Alt-nuclear documentary "Pandora's Promise" to premiere at Sundance

[wtmusic]

"The recent reactor meltdowns in Japan have ignited passionate worldwide debate about energy and the future of nuclear power. PANDORA’S PROMISE is a feature-length documentary that explores how and why mankind’s most feared and controversial technological discovery is now passionately embraced by many of those who once led the charge against it. The film is anchored around the personal narratives of a growing number of leading former anti-nuclear activists and pioneering scientists who, in the face of considerable controversy, are directly challenging the anti-nuclear orthodoxy that is a founding tenet of the mainstream environmental movement. Their stories and ideas will be brought to life through a combination of incredible archival footage from 1945 to the present and original filming across the globe.

Operating as history, cultural meditation and contemporary exploration, PANDORA’S PROMISE aims to inspire a serious and realistic debate over what is without question the most important question of our time: how do we continue to power modern civilization without destroying it?

CAST: Stewart Brand, Gwyneth Cravens, Mark Lynas, Michael Shellenberger, Richard Rhodes, Charles Till, and Len Koch."

http://robertstoneproductions.com/pandoras-promise/

[Farmer Fowweather]

1. A million times better

With apologies to all for whom the cow is indeed sacred, or dead meat is an abomination, i assert that there are two metaphorical "sacred cows" that should now be dead meat.

The first is the widespread belief that the private sector is better than the government at everything. We have ample proof from the Republican dominated years (including Clinton's second term) that this is untrue.

The second is the dogma, the "orthodoxy", on the left that all things nuclear are a pact with the Evil One. Liberals should not ever subscribe to a dogma.
The idea that humanity is fundamentally good, which I hold, is a working hypothesis. Contrast it with the dogma of Original Sin

For a start, we would not exist without the radioactivity within the Earth's crust and mantle. It could not have existed long enough, . Kelvin computed its age, knowing nothing of radioactivity, and came up with a mere 40 million years. The Carboniferous Era alone we now know to have been 64 million years, and it started hundreds of millions of years ago. Kelvin did compute correctly how much carbon is sequestered underground, knowing the composition of the atmosphere and its mass from barometric data. Oxygen is a fossil fuel too.

France generates 75% to 80% of its electric power from an agency that the government created and owned, using only the outdated and wasteful light water reactor technology. They are not, however, stupid enough to burden themselves with burying uranium and plutonium along with the true fission product waste.

Lynas, Till, and the others are aware of an amazingly successful project that, instead of throwing away half the U-235 and all of the rest of the uranium and plutonium is spent fuel rods, systematically and safely creates enough fuel from U-238, and "burns" it, that it could provide energy at our present profligate consumption rate, for 200 years, using only the uranium and plutonium that's already in various dumps, and without creating wastes that last more than a couple or three centuries, at a rate of under a ton per gigawatt-year. Two of the brilliant ideas incorporated in the IFR .. EBR2 are the use of metal fuel rods, and liquid metal coolant.

That's a million times better a solution to the "waste" problem, than anything proposed for dealing with coal or hydrocarbon wastes, including those feeble and abominable wind turbines. Buried carbon dioxide has an infinite half-life.

[wtmusic]

2. Here here

and welcome to DU Farmer Fowweather