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If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that, let's get to the show. Very excited to be joined by Oliver Stone. He's got a new film, Nuclear Now. Let's take a look at the trailer and then I'm going to get you an interview with him.
We may have come to a point in time when Earth is asking us, do you know what you're doing? Most of our power still comes from burning gas and coal, and.
The amount is going up, not down.
If we do not cut carbon emissions by nearly one hundred percent, the world will suffer serious damage.
This is an even bigger problem than we thought.
The answer to solving climate change is very straightforward.
What's the best solution, in your mind? Largely nuclear?
Nuclear?
Nuclear. We've been trained from the very beginning to fear nuclear power. The very thing that we fear is what may save us.
What's scary is not the same as what's dangerous. Coal is dangerous. Now more people die from coal in a couple of weeks than I've ever died from nuclear, which is all from the one accident in Chernobyl.
First question is what about the waste.
Nuclear waste is nothing compared to climate change.
Once you understand it, people have a better sense of not being afraid.
We have to provide clean, affordable energy to the world in general.
We need to move faster. We do this for our families, We do this for killed this generation.
We've run out of time to be afraid.
Joining us now is the legend Oliver Stone. He is the director of the creator of the new film Nuclear Now. It's a very important film which I believe everyone should see. Sarah, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it.
Nice to see you back again.
Saga.
Oh of course. So first of all, Oliver, you know we've heard a little bit from you and the Joe Rogan experience and more, but a big proponent of nuclear power and we wanted to have a discussion here to focus primarily to the skeptics of which some of you engage with in the film, and which you were kind enough in order to show me a few months ago. So first of all, just why did you decide to make this film?
Well, because the future, you know, it's I was concerned that we've been hearing so much about climate change and the changes in the in the atmosphere, so that you know the thing is that we're not dealing with it. There's a lot of talk and a lot of hyperbole. People say we're getting better, but we looked at all the facts. I read this book that we bought in I bought in nineteen twenty nineteen. It was called A Bright Future by Josh Goldstein and by Stefan Scovist, a
Swedish nuclear scientist. The book is very simple, lays out the facts where we came from in nineteen eighty, two thousand and now twenty twenty, period to twenty fifty and looking ahead, we just aren't going to make it. The atmosphere is going to get warmer, and we're not getting rid of the carbon dioxide pollution that's all over the world.
It's in the atmosphere and not year by year. It seems to climb a little bit now people talk about all these changes like renewables, wind and solar and hydropower changes, but you don't see the result in the graphs.
And the IPCC, the.
International Panel inter Government Panel on Climate Control, it's a un body. Many scientists are in it. It's a very solid organization. They've been right. They're nineteen eighty graphs, they're two thousand drafts. They were right on the money. From now, from two thousand and twenty twenty, things have not gotten better. We've spent billions of dollars, in fact, trillions of dollars
on renewables and it hasn't gotten better. So we're kidding ourselves and we really have to think seriously from two thousand and five fifty back to now, kind of be analytical about it. And that's what.
This book is.
And I wanted to put it into film terms because it's dry reading. But frankly, it's very difficult to to concretize science.
But that was a challenge for me. I think the movie speaks for itself.
It's very clear that nuclear is not the only answer, but certainly it's a backup. It's a backup, very important backup to what we're doing now. And this will really cut the CO two down because basically it's clean energy. It completely clean, it has no side effects. The problem with our presence solutions are we keep putting in renewables, but renewables don't work all the time because of the sun is not always out, it's night, it's winter. Certain
climates are better than other climates. As a result, we back it up with gas. And that's why the oil companies love gas because they call themselves the perfect partner for renewables. But what it is essentially gas leaks all along the line.
This is methane.
As we try to show in the film, it's invisible, you don't see it, but it's almost twenty five of the global warming problem is now methane. That's serious, right, So we have to get rid of the coal. We have to get rid of the oil, which is hard,
and we have to get rid of the gas. And the only way we can really do anything about this is to bring in an alternate energy like nuclear energy, which has been proven clean, reliable and scalable, scalable in a time frame that makes sense before twenty fifteen.
We recently had an RFK junior on the show. We actually asked him about nuclear power and One of the reasons that he gave for why he was opposed is that he says an insurance company would not be able to deliver them a policy. I'm curious what you make of that argument and of others who have good faith disagreements around nuclear power.
