Oliver Stone Pushes Back Against Fears Over Nuclear Power

I'm really glad how you covered it in this documentary about Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and Fukushima. We have these ideas in our mind about the dangers of nuclear power and I love the analogy that you made in the film about how driving a car is not scary, but it's dangerous. Flying in a plane feels scary, but it's far safer. This is a great analogy to nuclear power. When you went over the data, when you talked about the amount of deaths from coal every year, when you talk about the amount of deaths overall ever from nuclear, it's stunning. It is. It's stunning. Then when you cut to, in the documentary you showed the anti-nuclear movement that happened after Three Mile Island and how crazy it was. All these stars and celebrities and they're doing concerts. You've got to stop nuclear power and what a mess. That happens when a fad becomes fashionable. It was a very successful movement. You're talking about the negatives here and the accidents. We cover all that in the film, which is called Nuclear Now. The idea that was behind it was because I really was like you. I went along with those things in the 70s and the 80s because I didn't know better. I wasn't educated. I really wanted to know what is nuclear power. I wanted to go back to the source. You've got to go back to the beginning and you've got to go back to Marie Curie and Albert Einstein and World War II and all how it got developed. This nuclear energy is a beautiful, incredible, almost a miracle that was given to us. We have an Earth. It's in the Earth, the Uranium. It's everywhere. It's the planet, the Earth, the sun. In a sense, we took it like Prometheus and we misinterpreted it, misused it, which is kind of normal given what we do with natural things. World War II was happening just as the nuclear fission was being understood and that made the bomb. They made the bomb with it because there was a war on it. They rushed it and they did an amazing job up in Los Alamos and they got it and they were successful. As you know, it was misunderstood at that point that nuclear energy was not nuclear bomb. In the contrary, a bomb is very difficult to build and it takes years sometimes. It takes scientists and they have to enrich the plutonium and they have to work at it. It's all configurations in the bomb that don't exist in nuclear energy. When people see a nuclear energy plant, they subconsciously cross it with both war and they cross it with horror films that they've seen in the 1950s with radioactivity and monsters that come out of that. A spider bites the man and he becomes Spiderman. It's incredible the stuff that happens. Hollywood has done no favors to it. It's continued for years and years and years. Of course, you had Three Mile Island. The film was coming out at the same time, China Syndrome, with Jane Fonda. It was a good film. I enjoyed it. We all enjoyed it, but it really was hysterical and alarmist. Nothing happened at Three Mile Island except the reactor did melt down, but nobody got hurt because the containment structure worked to keep it in so there was no release of irradiation. They continued on. Silkwood was another one. If you remember not too long ago, there was the HBO thing, Chernobyl, which was a complete fictionalization of what happened at Chernobyl. We went to Russia and we talked to the scientists there. We wanted to know what happened at Chernobyl and we find out that it's in the film. The same thing is true for Fukushima, which is unbelievable because when you go to the bottom of it, I was astounded to find out that nobody died there from radiation. Not one Japanese. They checked the whole thing out and it's been done to death. You hear about 15,000, 20,000 people died from the tsunami and the earthquake, which was the biggest earthquake Japan ever had. Really, we show the earthquake. We show the tsunami. The wave was 100 feet tall. There was a badly built wall. The wall was not a sea wall that could hold and the generators were flooded beneath the water. These were also not state of the art. What they can do now in terms of these power plants. No, everything gets better. But even those nuclear reactors built 60, 70 years ago are still functioning. They're legacy reactors. They do work and we mustn't dismiss them. Yeah, technology gets better. As in any business, there's another generation and it's better, hopefully better. The point was that they could avoid what happened in Fukushima today. Oh, Fukushima was ... If you look at closely, Japan had built 20 some reactors at that point and this one is the only ... The others were exposed to the same earthquake and the same kind of tsunami. Several of them were on that same coastline. But this particular one, this plant was the only one that was shaken up. Even then, all the radiation that was released, there was a hydrogen explosion. That radiation released in the air, you heard about it. It was supposed to be another terminal. Well, we have shots in the film showing they're taking tests on all the Japanese citizens and nobody can ... It's low level, what they call low level radiation, which is we can sustain it. We have DNA in our body that fixes, repairs our body as each day goes by. But it's also ... You point out very well in the film that there's a lot of radiation that you don't even take into consideration that you encounter constantly. We have this idea of radiation as being a net negative. It's a terrible thing. But it's just a thing. You get it from being outside. You get it from rocks. You get it from all sorts of things. There's radiation in this room. You get radiation from eating a banana. I think what you said is so true that films and comic books and our fictions of radiation, that's part of the problem. Yeah, it started early in the 50s. It's a giant problem. Comic books and all that. It plays to the worst aspects of human nature, which is we just love to get terrified about headlines so we don't read into the devil of the details. Exactly. That's what was confusing to me. Really, we're miseducated. There is still a bias against nuclear, if you mention it to anybody. Yeah, it's scary instantly. Yeah, but the point is we can live with it and we have to because we're facing a