Oliver Stone: How he stopped worrying and learned to love nuclear

Hollywood director Oliver Stone believes nuclear energy is safe. Period of time. Point. And the war in Ukraine has not changed his thinking. At a time when most scientists agree that we need to drastically reduce our use of fossil fuels to avoid permanent damage to our ecosystems, he’s all in. We need nuclear energy, says Stone. Nuclear now.

Nuclear Now is the name of his latest documentary. In it, he argues that the deadliest nuclear disaster — at the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, when it was part of the Soviet Union — pales in comparison to the day-to-day damage fossil fuels do to human health and the environment. base. He argues, based on research first published in the book A Bright Future, that nuclear power is crucial to meeting modern energy needs while reducing carbon emissions.

“Russia had the worst luck,” Stone said recently, referring to Chernobyl in an online briefing with the US Foreign Press Association. “America didn’t really have accidents. They have hysteria. We feel that hysteria has led to the closure of the industry.”

Yes, there was a partial reactor meltdown at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island that raised concerns in 1979, but his movie blames Hollywood and the fossil fuel industry for fueling exaggerated fears about nuclear power. Movies like Silkwood and the China Syndrome raised the specter of a doomsday scenario, while Dr. Strangelove of: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb highlighted the risks of unstable leaders with nuclear weapons. The Rockefeller Foundation, backed by oil money, promoted studies warning of the dangers of radioactivity without mentioning that it occurs naturally in our environment, Stone’s film claims.

Countries such as the United States, Germany and Japan have since moved away from nuclear energy. France and Sweden, on the other hand, have invested in nuclear energy – and Russia, Stone argues, has become a market leader, exporting its energy and its technology.

Stone lamented that the war in Ukraine and rising tensions between the US and Russia could further hinder the progress of nuclear energy and the fight against climate change. In the same week he addressed the Association of Foreign Correspondents in the US, the head of the International Atomic Energy Organization (IAEA) appeared before the United Nations Security Council, where he warned of the risks posed by the war to the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Enerhodar, Ukraine.

Europe’s largest nuclear power plant was taken by Russia shortly after it invaded the country. Ukrainian personnel continue to run the facility in what has been described as a tense situation. Amid signs that a long-awaited Ukrainian offensive is about to begin, IAEA chief Rafael Grossi described an increasingly dangerous and unpredictable situation at the plant. He called on both sides to agree to safety protocols — no shooting at or firing from the site, no weapons or troops stored there — to prevent a radiation leak at the facility.

The plant’s six reactors have been cold shut down since September, but there are still tens of thousands of kilograms of radioactive material at the site, which rely on an external power source to keep them from overheating, although there are generators on site for emergency use .

Stone dismissed the concerns as overblown, noting that the 2011 breach at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant killed no one, but that the earthquake and tsunami that triggered it left 18,000 dead. Isuru Seneviratne, executive director of Nuclear New York, a nuclear advocacy group, said chemical plants pose even greater risks to citizens.

“If Putin wanted to kill a large number of Ukrainians by attacking an industrial site, then there are many to choose from,” Seneviratne said in the briefing. “In fact, 14,000 people have already died in the war in Ukraine. The US nuclear industry rarely kills anyone, war almost always does.”

Stone acknowledged that the Soviet Union had initially lied about the Chernobyl accident, which killed 50 people and released 400 times more radiation than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. But he criticized Germany’s call for the European Union to penalize Russian nuclear power as “stupid” and counterproductive given the climate crisis, as well as Germany’s decision to shut down all its nuclear power plants.

“Their economy is in the s***,” Stone said. ‘It fell. The economy has completely collapsed and will fall even further.”

Stone believes the West should at least look to partnering with Russia and China on nuclear power as a way to remove climate-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere before it’s too late.

He himself worked in Russia. He had access to Chernobyl and Russian nuclear officials for the filming of Nuclear Now. In 2017 he interviewed President Vladimir Putin about the American dissident in exile Edward Snowden, about whom he made a thriller.

“You need to hear the other side,” Stone insisted. “You can’t just draw conclusions from the Western press.”

The idea that Russia and the US – let alone Ukraine – could constructively collaborate on anything may sound idealistic and a far cry from today’s reality, but Nuclear Now points to a time when US leaders advocated a similar approach . It shows US President Dwight D Eisenhower giving his 1953 Atoms for Peace speech to the United Nations, which led to the creation of the IAEA.

“It is not enough to take this weapon out of the hands of the soldiers,” Eisenhower said at the time. “It should be placed in the hands of those who know how to strip its military shell and adapt it to the arts of peace.”