I admire Robert very much, in fact supporting it. I mean, his campaign is a breath of fresh air. He says things that don't get said in our culture. But on this issue, I think he's unfortunately behind the eight ball. We are really in a hole, and I think it's much darker than he knows or may know, and he's not facing up to the truth of this, which is it's bad news for everybody in the world. It's going to get much harder, and you have to take some chance.
You have to take some initiative. Nothing important, airline travel, all kinds of breakthroughs in medicine cannot occur without some kind of risk. Okay, so the insurance companies won't handle it well. So what, there's governments all over the world that can back up this issue. You don't need insurance companies, you need government cooperation and backup, as they have in all these big countries that are doing anything.
The most advanced people in nuclear energy.
Or China and Russia by far have Rosea TOM is a two hundred and fifty thousand man agency.
They do a great job not.
Only developed nuclear energy inside their own countries, but they export it to many countries who are willing to make arrangements with them. They put in turn key plants in places like Bangladesh, Turkey all over the world. China is building the most ferociously. Of course they have the most coal, but they are building as far as I know, committing four hundred and forty billion dollars to their program by nineteen.
By twenty and thirty eight, they expect to have one hundred and fifty new nuclear actors online, which means, in addition to this fifty sum that they have now, they're going to be the world's leader in nuclear reactors in terms of volume. That's quite significant. And President she has made a commitment to the United Nations that by twenty sixty.
He won't be a net zero in terms of emissions. It's a big statement.
I hope they can live up to it, because that would be the key the United States and China would be the key in terms of population key the biggest players here.
In terms of changing this changing the way we do business.
Oliver, what went wrong for the climate left in the nineteen seventies. You talk some about that in the film. Where did the missteps happen? And what were some of the dangerous myths that kind of became concretized in a lot of people's minds who do believe in climate change.
Whether I believed in it or not, some conservatives don't, It doesn't really matter. The point is we still must do the right thing, and nuclear energy is the right thing to do. It's cleanest energy of all, doesn't require backup.
That's very important. It's functioned self reliant on its own. Once you build a nuclear reactory, it last fifty to sixty sometimes seventy.
Years and very little maintenance. It's expensive at first, but it pays off in the end compared to what compared to what you have to keep asking compared to coal, compared to oil. Look at the damage from the all the waste it's in the atmosphere. All this is the responsibility of coal and oil and gas. We kept talking about the waste from nuclear nuclear plants, but that waste is nothing compared to the waste that we're facing now. The problem we have is waste. It's chemical waste, oil waste,
gas waste. So it's just it's illogical to the way that it's being argued. The point is serious, it's a serious issue, and we don't face up to it because the numbers don't. The numbers are staring us in the face. So you asked, what was the question you asked, M.
Sorry, just about what went wrong for people, oh, for the climate left in the nineteen seventies.
It's always a problem because you guys constant, a lot of people, a lot of news people concentrate on the pro nuclear anti nuclear argument, which is frankly senseless at this point because we're way beyond that. But in history, I think it will be written off as a great tragedy, a great tragedy, someone like the Kennedy killing, in the sense that we were going in the right direction. President Elisenhower is Adams for Peace program started the whole thing.
The John Kennedy supported it entirely. They were building in America that we were on target. Had we built about one hundred and some reactors, one hundred and five ten reactors, and we were maybe more, a little bit more, but we were on this on the road completely nuclearizing our society, or a lot of it. Let's say we'd gotten up to eighty percent, ninety percent of our society. But that was on the way. In the nineteen seventies early seventies. We coming off of the Navy's program. The Navy had
done initial work on nuclear submarines and tremendously successful. Him and rickover built submarines, and then he built the first civilian reactor for the government in shipping Port, Pennsylvania, had opened in nineteen fifty nine. Now that's important because, in other words, the Navy had set a pattern. Now, of course, with this military usage, they had enriched enriched uranium, which
is not what we're using for civilian nuclear plants. We're not going to enrich the urager and that's a big difference between it being a bomb and it the nuclear energy. You cannot blow up a nuclear energy plant, a generator, so a reactor rather. So we came to this place where the United States is really moving along and it's a and we showed in the film of the vision of his society, and what happens is that essentially the Rockefeller foundation starts the war. It's the oil company business.
John D.
