“Pandora’s Promise” is a film that addresses the debate about nuclear power. The film shows how many environmentalists agree with the idea that nuclear power is safe, and that it does not contribute to global warming. Originally, nuclear power was met with a lot of opposition; people considered it controversial and unsafe. The film also addresses that we need to find ways to continue to power our civilization without continuously destroying it, which we can do via the use of nuclear power. Currently, we are powering our civilization with other methods of energy (fossil fuels), but we are increasing global warming which is destroying our planet.

The film talks of how disasters in the past have made nuclear energy a scary idea; for instance, the development of the atomic bomb and what it did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear plant disasters such as Chernobyl in Ukraine, Fukushima in Japan, and Three Mile Island is new York. The nuclear accidents of Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island all happened due to inadequate cooling.

Pandora’s Promise states that even though this form of energy is somewhat feared, it could help us save our planet from dying, and it could also help underdeveloped countries become more developed and industrialized; in doing so, many countries who are severely impoverished could rise out of poverty due to a rise in electricity being supplied to those countries.

The interesting thing about this film, is that it highlights the dramatic shift in opinion of the environmentalists. One of the biggest issues with nuclear energy is that it can contaminate areas with radiation, making them uninhabitable; we can see this with Fukushima, and it was also what happened in Chernobyl. Chernobyl is also used as an example of civilization coming back to the area after it had been contaminated by radiation. Many people have lived for years since, and they are fine. The individuals who have died there did not die due to radiation, but other causes. Children born in Chernobyl through parents who live there were not found to have any birth defects.

Nuclear energy was started form the atomic bomb; the fact that this form of energy originated from a bomb is partly what contributed to people feeling negatively about it. People began to attribute nuclear energy simply to nuclear weapons, forgetting that it can be used for much more than making weapons. Michael Shellenberger states that many people originally believed nuclear power to be “sinister”. The reality is that nuclear energy is the cleanest form of energy we currently have. Many of the tactics used to make it seem like nuclear energy was bad were placed by oil companies; such as newspaper ads highlighting the dangers and trying to rally people to stop them from building the nuclear power plants. People realize now that those ads were paid for by oil companies, because those companies knew that nuclear energy could put them out of business.

Reactors now are being built with the capability to shut themselves down automatically, meaning they cannot meltdown/explode. The United States has been buying nuclear weapons from Russia for years, taking those weapons and turning them in to nuclear power/energy. Nuclear energy is doing more to rid the world of nuclear weapons than it is to create them. Rather than blowing us up, nuclear energy is lighting our cities. I think we need to focus more on shifting our ways of getting electricity to using nuclear power. The scientific facts clearly show that it can reduce the impact we have made on the planet by using fossil fuels, and we can even help get electricity for areas that may have never had it before.