The Breaking the Waves stars have boarded the five-part miniseries about the 1986 nuclear disaster in Ukraine with Mad Men star Jared Harris, the Hollywood Reporter has confirmed.
Chernobyl will see Watson play the role of a Soviet nuclear physicist looking to solve the mystery beyond the natural disaster, while Skarsgard will perform the role of a Soviet-era bureaucrat in the energy ministry. Watson and Skarsgard co-starred in Lars Von Trier’s 1996 drama Breaking the Waves, which earned Watson a best actress Oscar nomination.
Harris was earlier announced to star as Valery Legasov, the Soviet scientist chosen by the Kremlin to investigate the accident. The Chernobyl project dramatizes the true story of one of the worst man-made catastrophes in history, and tells of the brave men and women who sacrificed to save Europe from unimaginable disaster.
The limited series is described as a “a tale of lies and cowardice, of courage and conviction, of human failure and human nobility,” that will look closely at how and why the nuclear disaster happened as well as the heroes who fought and fell during that time.
Craig Mazin (The Huntsman: Winter’s War) will write and Johan Renck (Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead), will direct.Mazin will exec produce with Carolyn Strauss (Game of Thrones) and Jane Featherstone (Broadchurch), with Renck and Chris Fry (Humans) attached to co-exec produce.
The project continues HBO’s investing in miniseries and limited series, and comes several months after the cabler struck a $250 million production partnership with Sky. The two had previously worked together on the Jude Law-starrer The Young Pope, which has been renewed for a second season.
Watson is repped by UTA and Independent Talent Group, while Skarsgard is repped by ICM Partners and Curtis Brown Group.
The City of St. Louis has a little known nuclear past as a uranium-processing center for the Atomic bomb. Government and corporate negligence led to the dumping of Manhattan Project uranium, thorium, and radium, thus contaminating North St. Louis suburbs, specifically in two communities: those nestled along Coldwater Creek – and in Bridgeton, Missouri adjacent to the West Lake-Bridgeton landfill. Another tragic and bizarre occurrence has been unfolding in Bridgeton, Missouri. In 1973, approximately 47,000 tons of the same legacy radioactive waste was moved from Latty Avenue and was illegally dumped into a neighborhood landfill named West Lake. This landfill became an EPA Superfund site in 1990. For the last seven years, an uncontrolled, subsurface fire has been moving towards an area where the radioactive waste was buried. Atomic Homefront is a case study of how citizens are confronting state and federal agencies for the truth about the extent of the contamination and are fighting to keep their families safe.
USA, 2016, Director: Justin Clifton, Documentary, 12 min, English
In southeastern Utah, not far from many of America’s famed national parks, lies America’s last remaining uranium mill. After more than 36 years in operation, the leaders of the nearby Ute Mountain Ute Tribe’s White Mesa community worry that lax regulations and aging infrastructure are putting their water supply, and their way of life, at risk. Trailer: https://vimeo.com/161080821(link is external)
India, 2017, Director Shri Prakash, Documentary, English, 66 min
The American Southwest—especially the sovereign Indigenous nations of Acoma, Laguna, and the Diné or Navajo Nation—has a long history of uranium mining. Once home to a booming economy and proudly called the Uranium Capital of the World, these Indian reservations and poor White communities are now littered with old mines, tailings dams, and other uranium contamination, which is the legacy of this deadly industry. On the Navajo Nation alone, there are more than 500 abandoned uranium mine sites that need to be addressed. This film explores how colonialism, which came to the Southwest with Spanish conquest, has changed face in modern time, as it is played out in a new quest for mineral resources. Contaminated land, water, and air have left these poor communities helpless. Their efforts to gain justice have failed. Indigenous and poverty-stricken communities who suffered the most are trapped and exploited, as new mining companies continue to disregard the health and environment of these people with the lure of a better economy, jobs and new In Situ Leach uranium mining methods. Unfortunately, this is the same sad story repeated in other parts of the world including India, but in India it is the government itself undertaking the enterprise and repeating the same degradation in Jadugoda (Jharkhand).
