NYT: Filmmakers Examining the 'What Ifs' of Nuclear Power

[DeepModem Mom]

Filmmakers Examining the 'What Ifs' of Nuclear Power
By NANCY RAMSEY

Published: September 8, 2004


Cesium-137 is not your usual topic for a Midtown Manhattan lunch. But if you sit down with Maryann De Leo and Rory Kennedy, who have completed documentaries on the effects on children of the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986 (Ms. De Leo) and the Indian Point power plant in Buchanan, N.Y. (Ms. Kennedy), it is not long before the subject comes up. (Cesium-137 is radioactive waste, an isotope produced when uranium or plutonium undergoes fission.)....

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Ms. De Leo's film "Chernobyl Heart," which won the 2003 Academy Award for best documentary short, is not easy to talk about or watch. It takes the viewer into children's hospitals in Belarus and Ukraine and into the 30-kilometer exclusion zone around the reactor. According to the United Nations, birth defects in Belarus have increased 250 percent since the accident, and the lives of the children in the film are tragic.

One girl, Julia, was born with her brain outside her skull; another child, 4, is the size of a 4-month-old.

"I had to show enough of the kids with deformities, but if I showed too many, nobody would want to watch," Ms. De Leo said.

Ms. Kennedy's "Indian Point: Imagining the Unimaginable" takes a less emotional approach. It features interviews with the plant's detractors (including her brother Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chief prosecutor for Riverkeeper, an environmental- protection group) and a few defenders. Ms. Kennedy, who narrates the film, begins with questions: what if American Airlines Flight 11, navigating along the Hudson valley on Sept. 11, had banked left and hit Indian Point, rather than continuing south to the World Trade Center? Is enough being done to protect Americans from terrorists at home?...

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"Indian Point has much more cesium than Chernobyl had," Ms. Kennedy (said). "Being in New York City on 9/11, and in the aftermath, there was a lot of concern about where the next terrorist attack would be - Indian Point, bridges and tunnels, waterways, chemical plants. There was a disproportionate amount of fear, some of it grounded, some not. I went into this project with the question, is Indian Point something we need to fear?"...


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/08/arts/television/08lunc.html

[dumpster_baby]

1. we can build safer plants

I am not sure we have any choice in the matter

[DeepModem Mom]

2. Also from the article --

Spencer R. Weart, a historian at the American Institute of Physics and author of "Nuclear Fear: A History of Images" (Harvard University Press, 1988) offers a context for examining the nuclear option - and, perhaps, for watching these films.

"All industrial systems are liable to accidents, and we have to ask ourselves, where is the most likely damage over the long term?" he said in a telephone interview. "Every energy source has its problems. Bangladesh has been in the news because of the terrible flooding there. This is what will happen increasingly with global warming. The longtime consequences of burning fossil fuels are more severe than nuclear power. Let's say I'm less a proponent of nuclear power than an opponent of coal and oil."

[seventhson]

3. www.radiation.org

has a lot of info on this problem with Indian point and what it is ALREADY doing to us (along with many oither leaky plants across the country)


www.radiation.org

arm yourself with knowledge

[struggle4progress]

4. Atomic Energy Act of 1954 makes it clear that the primary reason ...

... for pushing nuclear power is to have the technical expertise for nuclear weapons.