Pandora's Promise

As an AP environmental class, The A block class was assigned to watch a video called Pandora’s Promise and reflect on the issues of nuclear power plants. There are a lot of concerns revolving around this issue and how environmentalist think all of these power plants are dangerous and hazardous because of explosions that have occured. Throughout the film we see how people shouldn’t be too concern. In the early stages of the film we see a lot of the people’s reactions of all the bad that has occurred.

When people hear the word nuclear they think of weapons. We hear from people from around the time of World War two and how they have seen what nuclear products have done and how dangerous it is. In the film one of the narrators says “This is primarily not an energy source, this is primarily a weapon”. This says a lot because we see short films of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and how much damage the nuclear bombs did to the area. Also around that time they children in school had to practice drills by hiding under there desk incase a bomb was sent and hit the united states.

Picture of Hiroshima from movie

One of the narrators named Mark is a key person in the pro nuclear movement. Throughout the film we see people protesting the building of power plants in the U.S. Mark says a very valid point and that is “nuclear was going to be apart of the solution because it doesn’t produce carbon dioxide”. It makes a lot of sense because the burning of fossil fuels is eating up the U.S economy and effecting the air. Also, other narrators state the fact that not one nuclear power plant disaster has occurred in the U.S. It’s weird to think that people are protesting for something that has harmed another country but not their own.

Picture of Mark from the movie

As we see and learn from the film, Chernobyl was claimed to be one of the deadliest power plant disasters and killed millions of people. From what people said in the film it seems that the united nations covered up the disaster. Yes up to 50 people died at the time trying to clean up the disaster but millions haven’t been killed by it. If there were people apart of the disaster and didn’t die, they would have a good chance of getting cancer. In the a part of the movie it was confirmed that there were no birth defects from people affected by Chernobyl. Mark states that “people were fed an urban myth about what the actual effects about what Chernobyl was”. This says a lot because it basically shows that nuclear power plants aren’t as bad as they sound like. I think making up false information and scaring people is the wrong thing to do.

Picture of Chernobyl from movie

Overall, I thought this was a great film and very entertaining. I learned so much about nuclear power plants that I never knew before. It fascinates me how people are turning for nuclear energy even though it gets a bad reputation. I think that we need to stop using fossil fuels and more to an energy source like this. This nuclear disaster hasn’t happened to the United States yet. I think we should start building more of these because we are an advanced country and learned from what went wrong in other countries. I think more and more people should see this film and understand how we can change our energy sources in the U.S.