{"id":1131,"date":"2013-11-26T23:16:58","date_gmt":"2013-11-26T22:16:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/?p=1131"},"modified":"2025-06-16T18:38:13","modified_gmt":"2025-06-16T16:38:13","slug":"pandoras-promise-the-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/?p=1131","title":{"rendered":"Pandora&#8217;s Promise (The movie)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Yesterday<\/strong> I had the opportunity to watch a screening of the movie <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Pandora%27s_Promise\" target=\"_blank\">Pandora&#8217;s Promise<\/a> at Uppsala University. After the movie there was a panel debate including the director of the film, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Robert_Stone_%28director%29\" target=\"_blank\">Robert Stone<\/a>. Since there was a lot of noise around the movie on the internet I was looking forward to see the film for myself and build my own opinion.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Some<\/strong> general words about myself in advance: Yes, I have been in the field of solar cells now for more than 10 years. But apart from that I have never been anti-nuclear. Very often people associate people working with renewable energies with opponents to nuclear power, but being realistic we can currently only choose the lesser evil &#8211; and here I am convinced that the German government very hastily took the wrong route after the nuclear accident of Fukushima. <\/p>\n<p><strong>What<\/strong> is the movie about? The aim of the movie is to tell a story: mankind will not be able to maintain its current standard of living without an increasing utilization of nuclear power worldwide. In order to convey his message, Robert Stone follows the traces of the <em>environmentalists&#8217;<\/em> movement from the 1960&#8217;s to today. Especially he focuses on some converted environmentalists, which now support nuclear energy.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>He<\/strong> visits the sites of the two major nuclear catastrophies: <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Chernobyl_disaster\" target=\"_blank\">Chernobyl<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster\" target=\"_blank\">Fukushima<\/a>. At both places the current radiation levels are shown to be low with a handheld digital Geiger counter, held up in the air and then compared to major cities in the world.\n<p><strong>What<\/strong> do you expect to see here? In this configuration you could only detect large amounts of airborne radioactive particles or radioactive gases. But there are no larger amounts of these to expected in the first place. The danger is in the contamination of the soil, the water and the food, especially with highly active alpha-emitters. Apart from the fact that the used Geiger counter is not sensitive to alpha particles, you would not detect any some 1.50 meters (5 feet for the non-metric world) above the ground anyway.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Perhaps<\/strong> more indicative to the setting of the movie was the repeated quote that radiation units (Sievert, Rem and Becquerel) are confusing, and that interviewed people did not had any knowledge about natural sources and levels of radioactivity. At least in the 1980&#8217;s and even before the Chernobyl-accident this was general topic in German schools!\n<\/li>\n<li><strong>When<\/strong> it comes to experts, the movie is certainly undercritical. There are few facts presented and for me &#8211; who in the 1990&#8217;s took several courses on nuclear physics and nuclear energy at Kiel University &#8211; nothing new was presented.\n<p><strong>The<\/strong> expert of the movie was a former US nuclear scientists who briefly presented his work on the next generation of nuclear reactor, the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Integral_Fast_Reactor\" target=\"_blank\">Integral Fast Reactor, IFR.<\/a> This project was aiming to construct an intrinsically safe breeder reactor, able to use not only 238-U but almost all possible heavy isotopes contained e.g. in the waste of today&#8217;s nuclear reactors. <\/p>\n<p><strong>While<\/strong> the fuel cycle by physical principles cannot be a completely closed cycle as pictured in the movie, the utilization of the fuel would be orders of magnitude higher than in current technologies while both reducing the amount of nuclear waste and the risk of major catastrophic failures. Unlike <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Subcritical_reactor\" target=\"_blank\">transmutation reactors<\/a> the core will still need to be critical and maintain a chain reaction. However, the project was cancelled by the US congress in 1994.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The movie<\/strong>  legitimately shows the damage coal mining does to the landscape, by showing an open pit coal mine. Quite recently a documentary on the German tv channel ZDF dealt with the same issue, showing that Germany now imports coal from <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mountaintop_removal_mining\" target=\"_blank\">mountaintop removal mining<\/a> in the Appalachians.\n<p><strong>Where and how<\/strong> today&#8217;s uranium is mined on the other hand is not shown. In the following panel discussion Robert Stone also stated that solar cells would rely on <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Rare_earth_element\" target=\"_blank\">rare earth metals<\/a> &#8211; a point where I had to intervene.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The movie<\/strong> cycles back and forth between scenes of militant and almost religious nuclear opponents and the salvaged witnesses of the good of our friend the atom, mostly showing historical scenes from the enthusiastic times of the 1960&#8217;s on both sides. It also emphasizes the quite quick conversion of the French electricity supply from fossil fuels to nuclear during the 1980&#8217;s. It does not mention the recent safety issues particularly in the French reactors as discovered following the increased inspection after Fukushima.