Rockefeller's foundation. His son was running it at that time. Not his son, No, at that time they were both dead. But the Rockefeller Foundation had tipped the scale with a report published in the New York Times in nineteen fifty six saying that any amount of radiation, any amount of radiation is dangerous to the human body. Is significant because it got public republished in the New York Times. The
published for the New York Times. Needless to say, it was on the Rockefeller Foundation that puts the thumb on the scale. You don't need to advertise it, you just put it on the front page. It gets around radiation apparel to man, you know. Period. And that was the myth that kept going around and around and around. Even so, even the fact, even the fact that DNA had been discovered by Krick and Watson in England, and they had suggested and it's now been proved that DNA is repairing the body.
As we live.
We have a double we have a sense of a double person, double helix.
The DNA is a repair mechanism by which we continue to survive, and that includes radiation.
It repairs the radiation in your body. What people don't know is we walk around in radiation. Radiation is every day.
It's inside the studio, it's inside your banana when you eat it. If you live at a higher altitude, it's more radiation, et cetera, et cetera. It's everywhere in the world. It's a fact of life. The radiation has kept the earth warm since the beginning of time. It's a belt of energy. It's a belt of tremendous warfth and energy,
and it's a wonderful discovery. Riekoi discovered it in the eighteen ninety five, and she knew that they were on to a miracle energy here, that this was something different, that matter was energy. Einstein proved it in nineteen oh five. But then and Einstein was a big supporter of it. And then, of course we learned how to deal with
nuclear energy. By the time of nineteen thirties, we improved, and in nineteen forty or roughly there, Fermi Enrico Fermi on our US program, we've managed to show out of control radiation control the uranium and so that we could have a limited energy usage for civilian purposes. However, the war was on and what is the natural instinct in
war is to build the biggest bomb you can. So the unfortunately if timing was bad because energy, that energy was so valuable, but it was used to maximize the amount of damage that a bomb could do in the Hiroshima Nagasaki attacks, and those two bombs set off the fear of uranium and the fear forever of nuclear energy, which has really damaged to us because they're so different. As I said before, it's not nuclear energy is not enriched uranium.
Right, Yeah, they're completely different.
You do so the job playing out.
People will ever separate that, and they've confounded it ever since because of the word nuclear. We have a bunch of as you know, all those I grew up on horror movies in the nineteen fifties. Everything, every every mention of radiation was negative. Every Hollywood movie monsters, a radioactive spider could bite a man and he would be turned into Spider Man. There was all kinds of fantasies about it. And then the films in the nineteen seventies started to register,
which was the China syndrome comes along. It's a good film, chain fund, Jack Lemon, It's made at the same time as it comes out at the same time as the three Mile Island breaks in the news, and that was a scare. There had been a shutdown, but there was no animeltdown, but there was no release of radiation in the area. There was a containment structure that was built. So it was much hyped and scared to people, but there was absolutely no damage to the civilian population a mile.
It was a false accident, so to speak.
It was an accident, but it didn't get out of hand, and they deal with and they keep improving these reactors, obviously, but then, of course ten years later we have the Turnable or seven years later, nineteen eighty six. Turnable is the worst accident in nuclear history, the only accident where people died. Really unfortunately, it's that we don't know that.
We just feel the hysteria because again the film business, HBO made that horrible Churnable series of very successful, and it scared people.
It works.
You can scare people, that's the easiest thing to do. The hardest thing to do is to make them understand and believe yes, And that's always the problem with filmmakers. They have they tend to go the easier way out, so anyway, Turnable convinced people that this was a disaster, and of course many governments started to move in that direction. And then the Fukushima in two thousand and sixteen. I'm
sorry twenty twelve my dates. I think it was twelve. Yeah, it was another called a nuclear disaster, when in fact no one died the Japanese citizens. It was a there was a what they call a hydrogen explosion. It was a built the sea wall was too low, the backup generators were flooded, but no one died. The reason twenty thousand people died was from the tsunami in Japan. Tsunami was the worst they ran and the worst earthquake following
the worst earthquake they ra had. Twenty thousand people perished it and it was all called the nuclear disaster, which is a misnomer. So here we are reacting to all these hypothetical fears again from going back to the fear of radiation. Radiation we talk about in the film Radiation we live with. It's in our bodies. We go to the dentist, we get radiation. Huge amounts of radiation poured
into us. If you are a cancer patient, you obviously know what chemotherapy is in radiation and what it does to you, But it has been highly effective in those persons, and people don't die unless, say, get massive, massive doses of it. So we're running around scared as usual and misinformed.
