[Mining Documentary] Pandora’s Promise rethinks nuclear power: review – by Linda Barnard (Toronto Star – July 12, 2013)

(Above) Pandora’s Promise – Official Clip #1 (HD) Documentary

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Pandora’s Promise makes some compelling points about how a global acceptance of nuclear power could save the environment.

The “beginning of a movement,” heralded at the end of director Robert Stone’s Pandora’s Promise, won’t be one to make some environmentalists smile, but it will certainly spark a lively debate on both sides of the nuclear power issue.

In that regard, Oscar-nominee Stone (for 1988’s Radio Bikini, about nuclear bomb tests at Bikini Atoll) has achieved a documentarian’s aims. But there’s not much in the way of balance in this often bone-dry documentary about the bum rap nuclear power has gotten thanks to misinformed, if well-meaning, environmentalists and energy experts.

Don’t let that put you off this doc, which makes some compelling points about how a global acceptance of nuclear power in place of fossil fuels could save the environment from further destruction while helping bring cheap energy to the developing world.

Unfortunately, nuclear energy has been painted with the same brush as nuclear weapons when this mode of energy is in fact a clean and overwhelmingly safe alternative to other fuel. That’s according to a group of former anti-nuclear crusaders making passionate arguments onscreen, including Whole Earth Catalogue editor Stewart Brand and climate-change author Mark Lynas. They’ve crossed the floor on the issue, saying the greens got it wrong when they turned their backs on nuclear energy.

Some, like environmentalist and Breakthrough Institute co-founder Michael Shellenberger, are rather embarrassed at their former no-nukes mindset — “feeling like a sucker,” is how he puts it. They were backing the wrong horse in championing expensive and difficult-to-harness solar and wind power over nuclear energy

For the rest of this article, click here: http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/movies/2013/07/11/pandoras_promise_rethinks_nuclear_power_review.html