Ahaie Tengwar Angulócello

Every so often, I see another media story about how a new kind of nuclear reactor that avoids all the horrible problems of the ones we have now is being studied, or a startup is looking to build one, or whatever. Don't be afraid of nuclear power, these articles proclaim, there is new, better technology that will resolve all the problems with the bad old reactors. The nuclear technologies I've seen mentioned like this make up a venn diagram of fast neutron reactors, molten salt reactors, and thorium reactors.

And these kinds of stories come from a mix of hucksterism and religion. Just as we have a religion of space enthusiasm (where solar power stations or helium 3 or whatever bullshit technology becomes the rallying cry for the religion's real goal, of having a city on the moon/Mars/in orbit, and having people permanently *Living in Space*), and the religion helps sustain huckster snake oil plutocrats who don't really care about space at all except as a way of siphoning off government subsidies and pumping up stock prices for their space technology companies -- so too we have a religion of Nuclear Power (it's the Future!), and nuclear power technology companies whose plutocrats have snake oil to sell. (PS: my data-free impression is that space enthusiasts vastly outnumber space hucksters, but for nuclear power, the ratio is much more even or perhaps reversed).

Some nuclear power advocates have at least half a leg to stand on (solar and wind are not 24/7/365 power sources, and nuclear power plants *are* a carbon-free way to provide round the clock power regardless of weather). But solar has become SO much cheaper than fossil fuel, let alone nuclear, that it leaves budgetary headroom for adding some kind of power storage to a solar farm and still being less expensive than the alternatives - and solar powered storage (like a lake that you pump full during the day and drain through hydroelectric generators at night) completely avoids all the regulatory and PR hassles of nuclear power.

Other nuclear advocates seem to Want to Believe in nuclear because they are right wing and regard solar as tainted by the leftist eco green conspiracy, or something? IDK.

But after encountering another "the new generation of (insert technical descriptor) nuclear power plants will completely avoid all the problems you've come to expect from nuclear power" article, I decided to try and figure out just how much truth there is to such articles. After picking away at the question for a while, I'm finally typing everything up so my time will not have been completely wasted. The rest of this post comes from reading far, far too many web pages (mostly on wikipedia but also elsewhere) devoted to nuclear power. ( Read more... )

Having read far too much and gone down far too many rabbit holes, I think I can say confidently that 90% of the claims in articles touting the bright future of new! improved! no longer dangerous or scary! nuclear power are hogwash. Things those articles tout nearly always involve making proliferation-enabling technologies routine (no one other than members of the Church of Nukes want this), assume that technologies still on the drawing board will work out as advertised (they never do), and/or gloss over many, many hard to solve problems. Meanwhile, right now, we already have the ability to just use renewables paired with energy storage. We soon won't need nuclear power anymore, yet somehow there are still scads of acolytes of the Nuclear Church who refuse to accept that their God has become irrelevant.

As best I can tell, there have been extremely few movies that show the actual apocalypse of nuclear war. The War Game, The Day After, and Threads appear to be it. I'm going to invent a genre here and call them movies of calamity, which combines bits of tragedy and terror on a huge scale. They aren't disaster movies because they don't provide the satisfaction of seeing the Worthy Protagonists survive and prevail while everyone unworthy perishes - instead everyone suffers, worthy and unworthy alike. They aren't horror movies because the terror component does not have the pleasing feeling of being a little bit frightened while knowing that you are actually perfectly safe. Instead they seek to make you feel quite unsafe.

And the lack of pleasure, the lack of feeling safe and smugly superior to the hapless victims on the screen, is probably why nobody has made more of them. The closest I could find were some thermonuclear tragedies: Testament and When the Wind Blows.

Testament (1983) ( Read more... )

"When the Wind Blows" (1986) ( Read more... )

Moving away from calamities and tragedies, another major genre in the realm of thermonuclear war movies are the war films - productions where the focus is on the decision by leaders and generals to push the button, and then on the officers and enlisted men who carry out their orders to drop the bomb. Hollywood of course has a natural tendency to sycophantically focus on establishment leaders and adopt their point of view, so most of these films are worthless exercises in fellating the Pentagon and the establishment (Hollywood has always had a hard on for the military). The biggest exception is of course Doctor Strangelove (1964), which I won't address directly, but there are two other movies in the same theme that I watched or tried to watch.

