Nuclear Energy and Emotional Containment in Pandora’s Promise

• In Event: Energy Pedagogies

Abstract

This paper explores the visual and affective strategies of Pandora’s Promise, a 2013 feature-length documentary that stakes out a relatively new position within environmental politics: support for nuclear power. Over the last decade, environmentalists like Stewart Brand, Mark Lynas, Michael Shellenberger, and Gwyneth Cravens have become convinced that despite unresolved questions about safety and waste, nuclear power will be essential in the coming battle against catastrophic climate change. What has thus coalesced is a debate within contemporary environmentalism about the role of nuclear power in the transition to a post-carbon future. The debate hinges on whether renewable forms of energy such as wind, geothermal, and solar power will be sufficient to achieve the transition, or whether the intermittencies embedded within these energy systems will require a steady nuclear power supply to make up the shortfall.

My paper argues that Pandora’s Promise relies for its affective power on testimonies of conversion. In the film, one environmentalist after another describes how through the acquisition of knowledge, their early opposition to nuclear power gradually gave way to a conviction that the direness of climate change meant that nothing—including nuclear energy—should be taken off the table. This experience of conversion can best be summed up by an epigraph that appears in Brand’s 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline: “With climate change, those who know the most are the most frightened. With nuclear power, those who know the most are the least frightened.” The film attempts to school viewers in nuclear power by asking them to observe thoughtful people as they puzzle through a problem and arrive at a different place from where they began.

In my paper, I will argue that the film’s “greening” of nuclear power is not new. Whether in its upbeat prediction that advances in nuclear technology can remedy world poverty or in its association of radiation with nature and healing, the film relies on visual and rhetorical strategies that go back to the birth of the atomic age. Most striking is the film’s implicit claim that public fear is the largest obstacle to any nuclear revival; Pandora’s Promise steadily ridicules anti-nuclear activists by portraying them as irrational. In a variety of ways, the film enjoins viewers to “keep their cool” when it comes to the topic of nuclear power. In this way, too, the film circles back to the early years of the Cold War, when civil defense planners identified the containment of extreme emotions (panic, fair, hysteria) as an atomic age imperative. The result was that emotional management assumed a new centrality within Cold War conceptions of governance and citizenship. I conclude the paper by suggesting that these conceptions have not only endured but intensified in the neoliberal age, as the nuclear threat has been largely (though not entirely) displaced by the threat of runaway climate change.

Author

• Natasha Zaretsky, Southern Illinois University