Pandora’s Promise is a preach to the choir documentary about environmentalists who learned to stop worrying and love nuclear power. My mom was so excited to see this documentary then spent the entire time vocally disagreeing with its premise. Pandora’s Promise explains that nuclear power is actually safe, and the oil and fossil fuel industry conspired to promote wind and solar power because they knew that wind and solar power were inextricably linked to them. Pandora’s Promise claims that liberals were tricked by big oil and coal because of the influence of films like The China Syndrome and events like Three Mile Island.
Pandora’s Promise explains that tragedies like Fukushima and Chernobyl were caused because commercialization efforts by the nuclear industry chose water reactors over breeder reactors, which use less waste. Pandora’s Promise also portrays Chernobyl as less of an environmental disaster than we imagine because people still live there. Basically water reactors had a better publicist, and Chernobyl did not have a reactor so viewers should not worry. Pandora’s Promise tries to dispel our fear of radiation by showing how radiation exists throughout nature, demonizing coal.
Did Pandora’s Promise convince me? As I get older, documentaries like Pandora’s Promise feel like infomercials to me so while I believe there is some truth to them, without having independent knowledge of the subject matter, I am always a little wary to jump in with both feet. Because President Obama touted nuclear energy, I am inclined to lower some of my skepticism, but it still exists. Pandora’s Promise did an effective job of distinguishing nuclear weapons from nuclear energy, but it is hard to ignore events like Fukushima and Three Mile Island.
Also Pandora’s Promise should have done a better job of introducing the talking heads before we heard their opinions. Without that information, it felt like Pandora’s Promise was centering random white people’s opinion on a Japanese tragedy. I am not just going to assume that they are important without some credentials, especially the guy walking around without shoes. If you would not listen to a shoeless minority opine about nuclear energy, then why should I listen to a shoeless white guy? I am willing to concede that being shoeless does not negate the value of his actual statement, but would a documentary look past appearance if he was not white?
Pandora’s Promise is passionate, but ultimately unconvincing because it relied more on conspiracy theories and people’s journeys than science in order to make it more approachable to viewers. When you have a Secretary of Energy who has more experience on Dancing with the Stars than a department that he wanted to eliminate, the science may be there, but the competent oversight isn’t.