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Christopher Nolan
On general release

Oliver Stone
Video on demand

RADIATION isn’t a pestilence, but read the medical studies following any accidental release of radioactive material and you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. In the UK, for instance, around 12 kilograms of uranium oxide escaped via the towers of the Windscale power station from 1954 to 1957, giving about 300 people terminal cancer. The explosion at Chernobyl in 1986, which killed over 30 people immediately, is likely to have caused terminal cancer in 5000 people over the long term.

It is the vagueness in these figures that stokes fear. An invisible killer striking at random raises the hairs on the back of all our necks, however few its victims.

But by any objective measure, nuclear power is safe and getting safer. An earthquake on 11 March 2011 shook the planet and jolted Japan 2 metres sideways, yet no one died from acute radiation syndrome in the devastated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, and studies found that the disaster didn’t . The oil industry kills 264 times as many people as the nuclear industry to produce just over seven times the useful energy.

It is all very well fulminating about “irrational” responses to nuclear power, but it is a different matter to get to grips with them. Christopher Nolan’s magisterial biopic Oppenheimer isn’t so much about J. Robert Oppenheimer’s development of the atomic bomb (the Trinity test, the first nuclear detonation, is in the middle of the film not its climax) as it is about the paranoid turn history took in the wake of his triumph.

Read Serhii Plokhy’s book Atoms and Ashes for how “atoms for peace” encouraged nuclear proliferation. The phrase, from a 1953 speech by US President Dwight Eisenhower, aimed to balance fears of nuclear armament with promises of the peaceful uses of uranium. Yet the uranium-235 and plutonium in nuclear weapons usually come from civil reactors.

The post-war public might have warmed to nuclear power if not for powerful lobbying by oil firms. This is the factually accurate but too-loud-to-be-convincing stand Oliver Stone took in his documentary film Nuclear Now, released in 2022 and based on Joshua Goldstein and Staffan Qvist’s book A Bright Future.

What do new nuclear power plants offer? They are small (able to fit in a shipping container or big truck), safe (in one type, vital parts dissolve long before criticality), powerful (with equivalent output to a large coal-fired power station) and clean (nuclear waste powers some designs). Yet Stone’s film fails, largely by assuming viewers are buckets to be filled with facts.

We look askance at movies like 1979’s The China Syndrome (by chance released soon before the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania), which created an apocalyptic turn in the US mind. The 2016 film Pandora, however, which turned the triumph of the Fukushima disaster response into a nightmare, is worth noting for its cynicism. This South Korean thriller was all about internal politics, not nuclear technology.

Oppenheimer is a class apart. Nolan’s story of an exceptionally conflicted and guilt-ridden man, played to eerie perfection by Cillian Murphy, gives us the perspective to understand the origins of our sense of the nuclear uncanny. It doesn’t stoke our fears, but brings them to the surface to recognise and address. Nuclear Now marks a big moment in the technology, but it is Oppenheimer that will help us embrace it.

Simon also recommends…

Barry Hines
Britbox
A fictional nuclear war reduces Sheffield, UK, to sub-medieval subsistence after 13 years of “winter”.

Kim Stanley Robinson (Hachette UK)
A sprawling, gripping novel of our immediate future finds an uneasy but crucial role for nuclear power.

Simon Ings is a novelist and science writer. Follow him on Instagram at @simon_ings