The Nuclear Comeback (review)

In the face of climate change and the oil crisis, the nuclear industry proposes itself as a solution, claiming that nuclear power generation is cheap, with nil carbon emissions, while new plants are safer than older ones and future technological developments are certain to provide solutions for nuclear waste treatment and safe repository location. People are listening; the result is the opening of a global nuclear renaissance, with some tens of nuclear power stations under construction and more than a hundred expected to start within the next decade. Conversely, detractors explain that nuclear power is producing a 100,000-year legacy of radioactive waste, the power stations are primary terrorist targets and the industry has a reputation for accidents, cover-ups and links to nuclear weapons production—the so-called Siamese twin syndrome. Energy-making through nuclear power remains a controversial issue: It is impossible to outline completely its life-cycle assessment without considering a time span large enough to include thousands of (hoped for) upcoming human generations.

Therefore, a well-informed and open-minded documentary such as The Nuclear Comeback can be helpful, probably not in giving conclusive answers about nuclear power, but in correctly presenting its current revival. This movie consists of seven sections dealing with all the contentious aspects of nuclear energy: greenhouse gas reduction potential, economics, risks, accidents, waste management and comparison with renewable alternatives. A worldwide tour of the nuclear industry takes the audience from plants in Sweden and England to uranium mines in Australia and the debris of Chernobyl, offering a direct review of the state of the art in each sector.

Despite the claims of its advocates, the environmental and economic benefits of nuclear power never emerge convincingly. "We have become addicted to consuming huge amounts of fossil fuels," states Bruno Comby, founder of Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy; "this is why we have absolutely no choice, we need to turn to nuclear energy." "We're seeing nuclear, the n-world, is much more mentionable in high political places today than it was even two years ago," adds Ian Hore Lacy, public communications director of the World Nuclear Association; but the film presents a more complex scenario. The vision of the planet's most famous nuclear facilities, including Chernobyl, and the surrounding apparatus sustaining them (uranium ores, transportation and locations for nuclear waste) easily show the hidden costs and latent threats posed by this industry. The Calder Hall Power Station (Sellafield, U.K.) was the first commercial nuclear plant ever available. It closed in 2003, and decommission procedures are expected to last 120 years. Exhausted uranium and plutonium fuels are temporarily buried underground in empty salt mines or under the Baltic Sea, shielded by concrete or embedded in thick glass matrixes; but, we are warned, there is currently no permanent high-level nuclear-power waste repository operating anywhere in the world able to stock radioactive garbage safely enough to resist earthquakes, floods or other natural occurrences over the next 1,000 centuries. All these open questions make nuclear energy different from any other industry: "I am not entirely sure that it is appropriate to include nuclear power in the regular market economy," marks Lars-Olov Hoghrud, nuclear engineer at the Swedish plant Forsmark.

Throughout the video, the scenery portrays overcrowded urban traffic, night-time illumination in Western towns, and offices where both advocates and opponents of nuclear power explain their points of view surrounded by energy-consuming technological devices. Even when the discourse turns to renewable energy resources, the video shows large Aeolian and photovoltaic plants set on the Northern European seashore or in sunny areas of the African desert. It never questions the desire to run after such a huge amount of energy supply. It seems as if no other possibility exists for contemporary societies than a self-consistent gigantic cycle of energy production and consumption.

The nuclear power dilemma is not only for the rich world to decide, as its demand is most dramatic...