very difficult situation, a cliff that we're going to go over. It seems that no one's really getting it. That's why I felt like the film I wanted to know. I need to educate myself. In doing the film, I think I was able to bring out these things. You talk about what is wrong with nuclear energy. It can work. It is a miracle. We should use it. We should use it abundantly. The Chinese and the Russians are way ahead of us. They built it and they built it with government backing, not like the US where we kind of back it, but we don't really back it. As a result, China is really cutting out now because they have approximately 70 reactors. Yeah, about 74. Anyway, they're building. I've heard, I don't remember the source, but I did hear that they're putting another $140 billion into this thing, which means that they're going to build 150-some reactors over the next, by 2038. That is a serious investment. Serious investment. Wow. That's a serious investment that would take a long time for us to catch up to. It's not about competing. It's about- Right, but if we wanted to do what they're doing right now, even if it's not competing, just to be current. We're the leader right now in it. Well no, we're the biggest country in the world. We still have 90-some reactors online. China's climate goals hinge on a $440 billion nuclear build out. That's interesting. We still have more, even with all the negative stereotypes about nuclear reactors, planning at least 150 new reactors in the next 15 years. More than the rest of the world has built in the past 35. That's great. Wow. I'm surprised you remember. No, it just says it right there, the article. Oh, okay. Jimmy just had it pulled up. China has, wow, and you've got a system worked out out there. Yeah, Jamie's a wizard. Look at him over there. He's the best. He doesn't know what the storm is about, even. This article that you just pulled up, Jamie, this is from Bloomberg. Oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah. Well, you see, you got the source right away. Yeah, and this is from 2021. This whole thing, it is exactly how you lay it out in the film. It's almost like we have to cure ourselves of these misconceptions, and if we don't, we're screwed. China's building, man. They don't fuck around. Now, they have a lot of coal. They're still building coal plants because they have a huge demand, and they have to get off the coal. That is crucial because they are completely contaminating the atmosphere as well. The more nuclear they build, the better it will be. The contamination from coal is terrifying. We showed a documentary that had been done. Do you remember the documentary? No, but I remember it was in Indiana. It was a documentary. One of the things it was highlighting is all the people that live around these plants and the air quality that they suffer. It's insane. Their cars are covered with a thin film of all the particulates in the atmosphere. That's correct. It's horrible. It's made from air pollution alone. I've read figures of four million deaths a year. It's just so many. You need so many cases of respiratory illnesses. That's horrible. I want to say four million a year from air pollution, but one million at least from coal a year. That's what I've seen, but there could be more coal in the ... Who knows what the health negatives are on top of that? How many people are suffering with illnesses and ailments because of those particulates, especially around those reactors or the plants rather? It's horrible. Well, we still have coal in the US. Yeah. No, this was in the US. This was in Indiana, correct? Oh yeah. They have coal everywhere. President Trump said, Trump digs coal. I dig coal. He said clean coal once. I was just like, what the fuck are you saying? The fuck are you saying? Cleaner than what? The other ... Lighting tires? Now, the other truth that we miss is gas. We know how ugly the oil thing is. I mean, there's the waste and all the oil and this fossil fuel itself is destroying the universe because we're putting carbon into the atmosphere, CO2. But gas is considered ... They're using gas everywhere. Even ... It seems like a modern thing. They say, well, renewables, which are solar and wind, we're all for that. I want wind, we want solar. But they don't work all the time. They run out in the winter, at night. Is it also a problem with battery technology when it comes to those things? Well, that's part of it too. The point is when they run out, what they need is gas backup. It's backup. You see, nuclear doesn't need storage and it doesn't need backup. What's the beauty of it? It's a real clean energy. And gas does ... I mean, renewables do need backup and that backup is gas. So it's not 100% ... One of the issues is about storage, the waste. Yeah. We talked about just the size of the amount of storage. It's not nearly as much as a lot of people think it is. The amount of ... All the waste that America has used up to now in the last ... Since 1958, whenever shipping port was built, has amounts to about the size of Walmart, frankly. You could put it in a Walmart. In other words, people make a big deal about waste, but they don't realize that it's so intensive and energy, huge amount of energy that it's ... How do you say? Compact as a result. It fits into ... If waste itself is a positive about nuclear, because first of all, there's been no harm done. It's been buried in casks. First of all, it goes into water for maybe two, three years. It's a conductor that takes the radioactivity down, and then it gets put into casks that are 12 to 14 feet. They build these casks in the United States. They're concrete and steel. Concrete is a great ... Does not conduct radioactivity. Concrete stops it. Concrete and steel casks work. They can go for 100 years, and then you can go another 100 years. Then eventually, eventually, you realize that radioactivity drops each time. In four or five years, it's way down. It tops to almost ... I don't have all the figures, but you can see that it's a ridiculous fear compared to what, given that climate change is so dangerous. Compared to the deaths that are already occurring every year, just from using the methods we have now, in comparison to the amount of people that have died from nuclear, it's very ... Very small.