Pandora's Promise

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1992193/

In the spring term of AP Environmental Science class, energy is a big part of our discussion. The movie, Pandora's Promise, delivered a comprehensive understanding and study of the newest yet most unpredictable of all energy sources, the nuclear energy. The movie discusses the development and the future of nuclear energy as well as introducing the possible downfalls that people have fear in this new type of power.

Pandora’s Promise opens by presenting thousands of environmentalists marching through the streets holding their signs protesting against the usage of Nuclear Energy. “There’s no compromise in the defense of mother Earth.” is the motto of their action. Which raises the question of safety issues surrounded nuclear energy.

This documentary featured several pro-nuclear scientists and activities, who demonstrate their view on the topic and the reason why they believe nuclear power is the solution to the world's energy crisis. Many of those people have once been an antinuclearist before, however, new developments and information changed their minds, “whenever you change your mind drastically, you start to wonder what you were thinking”. This film, even though titled as 'Pandora's Promise', focused on shifting the common misconception of the safety of nuclear energy and making more and more people become the supporters of this new, powerful, and mysterious energy source.

The common misconception of nuclear power often relates to the fact that nuclear power is such a dominating factor in military warfare. People's fears come from the atomic bombs which have completely wiped out a city during world war two, as well as some nuclear leakage, happened throughout the history of nuclear power that ruined a city for decades. People see nuclear power as a “window into an Armageddon”. The word "Nuclear" was made to be feared by people. One activist in the film explains how his childhood is related to the fear of nuclear and how this could block blind people from seeing the benefit of nuclear energy.

The public generally chose to ignore the good and positive things and pay a lot of attention to issues and negative results. When few of the nuclear energy sites have failures, it swings the public opinion completely. For example, the airplane, what people do not realize is the fact that only couple planes have crushed per year yet there are thousands of millions of airplanes flying every single day. Also, the advertisement from the antinuclearism also contributes to creating a fearful image for nuclear energy in people's mind.

The movie progresses to discuss the world's energy crisis and the topic of energy as a whole. The movie claims that energy equals life quality, and by the year of 2100, the world's energy need will be triple the need we have right now. This explained the need for a new powerful energy source that can meet those demands in order for us to continue human practices.

Coal is the most common resources of energy. The movie exhibits the safety issues of this type of energy source, "fossil fuel combustion leads to over 3,000,000 deaths each year through air pollution”. The movie proposed the solution to the world's energy crisis: Nuclear energy. Nuclear power, behind wind power, is the second safest way of producing energy. The common misconception of nuclear radiation often leads to cancer is that human is exposed to radiation all the time. One kind of radiation is called background radiation and people are all exposed to it all the time and nothing bad would follow up from that. The difficulty is that the public opinion is very hard to swing, once they have a conception of radiation, they rarely do any more research before settling down in their minds.

Nuclear waste is the last topic in this film. There are 70,000 tons of accumulated nuclear waste being stored in dry casks in parking lots and storage lots. The waste can be used in the future as a recycled source of energy; despite the common belief,  nuclear power is actually a renewable resource. The problem of getting support for the nuclear energy project is the public misconception of nuclear energy and mass production of nuclear power does mean that people are privy to nuclear weaponry, which in many people's point of view is a huge threat to their lives.

In general, the movie discusses the origin of nuclear energy and the problem it faces right now is not technological issues but rather the human factor. Public opinion is the string that is pulling the energy production backward. The misconception of the dangerous nature of nuclear power restrained our progress to more potential energy.

This movie confirmed many of my conception regarding nuclear power and also correct some misconception of my own. I always believe that with proper method, technology, and funding, nuclear energy is the best way to be the main source of energy. Sustainable development will not be happening if our society still heavily depend on fossil fuel related energy. Nuclear power is green and productive, it is also controllable despite the contradicting beliefs. With the increasing demand for energy all over the world, previous energy generating methods are getting outdated, they can no longer meet the world's demand. Therefore nuclear power is one of the solutions to the world's energy crisis, however, it still needs to be taken care of very precisely. Any incident can possibly lead to detrimental results.