SHRI PRAKASH is the first filmmaker from Jharkhand to bring a National Award in 2008 for his film ‘Buru Gara’ also his regional language fiction film ‘Baha’ received first international award for the state 2010. Using audio visual medium as a tool for social transformation and empowerment, National Award winner film maker, teaching film studies in St. Xavier’s College, Ranchi. https://www.facebook.com/Shriprakash23(link is external)
USA, 2018, Director Louis Berry, Producer Louis Berry, Documentary, 12:30 min, English
Tale of a Toxic Nation is the story of a nation rich in resources but weak in political influence. The Navajo Reservation has been left with over 500 abandoned uranium mines, toxic surroundings and an impossible clean up. The story has never been more relevant under an administration threatening to reinstate uranium mining in the area. https://vimeo.com/258337365(link is external)
Australia, 2015, Produced and Directed by Kim Mavromatis and Quenten Agius, MAV Media
in Association with NITV (National Indigenous TV Australia). Documentary, 5 min, Australian English and Australian Aboriginal (Antikirrinya), English subtitles Trailer: https://vimeo.com/119231410(link is external)
In the 1950’s and 1960’s the Australian government authorised British Nuclear testing at Emu Field and Maralinga in Outback South Australia. We journey with Antikirrinya Elder, Ingkama Bobby Brown to his homelands in outback South Australia where he explains the legacy of living with British Nuclear testing – how he witnessed the first tests on the Australian mainland at Emu Field (1953) and experienced the devastating affects of radioactive fallout on his family, people and country. This is the first time Bobby has spoken out about what he witnessed when he was a boy – what happened to his family and country and the people who went missing – during British Nuclear testing. British Nuclear testing was a breach of the King’s Letters Patent, the founding document that established the state of South Australia (1836), which granted Aboriginal people the legal right to occupy and enjoy their land for always. How could they occupy and enjoy their land when their land was being blown up and irradiated by nuclear fallout. www.kingsseal.cosm.au (link is external)
UK, 2017, Directors Joshua Portway and Lise Autogena, Producer Lise Autogena, Documentary, 30 min, Danish and Greenlandic with English subtitles, Trailer: https://vimeo.com/214697146(link is external)
Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway’s film Kuannersuit / Kvanefjeld is a work in-progress, forming the first part of the artists’ long-term investigation into the conflicts facing the small, mostly indigenous, community of Narsaq in southern Greenland. Narsaq is located next to the pristine Kvanefjeld mountain; site of one of the richest rare earth mineral resources deposits in the world, and one of the largest sources of uranium. Greenland is a former colony of Denmark, which is now recognised as an “autonomous administrative division” of Denmark, supported economically by the Danish state. Many people see exploitation of mineral deposits as the only viable route to full independence. For generations the farming near Kvanefjeld has been Greenland’s only agricultural industry. This way of life may soon be threatened, as Greenland considers an open pit mine proposed by Greenland Minerals and Energy, an Australian company. The mine would be the fifth-largest uranium mine and second-biggest rare earth extraction operation in the world. Autogena and Portway’s film portrays a community divided on the issue of uranium mining. It explores the difficult decisions and trade-offs faced by a culture seeking to escape a colonial past and define its own identity in a globalised world.
‘Atomic Homefront’ unboxes the cruel consequences of Missouri’s radioactive landfill, The Daily Dot Kahron Spearman—Feb 18
The film takes a human look into a St. Louis-area radioactive landfill that dates back to the Manhattan Project. Cammisa runs down the intertwining and harrowing paths of Bridgeton, Missouri, residents, and those living near the Coldwater Creek floodplain, which flows downstream from the nuclear landfill……..
Because there isn’t any official evidence—or any that the government will admit to—supporting a causal relationship between the radiation and the extraordinary rates of various cancers, pulmonary di – wepons before peopleseases, and multiple sclerosis, the residents exist on a shifting plate, tottering white-hot anger and unparalleled astonishment toward the federal authorities. The film is well-researched given that there’s an open, yet silent antagonism toward those seeking purpose by pushing back on the government’s “science” about the radiation exposure. …..
In the end, the critical takeaway remains the government’s dark submission to weapons. The human impact in the film is maddening and undeniable, begging for some exploration into the awful self-evidence of our defense apparatus: We need these weapons, so whatever collateral damage arises is for the good of the country. Yes, even your cancer.
