million people. She is asked how she can she reconcile doing the same thing she says the 'idiot' deniers of climate change are doing? "I can not," she stumbles. (Surprisingly, Stone fails to go beyond the Chernobyl numbers and report what the study of survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has learned about how weak a carcinogen nuclear radiation actually is. Those grotesquely high exposures increased the lifetime cancer fatality risk by only half of one percent, and caused no multi-generational genetic damage, findings that shock and surprise most people, as they did me. This is the radiation biology on which the WHO Chernobyl estimates are based, and it's remarkable that such relevant information is missing from a documentary that advocates that we worry too much about nuclear radiation.) Beyond the matter of trust, Stone taps the psychology of risk perception in a number of other ways. He challenges the irrationality of worrying more about risks that are human-made than risks that are natural, mocking the anti-nuclear environmentalists protesting against the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant who are handing out bananas, a single one of which contains more radiation than the entire radioactive water emissions from the plant they were protesting about (radioactive potassium 40 is absorbed into the banana from the soil, see Banana Equivalent Dose. People are more worried by invisible undetectable risks, so Pandora's Promise visualizes and demystifies radiation by having Lynas display the readings on a hand held radiation detector in several locations - Tokyo, Paris, on a mountain top in New Hampshire, on a plane ride, at Chernobyl, outside trailers that evacuees are living in Fukushima where parents say they won't let their kids play outside for more than an hour a day - confirming how low the levels, and the risk, actually are. Environmentalist culture is part of a communitarian worldview that believes 'we are all in this together', and Rhodes appeals directly to that social conscience when he says, "Unless you want to condemn more than half the population of the earth to sickness and impoverished lives, we have to produce more electricity." And we worry more about risks to children than risk to adults, so to shift the fear nuclear power to the far greater environmental peril of climate change, Pandora's Promise shows Lynas - who admits it was 'scary as shit' to be in the deserted ghost town of Fukushima - playing with his children as he says "Having kids has deepened my commitment to the future and concern about global warming." This is all psychologically effective risk communication - the facts presented in ways that appeal to the emotional filters that shape our views of those facts. But there is no shortage of information. The film covers all the main issues about nuclear power. Shellenberger calls solar and wind 'a hallucinatory illusion' that can't supply nearly as much electricity as the world will need (and needs natural gas back-up for windless or cloudy days), as we see rows of huge windmills in California not turning. Cravens tells us that particulate pollution from fossil fuels kills 13,000 Americans a year, as we see a sequence of earth-gouging coal mining sure to upset any environmentalist. We are told that the volume of nuclear waste is small (graphics show how all of America's nuclear waste would fit on a football field a few feet deep) and can be safely stored (we're shown how such waste is currently stored in containers outdoors at many American nuclear power plants). Brand describes as 'poetic' the way decommissioned nuclear warheads from the U.S and Russia are being recycled into nuclear power that is lighting American cities, as we see glowing nighttime skylines. Anyone who knows the nuclear power issue will immediately recognize that all these arguments are one-sided and simplistic. Important caveats are missing. The biggest of these is Shellenberger's casual dismissal of the greatest obstacle of all to nuclear power, the billions it costs to build these plants, which can't be raised because they aren't close to cost-competitive (to build - they are competitive once they're operating, since they have low refueling costs) and without a price on carbon emissions or help from regulators, they probably won't be competitive for years. This misleading one-sidedness detracts from the film's credibility, and trust, and potential impact. But only a bit, because Pandora's Promise is not one of those documentaries that hides its point of view behind a pretense of being neutral and objective. It is open, earnest, unabashed advocacy, and it makes a makes a persuasive case, laced with images and emotional messages that will tap subconscious affective cues that influence our perceptions of risk. It may not change the minds of baby boomer environmentalists whose fear of anything nuclear grows from deep historic roots and whose self-identities are too tightly bound to the expected tribal opposition to nuclear power. But to younger viewers, and to any viewer with an open mind, Pandora's Promise may well play an important role in broadening the conversation about the huge pros as well as the better known cons of this important, if controversial, source of clean energy. (In the name of transparency, I have participated twice in the Breakthrough Institute's annual Breakthrough Dialogue, a two-day retreat that brings together experts and thinkers - not sure how I got invited - to ponder solutions to big problems. Shellenberger, Lynas, Brand, Cravens, and Stone, have been part of those conversations.) Follow Scientific American on Twitter @SciAm and @SciamBlogs. Visit ScientificAmerican.com for the latest in science, health and technology news.
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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/pandora-promise-start-environmental-movement-nuclear-power-160500207.html

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