A particularly startling crack in this otherwise unified front surfaced a few years ago when James Lovelock, a hardened environmentalist who would routinely leave climate change critics frothing at their mouths, came out with a full-throated exhortation in favor of nuclear energy. Since the 1980s, the nuclear freeze movement aligned with other environmental concerns has turned environmentalists into nuclear's staunchest critics.
And in " Pandora's Promise", a clear-eyed and balanced film about the benefits of nuclear power, director Robert Stone introduces a cast of unlikely defenders of this awesome source of energy: environmentalists. Yet there have always been those who have nurtured and promoted a realistic vision of nuclear energy in which nuclear weapons are no more than a semi-colon in the book of history. The psychologist Paul Slovic, one of the world's leading experts in the psychology of risk perception, has written how, when asked to imagine the consequences of a serious accident in a nuclear reactor, many people conjure up horrific and chimeric images much more akin to a nuclear weapons attack. Since then nuclear energy has been irrevocably associated with nuclear weapons. As it happened, it was not Shippingport but Hiroshima that got seared into the public consciousness. It is one of the great might-have-beens to contemplate the impact of nuclear energy on our thinking had it been gradually brought into this world through peaceful means. Instead it was delivered kicking and screaming on Auginto the imagination of men and women by a blinding flash, a cloud of radioactive fallout and a blast wave that turned people into shrapnel-laden lumps of flesh and bone. This is not how nuclear energy was introduced to the world. President Truman's speech is considered a landmark in history, the moment when the most revolutionary energy source mankind has known was introduced to the public and a golden age of energy sufficiency and prosperity was inaugurated. A single pound of uranium provides the equivalent of 2 millions pounds of coal. The fuel used in the reactor is the element uranium. This nuclear reactor draws its power from the splitting of atoms, a mechanism which has been part of the basic workings of the universe since the beginning of time. At exactly 6 PM the next day, famed physicist Albert Einstein will press a lever in a factory in California which will start a machine called a "nuclear reactor", a revolutionary new device that produces electricity in unprecedented quantity. On the morning of August 6, 1945, a stunning announcement is broadcast over the radio by President Harry Truman. People are looking for something - anything - that will give them hope. Germany and Japan have been defeated, a terrible war has drawn to a close and the world seems to be at peace again.