Oliver Stone Goes Nuclear
We talk to legendary director Oliver Stone about his new film Nuclear Now, what he thinks about his critics, and why he sees nuclear energy as a key solution to climate change.
A cooling tower at the Constellation Nine Mile Point Nuclear Station in Scriba, New York, on May 9, 2023. (Lauren Petracca / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
- Interview by
- Ed Rampell
Oliver Stone’s brand is antiestablishment controversy. In his features and documentaries, Stone has blazed a trail as a cinematic scourge of the status quo. Platoon (1986), the Vietnam War veteran’s unflinching, grunt’s-eye view of that imperial debacle, won the Best Picture Academy Award, while Stone scored the golden statuette for Best Director. That year, Stone was also nominated in a screenwriting category for Platoon, as well as for his excoriating look at the Ronald Reagan regime’s Central America foreign policy and mass murder in Salvador.
Stone tackled the “greed is good” capitalist class in 1987’s Wall Street and the extremist right wing in 1988’s Talk Radio. The combat vet returned to Vietnam’s battlefields to win another Best Director Oscar and Best Picture nomination for 1989’s Born on the Fourth of July, a stirring ode to antiwar activism. The iconoclastic JFK (1991) received eight Oscar noms, including for Best Picture and Director, and forever shattered the myth of the Warren Commission’s “lone gunman theory,” pointing a finger at CIA and right-wing renegades for conspiring to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.
Although lesser known than his fiction movies, Stone’s documentaries — about Castro, Hugo Chávez, and Yasser Arafat; 2012’s The Untold History of the United States; and so on — helped solidify his reputation as, arguably, Hollywood’s most left-wing director. But now Stone is going against the grain with his latest nonfiction film. In Nuclear Now, Stone makes a frontal assault on the underlying beliefs of antinuclear activists, arguing that nuclear energy is a solution to the climate crisis.
Stone recently spoke with Jacobin about why he made Nuclear Now, the film’s funding, Three Mile Island, alternative energy, and more, including his next film, chronicling the life of another progressive leader, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
How did the recipient of a Purple Heart and creator of some of the best antiwar films ever made observe Memorial Day?
I went to Austin to be on The Joe Rogan Show. It’s very important – [the podcast] has a huge audience.
So how did Nuclear Now come about?
I was scared. In the 2006 movie [An Inconvenient Truth by] Al Gore, I was obviously conscious that he was giving solutions to the problems of clime change. But I was confused by the many different sides I was hearing. It was confusing — and I wanted to straighten it out for myself. I saw a book in 2019 that was well reviewed in the New York Times by Richard Rhodes: it was called A Bright Future. It was written by Josh Goldstein, an emeritus professor of international relations, and by a nuclear scientist named Staffan A. Qvist, from Sweden. It was a small little book, but it was simple and commonsensical. Common sense is important. It was very different in the sense that it was saying: “What’s wrong with nuclear power?”
Because that’s all you had heard for many years. I didn’t know; I just went along with the consensus that nuclear power was a bad thing. But when you read the book, you begin to understand that it is not a bad thing — it has been confounded with nuclear war; war and power are not the same thing — and that we have lost, bypassed a great opportunity, in America anyway, [compared to] if we had followed through on “Atoms for Peace,” what presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy had started in the 1950s and ’60s.
Nuclear power was working. It worked for many years with the Navy, with Hyman Rickover, and then he transferred his acumen to building civilian power stations. Shippingport, Pennsylvania, was the first one in the United States; in 1958 and 1959 it came online. Many of those same reactors are still going; they’re called “legacy reactors,” but they’re almost finished now. But they worked seventy years [laughs], and nobody complained.
Except there was a scare at Three Mile Island, where no one died, and in fact, the containment structure worked. But a lot of hysteria and brouhaha — as you know, I’m not a guy who believes in passion, necessarily, when it’s wrong. You’ve got to call it out; I wanted the truth, and this is the truth.
I’ve been talking to many scientists. I went to Idaho National Laboratory; I went to France, and I went to Russia and talked to a lot of people. It’s all a lot of hooey from a lot of scared types who love to tell you what’s wrong with everything. You’ve got to scale it down and say, “Relative to what?” Relative to climate change — coal, oil, and gas?