Fail Safe (1964) ( Read more... )

By Dawn's Early Light (1990) ( Read more... )

The single biggest genre of nuclear apocalypse movies is of course the post-apocalypse story. Atomic war is just a background plot point to explain why the world has become a lawless wasteland where might makes right and the survivors are in a constant Hobbesean struggle to not become the prey of bullies who have more guns than they do. Hollywood has always loved Westerns and these movies become excuses to produce yet another Western without going to the dried out well of the 1880's yet again. I checked out one and a half examples that made it onto lists of noteworthy nuclear apocalypse movies.

Panic in Year Zero! (1962) ( Read more... )

Panic in Year Zero only makes sense if you accept the premise of the filmmakers that the potential for disorder, chaos, rape and murder are always there just under the surface, and that the slightest disruption to daily life will cause most people to suddenly for no reason start acting like violent sociopaths.

Despite all the evidence that in real life disasters people act rather better towards each other than they do in ordinary times, and that the natural tendency of people and communities experiencing calamity is to come together and help one other, the meme that disaster causes people to start acting like sociopaths is one that will not die in Hollywood. Hollywood is nothing if not a tool of the establishment, and thus it projects the fears and paranoia of the wealthy (who spend a lot of time worrying that one day the poor will treat them as they have been treating the poor) upon the world.

Miracle Mile (1988)

Imagine that the script for a romantic comedy about an awkward nerdy boy who meets and falls in love with a nerdy girl had a collision on the subway with a script about a boy learning, accidentally, that an all out nuclear attack will be be launched against Russia, with the inevitable consequence of a counter attack, and the world as he knows it will therefore end in 90 minutes. As word of the impending attack spreads from one person to a half dozen to the entire city, chaos, panic, and disorder break out, hugely complicating the boy's attempts to reunite with his girl and wrangle transportation for them both out of town before the bombs drop. In the end, the young couple die within yards of the place they first met the day before when the bomb blast crashes their helicopter.

Yep, this is another "disaster strips away the thin veneer of civilization" movie, with the decent into chaos happening this time before the bombs drop instead or after. I watched the first twenty minutes and the last ten and did not feel I missed anything of real interest in doing so.

And finally, we have another really crappy movie that somehow got onto lists of important nuclear holocaust movies for God knows what reason:

Special Bulletin (1983)

A group of terrorists seize a boat in the harbour of Charleston, South Carolina. They have a nuclear bomb, which they threaten to detonate if their demands are not met. In the end, they are captured or killed, but the specialists brought in to disarm the bomb fail and it detonates, destroying the city. That simple synopsis leaves out two of the things that made the film aggressively unwatchable for me.

First, the pretence that the entire made for TV movie is found footage captured from the broadcasts of one of the TV networks as it airs special news updates about the crisis. Since the narrative would have been woefully incomplete without showing the story of the terrorists, the network strings a cable into the boat and there is the pretence that the terrorists allowed TV journalists to join them on the boat to interview them and be a fly on the wall while they made their demands. Which is utterly ludicrous on its face - all activists everywhere know that you don't allow the press unrestricted access to your if you want to control your narrative and get your message out the the world undistorted.

The second thing that makes this film not just a crappy forgettable made for TV movie but a feculent and disgusting piece of right wing propaganda is the identity of the terrorists -- they are nuclear disarmament activists who are demanding that the US government give them the arming triggers to the entire US nuclear arsenal stored at the naval base in Charleston. So in the bullshit world depicted in this film, the terrorists, who at the start of the movie are battling local law enforcement with automatic weapons, are pacifists and peaceniks. Which I guess is part and parcel of TV's long history (as the tool and lapdog of the centre-right establishment) of demonizing left wing activists. But still, the ludicrous nature of this particular slander is just too ridiculous for words and make the movie too fucking stupid to watch.