My Blog for Physics in Film

I believe nuclear power is the transition energy source we need. It is efficient and a much cleaner source of energy than coal and less environmentally changing than hydroelectric. Plus, we can essentially put one anywhere unlike wind and solar. All those other renewables are nice and should be used when appropriate; but it will be hard to satisfy our thirsty demands with just those.

I believe clean energy and energy dependence outweigh the waste and safety concerns. The waste problem is exaggerated be media and activists in my opinion. We can control the waste of nuclear power plants. With coal, we cannot. Plus, not everyone knows the full extent to how deadly the waste really is. Are they gamma, beta or alpha emitters ect… Plus most do not know how much we actually produce. When I did a project about this for a philosophy class, a statistic I read stated that all the waste we every produced in the US can fit in a football field if stacked 5 meters high. Furthermore, the possibility exists that we can refine the spent rods into new fuels or use them in breeder reactors (although I am not that familiar with that, but I am sure possibilities exist). Uranium is cheap right now so that really is not necessary at the moment. As for safety, the worse accident we have ever had in the US was Three Mile Island where it was relatively under control and there were no deaths that I know of. The accident of Chernobyl was partially due to bad design by the Russians (according to me HS history teacher), kind of like the poor engineering in K13. I think energy independence is worth it, plus we need something reliable to hold us over until we perfect something better and with zero bad waste, like fusion or something. Coal kills far more and damages nature far more than nuclear.

Nuclear weapons are a concern. Refining uranium is not that easy to do in your backyard though so I am are concerned with rogue nations or people who could manage to steal fissile material or existing warheads. The government should regulate it…successfully. Tactile weapons sound like a compromise to use nukes more conventionally. It is like the government is like a small child that just wants JUST ONE cookie before dinner.

Nuclear winter is always a possibility; there exist a relatively large number of nukes, enough to kill us all. However, no human wins if there are none left so I feel that we keep them around so no one uses them, mutually assured destruction. I also think we don’t know how many actually exist anymore since the cold war and the Soviet Union wasn’t probably paying super close attention when it was splitting and I am sure our government knows where every last one is. Banning nukes is one of those bans that have to be enforced to the very last. Just one left could spell destruction if the owner is less than friendly. In short, I feel nuclear holocaust would likely be caused more because of an accident, like a cowboy pilot of a plane that lost its radio riding a nuke as it plummets to Earth. On the bright side, the nuclear winter will cancel out global warming.

I think movies like “The Day After Tomorrow” do open discussions about global warming but at a cost. Since disaster movies often embellish the origins and accelerate the onset of a man-influenced natural disaster people who are intrigued by the movie and start looking at outside material may be upset when they realize the truth and perhaps may even think they have been tricked and will move to the anti-believers side. The truth is scary enough. Movies that have an environmental message should speak from the truth. Hence, my idea of a good global warming disaster movie is one based on the Earth 50 years in the future. This would show consequences of global warming in a truthful manner.

“The Day After Tomorrow” was loosely based on fact. Yes, there would be an ice age from global warming, but it would not happen quite that fast and there would not be giant “anti-hurricanes” fueled by cold air forming to consume the entire northern hemisphere. Furthermore, sea levels would also rise, but not in such a dramatically quick way. I feel that movies such as this and “An Inconvenient Truth” seek to lure people to environmentalism by fear. However the opposite may occur and one may feel tricked or lied to by the films and become more stubborn. I think a better approach would be to inform based on the truth instead of scare tactics. Furthermore, we can work to dispel the evidence contrary. Most of the evidence I have seen cited talk about how the warmest days in the US happened in the 1930s, which is true. However, as a globe, most of the warmest years happened most recently and activists need to make that clear to the public.