In Nuclear Now, you criticize the fossil fuel energy industry for spreading disinformation regarding climate change. Did the nuclear industry have anything to do with the funding of Nuclear Now?
No, no, no. This was done with private investors. And the nuclear industry [laughs] has not done a very good job defending itself, if you look at the history. It has had no sense of fighting back. When Jane Fonda and Ralph Nader started their attacks, there was no really interesting response from the industry. It kind of folded up. Which was a shame, because I think when history is written, if we presume the planet will survive, and there’ll be a civilization, and I’d very much like. . . . I am an optimist. When this is written, they’ll say: “This was a huge mistake in the 1970s to stop building nuclear reactors in the United States.” Thank God they did not stop in Russia or China or France, which has kept it going.
But as we said in the film, “It’s too good to die. You cannot kill it off.” The United States is now slowly getting back into, of course, smaller reactors and more modern, new-generation reactors. There’s a lot promise. But the big building is still going on in China, Indonesia, Eurasia, India and so on.
You mentioned Three Mile Island. There are disputed accounts of what happened there. For example, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists says there was a 64 percent increase in cancer after the meltdown, and activists like Harvey Wasserman make similar claims. What’s your response?
There’s always some — excuse me — protesters who will say, “I saw this and I saw that,” but I’m going off of the facts from the World Health Organization and the United Nations. They do very thorough surveys, and they go back and go back. No one died as a result of Three Mile Island. If someone got cancer, we don’t know that it was a result of Three Mile Island. You can scare anybody about anything.
Why doesn’t Harvey Wasserman go to all the fucking oil wells and all the gas and coal plants and do his horror number? I saw his clip, and I think he’s a scaremonger. He’s like a Ralph Nader, who to this day will still tell you that nuclear is very dangerous and that it can blow up Cleveland and all that. It’s just not possible. You cannot confound nuclear power with nuclear war. It’s not the same thing. They have not enriched the plutonium; it’s not dangerous in the same way. It’s a different process.
In Nuclear Now, you have lots of archival footage with clips of antinuclear activists. But correct me if I’m wrong: you, Oliver Stone, did not per se do any original interviews for your film, which made it onto the screen, with antinuclear protesters.
No, in the same way that I didn’t in my JFK documentaries interview the people who defend the Warren Commission. There’s so much defense out there — you can go to their interviews. I’m not trying to run a debate society; I’m trying to run a fact-oriented science, where it says this is what scientists say. It’s not what protesters say. I hope you understand there’s also an issue of time and clarity. I had a lot of ground to cover— I couldn’t cover everything.
But I had to go, from the past, what is nuclear energy? Through the history of it, from the origin, through the protest movements of the ’70s, which is a part of it, then what happened in the 1980s and ’90s, then I got into the Al Gore debate about renewables — it’s a long way to go — and the future of nuclear energy. That took an hour and forty-four [minutes], and that’s pretty much at the edge of the attention span of most people. I wanted this film to play for ninth graders, eighth graders. I wanted it to not be too wonky.
You used the word “debate.” Wasserman has challenged you to a debate.
I didn’t know.
I’m going to quote what he told me about Nuclear Now, and I’d like your response.
What did he say?
“It’s the most dishonest, dangerous, dishonorable film I’ve ever seen. [Stone chuckles.] It’s the Triumph of the Will of the nuclear industry. It’s an abomination.” What’s your response.
He’s insane, I think. [Laughs.] I don’t know where he’s coming from. I don’t know the man. He should have a debate with the coauthor of the book, Josh Goldstein, I think, rather than me, because I’m sure he’s got all his arguments, as do some of the other people from that world. It’s not my duty to debate them. I’ve been interpreting a book that I bought. I believe the book; I’ve talked to people at Idaho — that’s who you should be talking to. People who have worked with nuclear and deal with it all the time and who have built these plants.
Where does he come from? He’s an amateur in this world. People who work with nuclear know it. They know these things. And you can’t argue with a guy who’s a zealot.