\n<p><strong>Robert Stone<\/strong> claims that France has the lowest electricity price in Europe and Germany the highest (because of large investments in renewables), however, France is only on place 7 in the European Union while Denmark traditionally has the highest price and this is not because of the quite recent investment in wind and solar.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Totally<\/strong> out of scope was the emphasis of the film that nuclear power is the only way to meet the increasing power need in the developing countries. Nuclear power by definition is based on centralized, large scale power plants which require an established infrastructure to distribute the electricity to the consumers.\n<p><strong>On the other hand<\/strong> renewable power generation by photovoltaics is completely scalable. A solar cell installation has the same efficiency, the same cost per power and the same cost per kWh, independent of size. And compared to running small generators on diesel or gasoline the electricity from solar cells is today actually the cheaper alternative &#8211; however, like hydropower and like nuclear power it needs a comparatively large investment at the beginning, but has little or no running costs.\n<\/li>\n<li><strong>Also<\/strong> doubtful is the message that saving energy and reducing the personal electricity consumption will not contribute to managing our energy future.\n<p><strong>While it is<\/strong> definitely true that mankind has always found and probably always find new ways to spend more and more energy, there has to be a wide impact on energy savings. I myself have since a long time replaced almost all light bulbs first with compact fluorescents and now with LEDs &#8211; there are only 2 incandescent bulbs left in my apartment, one is the light bulb inside my oven. Last year I also threw out my old fridge and freezer &#8211; and this action alone reduced my electricity bill by 1000 kWh a year, sorry Vattenfall, hello Samsung.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>The dramatic composition<\/strong> of the movie reminded me strongly of another US documentary, filmed during the oil crisis. And while we have to wait for the official release of Pandora&#8217;s Promise through iTunes, you can already enjoy these time pieces for free:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/WhentheC1975\" target=\"_blank\">When The Circuit Breaks<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/WhentheC1975_2\" target=\"_blank\">When The Circuit Breaks II<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Sadly enough<\/strong> the meaning of the panel debate was completely destroyed by focusing on uncontroversial and irrelevant topics and elaborate answers avoiding to answer the question, but rather re-citing a pre-formulated script. To bad, since the audience of enthusiastic and curious engineering and science students would have deserved better. After less than an hour of this staged display the time was up &#8211; but discussions continued outside of the lecture hall.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The two biggest problems<\/strong> which I see with the peaceful use of nuclear power are<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>The long-term commitment which nuclear power requires is not suited for the hands of companies oriented on short-term profit. And we are talking different orders of long term here: from the decades it takes to amortize the down payment of a new reactor or the research into new reactor technologies to the millennia we need to store the radioactive waste of today&#8217;s nuclear reactors.\n<p>Look at the development in Germany and you will notice that politics is not either capable of providing this long-term perspective. Political decisions are in most countries today based on 4-year election cycles &#8211; this is 16-times better than the quarterly cycles currently modern in the economical world, but still 2500-times to short.<\/li>\n<li>The discussion has to be demilitarized and be conducted on realistic and scientifically sound grounds. It also has to be globalized &#8211; and here I am not (only) referring to non-proliferation agreements, like currently with Iran.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align:center\">We\u2019ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science technology. <\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align:center\">And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align:center\">Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don\u2019t know anything about it?<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align:right\"><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Carl_sagan\" target=\"_blank\" >Carl Sagan<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday I had the opportunity to watch a screening of the movie Pandora&#8217;s Promise at Uppsala University. After the movie there was a panel debate including the director of the film, Robert Stone. Since there was a lot of noise around the movie on the internet I was looking forward to see the film for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[29,28,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media_en","category-politics_en","category-science_en","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p48grL-if","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1131"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2459,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1131\/revisions\/2459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}