NEI Nuclear Notes

Showtime premieres its nine-part documentary series Years of Living Dangerously tonight at 10 p.m. U.S. EDT. The series uses some of the biggest names in Hollywood to draw attention to the impacts of climate change. James Cameron, Jerry Weintraub and Arnold Schwarzenegger are on the team of executive producers, while celebrities noted for their environmental advocacy appear on camera including Don Cheadle, Harrison Ford, Matt Damon, Ian Somerhalder and Jessica Alba.  What are they hoping to accomplish with this series? Executive producer David Gelber summed it up:  The goal of Years of Living Dangerously is to galvanize a national conversation on the realities of climate change and inspire people to share their own stories and empower them to get involved in solutions. I watched the first episode, available early and for free on YouTube , and understand why the reviews are extremely positive. It is a beautiful piece from a filmmaking standpoint, but then of course ...

Your list of the best nuclear news of the year, part 1, and in no particular order. All good news is number 1, right? 1. Pandora’s Promise – There has been a movement by environmentalists to support nuclear energy for some years because of its continued safety record, the inability of renewable energy sources to provide baseload energy and, most especially, the looming spectre of a climate change-driven catastrophe. Robert Stone’s movie Pandora’s Promise made this tectonic shift in attitude manifest for many people. Stone does a lot more than provide talking heads, however, dispelling myths, showing the anti-nuclear movement as driven more by fervor than rationality and facing fully the implications of the Fukushima Daiichi accident. Still, what a great bunch of talking heads: Gwyneth Cravens, Mark Lynas, Stewart Brand, Richard Rhodes and more. They all articulate their conversions on the road to nuclear energy with great intelligence and humor. For me, Lynas is the breakout ...

CNN has been soliciting a lot of op-ed style pieces to promote its showing of Pandora’s Promise . As Eric points out in the post below, CNN has really done a good job gathering this material, though both pro- and anti-nuclear energy advocates often use their space to make clear their talking points, assuming – probably correctly – that many people have not been engaged in their somewhat internecine arguments. Still, Rachel Pritzker, president of the Pritzker Innovation Fund , tries an interesting approach . It is time for policymakers to recognize that nuclear power must be a robust part of our nation's energy plan to reduce carbon emissions. These may seem like strange words coming from a liberal whose family has been active in progressive politics, and who grew up on a Wisconsin goat farm in a home heated by wood fires. Like many of my fellow progressives, I care deeply about the environment and the future of our planet, which is precisely why I do not think we sho...

I'm a Washington policy professional but also a Washington native, and so over the better part of four decades I've developed a distinct appreciation for how policy in this city is covered by the fourth estate. To cut to the chase: I'm pretty much underwhelmed/infuriated by a wide swath of the Washington press corps on pretty much a daily basis. But not today. For the better part of the past month I've worked closely and in most rewarding fashion with the producer-reporter tandem of David Fitzpatrick and Drew Griffin of CNN. Tonight of course that outlet is airing the magnificent documentary ' Pandora's Promise .' In support of the documentary CNN has devoted extraordinary resources this fall to informing the public about nuclear energy. In sprawling digital and broadcast news and commentary this week, CNN has covered nuclear's voices pro and con, academic and activist, political and wonkish. Nuclear power in the United States has known both triumph a...

We're getting every closer to the debut of Pandora's Promise on CNN. To recap, the pro-nuclear documentary will air on the cable network in less than two weeks from tonight at 9:00 p.m. U.S. EST. To help promote the event, we've created a Thunderclap . What's a Thunderclap ? Simply put, it's a great new way to promote campaigns or events via social media. We're looking to recruit 100 people who will sign up to promote the CNN premiere of Pandora's Promise on Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr (or any combination of the three). Just click the button on the widget below, and you can get in on the action. Here's hoping you can join us on November 7th.

We haven’t mentioned Pandora’s Promise for a while, but the pro-nuclear energy documentary continues chugging around the world and picking up play dates. Its director, Robert Stone, has written a very specific editorial in Australia’s national newspaper, The Age, not about his movie – though he does tout it a bit - but about nuclear energy down under . Like much of the world, the main fuel that lights Australian homes and powers Australian industry is coal. The difference is that Australia's dependence on coal is nearly double the global average. That’s actually a good point that one does not see too often. Australia as we’ve noted before is about as anti-nuclear energy as a country could be – with its neighbor New Zealand a close contender – it’s practically an article of faith there. All power to antipodean pro-nuclear activists, but from afar, it seems an intractable position. But the result has been that the country has exceptionally limited alternatives to its co...

Updated Editor's Note: The next big date on the Pandora's Promise calendar is November 7 at 9:00 p.m. U.S. EST. That's when the film will make it's cable television debut on CNN . A crew from the cable network visited NEI a few weeks ago, and we anticipate that you'll see a number of features about the future of the nuclear energy industry air over the next several weeks. Be sure to watch on November 7, and join us on Twitter as we participate in a real-time chat about the film using the #PandorasPromise hash tag. Editor's Note: Here at NEI, we're keeping a close eye on  Pandora's Promise , a documentary film by Academy Award-nominated director Robert Stone about how many prominent environmentalists have changed their minds about nuclear energy because of concerns about climate change.  The film was produced independently from the nuclear industry. Among the financial backers of Pandora's Promise are Richard Branson and Microsoft co-founder Paul A...

