Nuclear energy has been a topic of debate since it was introduced in the United States in 1951. From concerns over reactor safety to debates on the issue of wastewater disposal, scientists, governments, and civilians alike have varying opinions on the use of nuclear energy as a sustainable option for the future. SIS professor emeritus Joshua Goldstein, who’s currently a research scholar at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has focused his research on climate change for years and now is bringing the nuclear debate into the spotlight in a new documentary called, appropriately, “Nuclear Now.”

The documentary takes viewers inside the nuclear energy infrastructure in France, Russia, and the US and presents the history, facts, and potential of nuclear energy as a sustainable power source. Leading up to a special screening at SIS on January 22, we caught up with Goldstein, who co-wrote “Nuclear Now” with renowned filmmaker Oliver Stone, to learn more about the film’s development process, his journey from international relations to filmmaking, and what students can learn from the film. 

You are one of the co-writers for the documentary “Nuclear Now.” How did you become involved in this project?

I started out as an international relations professor, and I do global trends. I'm a data-oriented person. About 10 years ago, I switched my main focus to climate change, and it quickly became clear to me that you couldn't really solve the problem without nuclear power, which was bad because I was an environmentalist, and I'd never liked it. So that's how I got into nuclear energy. Then I started to learn about it and discovered that it was a lot better than I had thought. It was a pretty good solution, and France, Sweden, and a few other places had decarbonized their electric grids really quickly by building a lot of nuclear power.

I co-wrote a book, A Bright Future, with Swedish scientist Staffan Qvist about how some countries have solved climate change and the rest can follow. It’s a bit of a misnomer because nobody's actually solved it, but they've shown us how we can solve it, right? It's the idea. After the book came out in 2019, I had an op-ed in the New York Times and there was some publicity around that. Oliver Stone in Hollywood saw some of that press, and he saw the book reviewed in the New York Times, and he decided to do a documentary about it. I'm the co-author of the book that it's based on, and then I'm the co-writer of the documentary with Oliver Stone.

How did you move into documentary filmmaking from your career in academia and international relations?

Hollywood and academia are very different, and the whole way of thinking about stories and writing them is different. This is one reason it took three years instead of one year to produce the film—I knew everything about the subject but nothing about how to make a film. Oliver Stone obviously knows everything about how to make a film, but he doesn't know anything about the subject. He ended up going around the world and talking with a lot of people, learning a lot about the subject, and he presents the film basically as taking the viewer with him on this journey of learning about nuclear power. So that's how it ended up being structured. We went back and forth a lot where I would write a version that was a great documentary, very accurate, very complete, scientifically sound, and then everyone on the Hollywood end would say, “That's great, but it's completely boring.” Then he would make a version that was all exciting and flashy, and a great film, except I'd say it's got all the facts wrong. So, you're back and forth, back and forth, and eventually, I think we got a version that is interesting but certainly accurate. We were intent not to make any mistakes because there's already so much criticism of nuclear energy. I think we succeeded in making a scientifically sound, but hopefully still entertaining, movie.

Why did you and your co-writer focus on nuclear energy as the topic?

I'm really seriously concerned about climate change, and I think most people, even most climate activists, don't really appreciate how serious the problem is. There are a lot of feel-good things that people try to do, like putting solar panels on the rooftops and driving electric cars, but they're not adding up to get us where we need to go. They're steps in the right direction, but we need a proven solution. The problem is that the world's electricity use is growing really quickly, and that's because countries are coming out of poverty. Billions of people are rising out of poverty, and they're using more energy, and that's a great thing, except they're doing it with coal now. So, we need something that can accommodate this big increase displace coal and offer a better way to get there. And the unique thing about nuclear power is that it's so concentrated, and that means you can scale it up really quickly. It means that there's less mining and less waste, and it should be the cheapest thing out there. France decarbonized their grid and took fossil fuels out of the mix in about 15 years. It’s provided cheap electricity, it's been safe, and carbon emissions are way lower than in other countries. Nuclear energy is something we have proven that the world can do and know that it works.

The production and use of nuclear energy remains a controversial topic in many circles, with arguments both for and against it. I know you’ll be speaking about this in the panel discussion on January 22, but as a preview: how did you approach this topic while addressing the controversial aspects?

So, if you compare the harm from nuclear energy to the harm from coal, historically, it's just hundreds of times safer than coal. Millions of people die from coal smoke every year. Only some hundreds of people have ever died from nuclear power. It's just a completely different scale. You have to balance the risks and the benefits. I don't like the idea that says that nothing will ever go wrong and that nuclear energy will make everything so safe that no accidents will ever happen. That's never been true of any energy source.

I think we have to take into account that nuclear [energy] will have accidents and there will be releases of radioactivity, but they're not nearly as harmful as people think. We need education about what radiation is and what the risks really are. Very high levels of radiation can hurt people, but the low levels that people are scared of really haven't harmed anyone. We go into it a little bit in the film. If there's a reason that nuclear power won't work, it would be that people are too scared. We can be scientific and rational about it and say that it’s hundreds of times safer than coal, and people may, in the end, just say, “No, I'm too scared.” And if that's the case, then it's not going to solve climate change. We have to look for other things and deal with the consequences that we didn't solve the problem.

Why should students—especially those studying environmental policy and energy issues—come to this screening?

Well, they will learn a lot about nuclear energy, because the film covers the whole history of nuclear energy, how it works, what the problems have been, and all of that background. The reason why people need to learn about this topic is that nuclear energy is one of the important clean energy solutions that's out there. It gets ignored a lot of times, and there's a taboo on talking about it, but we have to be talking about it. You don't have to agree with me that it's a major solution, but we do need to have a conversation about it. It's the single largest clean energy source that is also a zero-carbon energy source in the United States and is second in the world after hydroelectric power.

Following recent news coverage, environmentalists are still averse to talking about nuclear, but there's been a lot more conversation around it over the last couple of years. Some environmental groups are now rethinking their position on it and are coming around to being more productive in those conversations. We’re at a point where reality catches up and we’re having to admit that we’re really seriously off track in solving a very important problem. We need to be looking at these solutions and having hard conversations about solutions like nuclear energy, whether you agree or not.