Most of Nuclear Now deals with fission; I know at the end you start to talk about fusion.
We went from fission . . . at the end we talk about fusion. We talk about the time period from 2020 to 2050. That’s our concern, that thirty-year IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] prediction. Fusion has not worked out yet. I went to Livermore back in 2003 or so, and I saw the fusion experiments. I know there’s been lots of new work, and I just saw Dennis Whyte over at MIT Lab, who’s working very promisingly in plasma fusion, and it’s really interesting work. But it still doesn’t seem to be something practical for this point in time. It might well come into being by 2050 and be the answer to all of our problems for the rest of this century. That would be ideal. We’re all for it.
I just returned from Germany. From the air and from the Rhine, you can see solar and windmills everywhere, very widespread.
Wonderful. We’re not against it. It’s ok. The problem is renewables don’t work all the time. The maximum capacity so far in Germany of wind is something like 25 percent, and wind has helped Germany. Solar is much less successful: about 11, 10 percent capacity. That means it’s not working most of the time. So what do they do? They bring in gas to back up wind and solar.
Gas, as we explain in the film, is methane. Methane is horrible for the climate. Nobody really talks about methane, and it’s invisible pollution. We show it in the film with an infrared camera. It’s deadly. Although it wears off ultimately, it has very bad short-term effects. So it contributes to pollution, to the warming of the planet. As such, it’s not the perfect solution — it’s the worst solution, next to coal. More coal is worse. But that works for advertising purposes, to say we’re a perfect partner for renewables. People don’t realize it’s methane. It’s certainly better than coal, but there’s no question we need to go back to nuclear in a big way.
Before we wrap up, I want to touch on the question of radioactive waste.
Waste is the most monitored, supervised industry of all. There’s nothing like it. Compare it to gas, to coal. The waste from those is all over the country. There’s leakage from methane. There’s the oil. In terms of, compared to what? Nobody has died from it. It’s intense and a relatively small amount. After seventy years, they could put all of it into a Walmart, according to some scientists I’ve talked to. It’s not a huge amount. Radioactive decay kicks in; 99 percent of it is over by forty years in. Right now, they cool [the waste] in water and they put it in concrete and steel casks; it’s good for a hundred years. And then you could even move it over to another hundred years on another one.
People like we’re talking about, people who are against it, are talking about a million years, ten thousand years. There’s no end to their concern, but the point is radioactive waste decays, and most of it is not harmful at a certain point. And it’s watched very carefully; it’s actually an advantage of this industry. Also, there’s a new development with a lot of the reactors burning the waste, using the waste. The one in Russia, the breeder reactor, and other reactors in France are burning the waste.
What’s next for Oliver Stone?
[Laughs.] What’s next for the world, you should be asking. This is important for my children, for your children, for grandchildren; it’s really the future. We have to really think how we get energy, and we’re not doing that in a sober, analytical way. We’re listening to too many nutcases who told us it’s no good. We have to be positive, because this is important. Nuclear energy was a gift from the gods — think of it that way. From the very beginning, we’ve had nuclear energy in the world. What Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, and Enrico Fermi did was bring it to our attention.
Unfortunately, the climax of it came in World War II, and it was used to build a bomb, in a separate process. But Fermi proved we could control, through his rods, the power in the radium. That is an amazing scientific breakthrough,. That’s what Eisenhower understood. Those people who doubt Eisenhower would say, “Well, he was using that to cover for building more and more bombs” — and he did build bombs, ok. I fault him for that.
But at the same time, he did have an idealistic vision of the future, a world powered by nuclear energy. America would not be in this hole it is in now. We’d have a thousand nuclear plants, at least five hundred. We have to build; that’s the important thing. And we have to build fast and on the assembly line, like planes. That’s the message we’re trying to give.
You’re nearing completion of a documentary about [Luiz Inácio] Lula [da Silva]. When can we look forward to seeing that?
That’s right, hopefully before the end of the year. As you know, I had him in the other films with Hugo Chávez. And of course, he’s gotten a very dramatic story, with his going to jail after his second term. Now he’s back — he’s won a third term. It’s quite a story. He’s a wonderful man.