The Uranium Film Festival & The Perils of Nuclear Power, Clean Tecnica, December 27th, 2017, by Carolyn Fortuna , “……..The International Uranium Film Festival is dedicated to all films about nuclear power and its associated risks of radioactivity. This educational event merges art, ecology, environmentalism, and environmental justice as it informs the public about uranium mining and milling, nuclear power issues, nuclear weapons, and the nuclear fuel cycle. The dynamic media of film and video allow organizers and festival participants to educate and activate the international public as it brings together cultures and generations around the effects of radioactivity and radioactive materials.
Founded in 2010 in Rio de Janeiro by Norbert Suchanek and Marcia Gomes de Oliveira, the visual exhibition has traveled to nine countries around the world and has successfully organized about 60 Uranium Film Festivals. The films typically have content that critiques and analyzes uranium mining, milling, and use and the effects those processes have on land, water, and human health. The dialogue that results, hopefully, can lead to a more peaceful, healthy future and hold promise to promote a safe, sustainable future without nuclear risks……..
Uranium is radioactive and can therefore increase the likelihood of cancer in exposed individuals.
Uranium is a heavy metal that can have toxic effects (primarily on the kidneys) if it enters the bloodstream through ingestion or inhalation.
Depleted uranium hexafluoride (depleted UF6). UF6 can react with moisture in the air to produce HF, a corrosive gas that can damage the lungs if inhaled.
In addition to the radiological and chemical health risks associated with depleted UF6 cylinders, there are also risks of industrial accidents and transportation-related accidents during handling, storage, or transport of depleted UF6.
In addition to the radiological and chemical health risks associated with depleted UF6 cylinders, there are also risks of industrial accidents and transportation-related accidents during handling, storage, or transport of depleted UF6.
The Atomic Age nuclear world has produced millions of metric tons of high-level, low-level, and intermediate-level radioactive waste during the past sixty years. This waste will remain hazardous for over 100,000 years. The Union of Concerned Scientists reminds us that the 2011 accident at Fukushima was a wake-up call about the vulnerability of nuclear power plants to natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods.
We are at a turning point in which many investors are shying away from fossil fuels as energy sources due to their imminent status as stranded assets because of the serious risk they pose to our health and our environment. Shockingly, however, nuclear power is gaining appeal for investors looking for a fast return. Nuclear power is being pitched by some financial planners as “necessary” and — are you ready for it? — “actually good for the environment.”
Solar power, wind power, geothermal power, hybrid and electric cars, and aggressive energy efficiency are climate solutions that are safer, cheaper, faster, more secure, and less wasteful than nuclear power. The Uranium Film Festival can help people around the world to understand how our transition from fossil fuels to an equally dangerous source is not a climate solution.
The Uranium Film Festival honors the best and most important films about uranium with trophies produced by Brazilian waste-material-artist Getúlio Damado, who lives and works in Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro.
Submissions to the Next Uranium Film Festival
The upcoming International Uranium Film Festivals planned for 2018 are in Rio de Janeiro (May/June 2018) and in Berlin (October 2018). If you’re interested in submitting an entry to the 2018 Uranium Film Festival, be sure that you restrict your narrative to productions dealing with nuclear power, radioactivity, and the use of radioactive elements like uranium.
Sample subjects are:……..
The Thinking Behind the Uranium Film Festival
The Festival’s must-see documentaries and movies that are rarely shown in TV or in film theaters give nuclear filmmakers a global audience. A further important achievement of the Festival is a first-ever film archive and documentation center dedicated to all films about the nuclear fuel chain and radioactivity: the Atomic Cinematheque, or the Yellow Archive.
Every year, the Festival receives new invitations from all over the world to introduce its films to other cities and countries like Australia, Greenland, Tanzania, Spain, or Scotland. This is only possible through the kindness of donations from like-minded concerned individuals and other non-profit organizations. The organizers do kindly ask for your support, welcoming any donation and distribution.
The Uranium Film Festival is a project against forgetting and ignoring. The horror of atomic bombs and uranium weapons, and nuclear accidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Goiânia, or now Fukushima, should never be forgotten — nor repeated. https://cleantechnica.com/2017/12/27/uranium-film-festival-perils-nuclear-power/
A Star Psychiatrist Swerves From Nuclear Armageddon To Climate Change,Robert Jay Lifton studied Nazi doctors and the threat of nuclear annihilation. But global warming changed everything. Huffington Post , Alexander C. KaufmanBusiness & Environment Reporter, HuffPost 27/11/2017 NEW YORK ― Robert Jay Lifton has spent his life trying to understand some of the most unfathomable milestones of the 20th century.
