Here is a film that returns us to a thorny revisionist subject which I haven’t seen aired in documentary form since the film Pandora’s Promise in 2013 – which isn’t mentioned here, though a poster for it is visible in one shot. For many environmentalists, the last realistic hope we have to avert climate disaster is the great unthinkable, the great unmentionable: stop worrying and learn to love nuclear energy, because nuclear is a colossally efficient and very clean energy source.
Like Pandora’s Promise, Atomic Hope revisits the case studies of Chornobyl and Fukushima and argues that, although clearly catastrophic, a mythology of horror has grown up around these events that has stymied all debate and shut down thought. The film doesn’t say so, but another way the eco-nuclear movement became tainted was perhaps a speech by Margaret Thatcher to the UN general assembly which made the case in 1989, partly to undermine the coal industry as a trade union powerbase.
