Oliver Stone on Nuclear Energy: ‘We Need to Get Away From Mentality of Fear’
variety.comBen Croll Presenting his latest documentary, “Nuclear,” at the Venice Film Festival, director Oliver Stone reflected on the climate crisis in a tone all too rarely struck – optimism. “[We need to] get away from that mentality of fear,” Stone said from a press conference just before his film’s world premiere. “Like everyone else, I saw ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ in 2006, at it was scary.
I kept reading the news, and it kept getting worse.” “The movies, television, books [about climate change] are all negative,” he continued. “And I find all that doomsday stuff to be depressing beyond belief.” The filmmaker looked to address the issue by focusing on action, and by offering scalable and effective solutions.
He found them in nuclear energy, and in a 2019 book, “A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow,” written by American University professor Joshua S.
Goldstein. Asked what drew him to the text, Stone was unequivocal. “This book is hopeful,” the director explained. “It’s positive and tells you that we can do something about it; that we’re not victims.” Stone and Goldstein co-wrote the film, which tries to disentangle nuclear power from nuclear bombs, clearing up false assumptions about the method while taking aim at media properties like the HBO series “Chernobyl.” As Goldstein sees it, that kind of “fear mongering” has led us astray. “If we’d stayed on the path of the 1970s [when nuclear production was on the rise] we would have a carbon free economy now,” said Goldstein. “We wouldn’t have this climate crisis.” “Desalinating water, making aviation fuels, and sequestering carbon from the atmosphere all require tremendous amounts of energy and heat.
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