The famed psychiatrist and author started his career in the mid-1950s studying Chinese government-sponsored brainwashing, or “thought reform.” In the ’60s, he began interviewing survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, becoming obsessed with how the human mind copes with the possibility of nuclear annihilation. By the late ’70s, he turned his focus to the doctors responsible for the Nazi regime’s human experiments, men who occupy a uniquely revolting niche in popular culture.
At 91 years old, he has arrived at his most daunting subject yet: climate change. In his latest book, The Climate Swerve, Lifton examines humanity’s struggle to understand what’s happening, how to deal with it, and why powerful people and institutions sabotage attempts to avoid destruction of the planet.
“The climate threat is the most all-encompassing threat that we human beings face,” Lifton said in an interview last month. He walks hunched with a cane now, but sports a mop of long, wavy white hair. He peered through dark, thick-rimmed glasses out the window of a book-stacked office in his modest Upper West Side apartment, located just blocks from Trump Tower. “The nuclear threat is parallel to it in many ways … but the climate threat includes everything.”
In other parts of the world, little doubt exists over the similarities between nuclear weapons and climate change, which Lifton calls the “apocalyptic twins.” The Marshall Islands served as a U.S. testing site for atomic weapons throughout the 20th century. The Pacific archipelago nation bears the scars of that experience today, with entire islands vaporized in hydrogen bomb blasts and high rates of cancer linked to radioactive contamination. Now the country struggles with rapidly rising sea levels, which swallow large habitable areas, make storms more destructive, and salinate freshwater supplies necessary to farm breadfruit, a staple crop.
The phrase “climate swerve” gives name to the increasingly ubiquitous sense of awareness that global warming is happening, and humans have something to do with it……..
“I consider the climate serve a movement toward the recognition of climate danger and what I call species awareness ― awareness of ourselves as a single species in deep trouble,” Lifton said. “The swerve is toward that recognition, that consciousness.”………
I came upon the idea of malignant normality in studying Nazi doctors. If a Nazi doctor was assigned to Auschwitz, it was normal, it was expected of him that he would do the selections of Jews for the gas chamber. Take a leading role in the killing process in a reversal of healing.
With climate change and nuclear weapons, there is also a malignant normality. With nuclear weapons, it’s that the weapons should be stockpiled, maybe even used if necessary because that’s the way you carry through deterrence. Deterrence always carries a willingness to use them in certain conditions. So therefore we should be ready with our duck-and-cover drills to carry out a nuclear war, survive it, win it and carry on with life. These are absurdities that became part of nuclear normality…….
With climate, climate normality was in the everyday practice. We were born into climate normality. This is the world which we entered and in which we live now and which continues. If we allow it to continue as it is now, it will result in the end of human civilization within the present century. I came to the idea of malignant normality that has to be exposed for its malignancy. Intellectuals and professionals have a particular role, what I call witnessing professionals, bear witness to the malignancy, the danger, of what’s being put forward to us as normal and as the only way to behave. That’s happening more but we need a lot of additional expression of resistance on the part of intellectuals in protest and activism.
‘It’s heartbreaking to see how people fled and left all their belongings behind,’ says Bob Thissen
Jon Sharman A film team that specialises in surreptitiously accessing abandoned places has produced new footage showing the ghost towns left behind after the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
The trailer for “Abandoned Fukushima”, a new series by the Exploring the Unbeaten Path group, shows cobweb-covered supermarkets still filled with 2011-era products and classrooms where children’s bags and coats are still hanging.
The area was ravaged by a huge 9.0-magnitude earthquake in March of that year, which led to successive meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station. Thousands of residents were forced to evacuate and exclusion zones remain in place.
In the most dangerous areas access is restricted and people travelling through are not allowed to stay overnight.
But the film crew, led by Dutchman Bob Thissen, captured handheld and drone footage of the abandoned, irradiated areas while dodging police and constantly measuring contamination levels.