Well luckily, though, Oliver, one of the things I thought was that your film would be a big c change. You're obviously, you know, a world famous filmmaker. You we're talking just now about the HBO series Chernobyl. You it took a lot of courage to get this film made, as you've said previously about how it was really difficult to do it, but ultimately always find a way to make the films that you want to make. Could you
talk about that process, and then about the reception? You know, as now that the film is out there, people are watching it. It's finally we consumed people like me. We're trying to get the word out about it. How have you seen thoughts minds began to change as you've got it out there?
Well, not yet, Frankly, and I'm hopeful, but it's a hard process to change public Well, Frankly, let me just tell you that in America, the polling revealed that sixty percent of the population is pro nuclear development.
So it's happening, but very slowly and.
Not fast enough in the terms of this deadline we're facing twenty fifteen. The film unfortunately was not supported by this, udios or this or that. Nothing nuclear has ever been positive from the film business, so this was against the grain as always, and like with the JFK series, no official distribution came our way.
We were turned down.
And I think this is because the issue is considered a controversial one, not that it is because it's factual, but it's considered controversial, and then people back away from it because they don't want to have all the you know, all the pressure that comes on corporations and so forth, and so much it's getting out there. I would give it away for free if I could, but there are some investors in the film and they're good people. But
you know it's going around. We're on Amazon Prime, we're on the Apple Network where number we were number one last week in documentaries, so you know it will get around. But unfortunately we have to go country by country. But we have foreign salesmen will I was in Korea recently, because they're in a very critical position. I would there are they are reopening. They were the best, one of
the best countries. Standardized, standardized, they built standardized nuclear actors, and they kept going and they were doing good work. And then they had a movie too, Pandora, which scared them. After the Fukushima thing. They turned it into a major catastrophe and people got scared, so they closed down for a few years. And as a result, you lose it, you lose a trained workforce, which is very important to keep going.
However, Korea and.
Japan are coming back online, and you know, there's other countries that are key here.
Indonesia's a key country.
India's going nuclear and much more so than before, although they have a huge coal problem.
The key countries. We've got to keep working at this. I guess I will be devoted to this for.
Many years in terms of going around and talking about it until it happens.
But it's it's it's it's it's for our children. You know.
I don't know why people are so waste so much time arguing about nuclear because it's a waste of time compared to what the oil companies and the coal companies and the gas companies are doing to us.
Yeah, it's fear, it's predominantly fear so. I final question, Oliver, is just if there's one thing that you could get people watching this to do, what would it be other than watching the film? In terms of spreading the word about nuclear.
That's all you can do, right, I guess you spread the word. You talk this word about what's wrong with clear nothing's wrong with it. That's the point. It's working. And we have to realize that. We talk about all these other solutions and we're all for that. I mean, it'd be great if we get someone came up with a solution that was working ninety percent or one hundred percent of the time, but none of them are and
none of them provide the scale and the volume. We're not talking about making you know, a cell phone or an electric car. Here, we're talking about a continent size need of energy. I mean, you have no idea what's coming the Africa, Asia, the South America. They're going to want the same things we have. They want electricity first, and they're going to get it. In addition to electricity, we have to look at the other issues, which are not just electricity.
We have a huge part of our energy.
Consumption goes into cars, transportation, trains, we have to get them off off their energies and into some form of liquid liquid energy that would be safe. Nuclear in combination with hydrogen and carbon it is a very likely solution.
And I was at the Idaho Lab in.
America here and they're working very hard to break through on the hydrogen front, what they call green hydrogen. But that's with nuclear hydrogen, where it's not with gas background. So it's important that hydrogen go in this direction. And I think that with nuclear these scientists are really and there are many young scientists, I have to say, and
women too, many women's sideus I saw working. This is an important new field and hopefully America will develop a new generation of young people working trained in this business. And I think that's happening, but slowly America is not putting enough money into it. The government is bipartisan, there's no question that. From Obama, Bush, Trump, Biden, they keep supporting nuclear, but they don't give it the lung space, the word of mouth that it needs to get going.
They talk about all these false solutions.
I think, well, I think you've done such an excellent service to the public, and I encourage everybody to go watch the film. We're going to have the links into our description. It's always just such a pleasure to talk to you. You're such a visionary, not only on this issue, but on many others that are so important JFK, Foreign Affairs and so much more so. Thank you, Oliver. We always appreciate your time.
Thank you.
Cigarette absolutely