Barbenheimer perfectly captures why America abandoned nuclear

And why we need to pick it back up

Barbenheimer is a synergistic phenomenon in which two movies, released at the same time, could not help but capture the contradiction that is America.

One movie is about an object of immense power while the other is about a physicist.

Digging a little deeper, the Barbie movie has made a Trinity level impact on viewers not because of its commercialism, which it effectively satirizes, but because of its philosophical and political arguments.

And America loves nothing better than spending its time engaging in endless political debates through the lens of conspicuous consumption. The inception of Barbie brings this to a new level as this is a movie, which is a commercial enterprise by Warner bros’ (Mattel received a flat licensing fee) about a commercial product (Barbie dolls, which, as a parent of an 8 year old girl I can say are not cheap) that also contained numerous other product placements including what was basically a Chevy commercial in the middle of the movie.

The meta of a movie that was using a corporate enterprise to comment on the female condition while simultaneously marketing products to them is next level in terms of self-contradiction.

It is a bit of legerdemain that so many people can watch a movie that is marketing to them and come away thinking mainly about the political message.

That people are going to see Barbie in droves is a testament, however, to the power of brands.

The Oppenheimer brand, meanwhile, is about a man who was at the center of one of America’s greatest and more horrific achievements and about how his life and the life of the nation went sideways from Hiroshima on.

The movie wants us to take away a picture of a complex and tortured soul, a genius who lacked worldly smarts to protect himself from the political climate, silhouetted against the backdrop of a mushroom shaped fireball.

Yet, building the bomb was not the greatest achievement in the movie. Rather, the greatest achievement was given only a very small amount of screen time, and that is shown with Oppie visiting Chicago and, venturing under the disused football stadium, meeting Enrico Fermi.

Under that stadium, in 1942, in complete secrecy and long before the Trinity test, the first controlled nuclear reaction was achieved. When it became public knowledge in 1946, everyone wanted to build nuclear plants.

At the time, through the 1960s or so nuclear power was cheaper to build than gas plants are today (in today’s dollars) about $600/kW vs. $900/kW.

Later safety concerns, especially after 3 mile island in 1979, ballooned the cost and time to build a plant up to $7000/kW and 10 years. Nuclear power, which had held so much promise early on, was effectively dead at that point, killed by runaway costs and red tape.

(By contrast a wind farm today is about $1800/kW.)

We let this happen, at the time, because nobody much cared about it. There didn’t seem to be a big advantage between building a gas power plant versus a nuclear one and, if the gas one was so much cheaper, then capitalism told us which one to build.

Unfortunately, when it comes to nuclear power, its brand has sunk over the decades to the point where building them has become nearly impossible, and that is a big problem because nuclear plants are not only carbon neutral, they also run continuously without needing wind or sun. (Many do need water but others use salt as a coolant.)

It sank out of sight largely because of fears of accidents not because they actually became more expensive to build. In fact, the opposite should have happened, as South Korea has demonstrated. There a reactor costs about $2400/kW to build now down from $4500/kW in the 1970s.

Arguments today against nuclear power are largely based on exaggerated fears such as what to do with spent nuclear fuel, the risk of accidents, and exaggerated estimates of the carbon output of nuclear power plants (largely coming from mining uranium and the metal and concrete in the plants).

These are counterbalanced by the shear quantity of energy that can come from a small amount of fissile material. The footprint of a nuclear plant is far less than a solar or wind farm, meaning less land use. And of course they can run all the time (this can be a problem because they can’t be idle, so they are best used as baseline energy not peak plants).

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The cultural relationship with nuclear energy is much like a marriage that was initially full of happiness and promise but over decades soured. The media had a lot of do with that. Through the 1950s, 60s, and into the 70s, the media was largely positive about nuclear power, even when serious accidents occurred, and even when the cold war and its threat of nuclear annihilation overshadowed the political climate.

In the 1970s, as environmentalist movements heated up, anti-nuclear rhetoric resonated with the public. The media began to publicize accidents and radiation threats more.

The turning point was Three Mile Island when a partial meltdown of a reactor occurred. Although there was no significant radiation release, the media called the nuclear industry and their overseers to task and the public turned against nuclear power.

In 1986, Chernobyl exploded and crystallized the public’s desire to move away from nuclear power. In 1987 Newsweek called nuclear power “a bargain with the Devil”.

Several European nations, Italy, Germany, Sweden, and Austria voted to phase out their nuclear programs.

They are now reaping the consequences of that decision while nations that kept their programs intact, such as France, have lower carbon emissions.

Any mention of additional nuclear power over the past 35 years has generated fear articles and books. The fear of radiation and the long half-life of radioactive material created the impression that nuclear was far more dangerous than other energy technologies. Those who grew up in the 1980s and 90s like myself received an impression of nuclear power as a dead-end technology that needed to be phased out.

This naturally played into the hands of the fossil fuel industry. Despite numerous massive oil spills over the years devastating coastlines and marine populations, a regular drumbeat of fatal accidents in oil drilling and coal mining and at power plants, far exceeding the rate of accidents at nuclear plants, and all the climate and other polluting effects of burning such fuels, we continue to use gasoline and other oil derivatives for the majority of our energy as if it were no big deal. For whatever reason, we feel less fear of fossil fuels, not because of what is happening, but because we fear what might happen from a nuclear plant meltdown.

It is all about branding. We fear not what actually happens but what the media tells us to be afraid of. Now that media doomerism has spun up on climate change, a shift is beginning to occur in how we feel about nuclear power. The fear of the greater threat, the actual changing climate, offsets the fear of the other more abstract threat of radioactive accidents.

Meanwhile, the blockbuster TV series Chernobyl about the accident has, far from drawing attention to the fear of nuclear meltdowns, helped to explain why that accident was unique to its time and place. US reactors can’t meltdown that way.

As it has become clear that the world isn’t going to convert to wind and solar overnight and as newer nuclear technologies have appeared in the media, all the problems that have been harped on for 35 years don’t seem like such a big deal.

In a world awash with media, it is impossible to get away from branding and many decisions made even at the highest levels of government, where scientists should be making decisions based on science, are overruled by trumped up fears exploited for personal agendas. Now we have a chance to use nuclear power to defeat fossil fuels that are currently destroying our planet’s climate, and it makes sense to seize it.

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Palfreman, Jon. "A tale of two fears: Exploring media depictions of nuclear power and global warming." Review of Policy Research 23.1 (2006): 23-43.