Ever since Pandora's Promise premiered back in June, we've been getting requests from our readers asking how they might be able to engineer a screening closer to where they live. That's not a surprise, as many of the nation's nuclear energy facilities are located far from major media centers where the majority of documentary films are screened. But now it seems there's a new way to get Pandora's Promise to your town. Earlier today we got word that the producers of the film have just signed an agreement with the team at Tugg -- a business that looks like a neat cross between Kickstarter and MovieTickets.com. By using Tugg , you can petition a theater near you to schedule a screening of a movie you're interested in. If you're able to get 100 people to commit to pay for their tickets ahead of time, the theater will schedule a screening. What happens if you don't reach the 100 mark before the recruiting deadline? No worries, as Tugg won't cha...

Opening Reviews? Mixed, with a tilt to the positive. Manohla Dargis in the New York Times grabbed a little harder than I did at the drubbing of Dr. Helen Calidicott got in the picture and said it showed the movie’s one-sided view of nuclear energy. This comic divide — the strident old lady environmentalist with the apparent bad dye job (Ms. Caldicott) versus a Yoda of the modern environmental movement (Mr. Brand) — makes for quite a setup. Yet such deck-stacking in movies can also be a viewer turnoff, no matter how seemingly worthy the cause. And “Pandora’s Promise” is as stacked as advocate movies get. The descriptions of Caldicott and Brand are pretty terrible - remind me not to get on Dargis’ bad side. I used to work in the independent film business in New York (briefly, ineffectually) and a positive review from the Times was very important to launch an independent picture. One of the companies I worked for went pear shaped after a poor NYT review.That’s not as true now ...

Note: Be sure to look at all of Nuclear Notes’ coverage of this important movie, most notably Eric’s review below. Should you trust a “review” of Pandora’s Promise , Robert Stone’s new movie on nuclear energy, from this particular site? Well, that’s up to you to decide. If I thought the movie terrible as a film going experience, there would still be a lot to say about it – and I wouldn’t want people who have waited a long time for a pro-nuclear movie to avoid it on my account unless it was a briar patch of lies. But Pandora’s Promise is good. It’s skillfully made, accessible to an interested general audience (in both style and content – this isn’t a dry dissertation) and it maintains a simple interview approach – shots are composed but the compositions are largely determined by the subjects – it isn’t as tightly controlled as an Errol Morris special. And it allows a more complex point-of-view than is usual for a subject vulnerable to blunt polemics – for example, it ...

Sec. John Kerry One of the big ideas pushed by Pandora's Promise concerns the potential of breeder reactors to provide a technological fix to the political question of what to do with used nuclear fuel. A considerable segment of the film tells the story of the Experimental Breeder Reactor II (EBR-II) project at Argonne National Laboratory in Idaho and how funding for the project was killed in 1994 at the behest of the Clinton Administration. The film contains a brief clip of U.S. Secretary of State and former U.S. Senator John Kerry (D-MA) urging his fellow senators to end funding for the EBR-II. But what the film didn't mention is that like the five environmentalists profiled in Pandora's Promise , Secretary Kerry has undergone something of a conversion on the question on nuclear energy himself. Back in 2010, then-Senator Kerry was a co-sponsor of the American Power Act . Though it failed to pass into law, the proposed legislation included a number of key inc...

Robert Stone behind the camera. It was back in 2006 that NEI Nuclear Notes published its first post with the title, " Another Environmentalist for Nuclear Energy ." At the time, I could certainly have understood how a statement like that might seem more than a bit unbelievable. Environmentalists? Supporting? Nuclear? Energy? Wasn't the environmental community unanimously opposed to nuclear energy?  But what I had begun to see at the time was a growing understanding on the part of a number of thoughtful people about the size and scope of the challenge before mankind. How do you support a world with a growing population that aspires to enjoy the same standard of living that we've grown accustomed to in the developed world? And how do you do it without causing catastrophic damage to the planet? It's was that conundrum that led environmentalists like Patrick Moore , James Lovelock and the late Rev. Hugh Montefiore to reconsider their position on nuclear ene...

On Monday night, I traveled to Pleasantville, NY to attend a screening of Pandora's Promise . While I had originally intended to provide live coverage of the event via NEI's Twitter feed , I was foiled by poor reception inside the theater. I'm writing this summary to take it's place. Pleasantville is only a 27-minute ride from Indian Point Energy Center , and a number of local anti-nuclear activists as well as plant employees were in attendance. All of us were met at the theater entrance by a volunteer from Riverkeeper who was distributing a copy of Pandora’s False Promises, a primer produced by Paul Gunter’s Beyond Nuclear. The presence of the Riverkeeper volunteer led the film’s director, Robert Stone , to quip from the podium that it was the “first time he had been picketed.” I'm planning on posting a full review of the movie here on NEI Nuclear Notes ahead of Friday's nationwide premiere, so I won’t go into much detail concerning the film itself. Fro...

This evening in Pleasantville, NY at the Jacob Burns Film Center , Robert Stone's new documentary, Pandora's Promise , will have its New York premiere. Following the screening, Stone will have a discussion with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. of Riverkeeper about the film. The discussion will be moderated by Andrew Revkin of the New York Times . NEI will be in attendance, and we'll be following the discussion live via our Twitter feed, @n_e_i . Please check in around 9:00 p.m. U.S. EDT for our live coverage. So Where Can You See Pandora's Promise ? The official opening will be in New York City on June 12 at  Sunshine Cinema  on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Two days later, on June 14, the film will open in an additional 15 cities nationwide ( Atlanta ,  Berkeley ,  Boston ,  Chicago ,  Denver ,  Houston ,  Irvine ,  Los Angeles ,  Minneapolis ,  Philadelphia ,  San Diego ,  San Francisco ,  Seattle ,  St. Lou...