BY RON JACOBS
Janice Haaken’s new film Atomic Bamboozle: The False Promise of a Nuclear Renaissance begins with a nuclear engineer stating that if he were “czar of the world,” he would ban nuclear weapons and all other uses with the possible exception of research. That comment is almost immediately followed by an overconfident and smiling former Texas governor and Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry, introducing what he calls the millennial brain trust of nuclear energy. The haughty self-assuredness of the young people in this “brain trust” is apparent in their business suits and well-fed faces. This group, Perry tells us, will “make nuclear energy cool again.”
The film is about what nuclear energy and its supplicant media tell us is a nuclear renaissance. As Attorney Greg Kafoury makes clear, not even two minutes in, this so-called renaissance is nothing but the same old routine where the industry and government pretend they have come up with solutions to the problem of nuclear waste storage. This solution then turns out to be letting future generations deal with it, which is no solution. Like so many other ongoing issues related to climate change and capitalism, Atomic Bamboozle makes it very clear that the pursuit of the dollar trumps all other possibilities.