“It’s heartbreaking to see how people fled and left all their belongings behind,” Mr Thissen told RT. New episodes in the Fukushima series will be posted to YouTube.
Mr Thissen has previously made headlines for sneaking into the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and filming the rusting hulks of abandoned Buran space shuttles created by the Soviet Union.
Off Country: A Multimedia Documentary Feature, KICK STARTER
A multimedia oral history project examining landscapes of nuclear weapons testing and anti-nuclear activism in the American Southwest.
About this project
For the past two years we have traveled throughout Colorado and New Mexico, interviewing activists and community members whose lives have been impacted by the nuclear weapons industry. We have listened to stories both heartbreaking and inspiring. We have heard about calling into work sick to go on a Backcountry Action in Nevada to stop an underground nuclear weapons test, about quitting your job to dedicate your life full-time to shutting down Rocky Flats, and we have heard about sickness, death, and imprisonment. In the face of both adversity and triumph, these are stories about solidarity, community and a profound commitment to environmental and racial justice.
Our project is a feature-length experimental documentary and multimedia oral history archive that examines three regions in the west, the former Rocky Flats Plant, the White Sands Missile Range and the Nevada Test Site. Off Country investigates the environmental consequences of the nuclear weapons industry as well as racist and classist policies inherent in the storage, mining, and production of radioactive material. We have driven more than 8000 miles, shot over two and a half hours of 16mm film and collected nearly twenty hours of interviews and field recordings.
The film was started with a small grant from CU Boulder, this grant allowed us to perform field work for 4 weeks in the summer of 2016. We shot over 2000 feet of film during this period. Since then we have traveled to New Mexico numerous times and have spent $8,000 on our own conducting fieldwork. Thanks to a small grant from The Puffin Foundation we were able to process and transfer about half of our footage. At bare minimum, we need an additional $10,000 to process the remaining film and transfer it to video.
In order to continue our work we have started a Kickstarter campaign and invite you to help. We are fiscally sponsored by Basement Films so all donations are tax deductible. www.off-country.com
Why Now?
In 1992 the closing of the Rocky Flats Plant outside of Boulder Colorado halted the industrial production of nuclear weapons. There are currently plans underway to construct a plutonium pit production facility at Los Alamos National Labs in New Mexico, in order to modernize the U.S. nuclear stockpile for the 21st Century, despite lingering environmental contamination left by the legacy of the 20th century.
In the 1940s, New Mexico was chosen as the site for the Manhattan Project and the world’s first atomicweapons test because of its remoteness and the military’s perception that “no one” lived there. However, the Mescalero Indian reservation was established just seven miles from ground zero, and Hispanic families had been ranching in the area for generations. What the military meant by “no one” was that no Anglo-Americans lived in the area.
The film will be bilingual and focus on nuclear weapons testing, manufacturing, and storage, with an emphasis on social justice and environmental restoration. Additionally, the archive will document and catalog a diverse chorus of voices whom history has neglected. This archive will be a tool for researchers, historians, and activists, to learn not only about history but the human stories of people resisting environmental contamination and political oppression……..https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/578520099/off-country-a-multimedia-documentary-feature
Nuclear Power: Caveats for Energy Policy, Speaker: Prof. Derek Abbott, University of Adelaide, 1st Sept 2017. Is nuclear power globally scaleable? World energy consumption is 15TW. Energy efficiency could save perhaps 13TW. Consider 10 billion light bulbs in the world and replacing them with LEDs.
This could save 50GW – the output of 50 nuclear plants. Just the IEA countries alone in 2015 saved energy equivalent to the power consumption of the whole of Japan. If we were to seriously scale up to 15,000 nuclear stations we would only have 25 years worth of uranium left.
Netflix is now streaming a film about nuclear weapons that puts you inside humanity’s worst nightmare, Business Insider,DAVE MOSHER, AUG 2, 2017,
Netflix is now streaming an experimental documentary film about nuclear weapons.
“The Bomb” debuted in April 2016 at the Tribeca Film Festival as an immersive experience with 30-foot-tall screens and live music.
The filmmakers hope their movie inspires viewers to speak up about the existential threat of nuclear weapons.
The year before I was born, the world almost ended. Twice.
In September 1983, sunlight reflected off a patch of clouds, fooling a Soviet missile-warning system into detecting five US intercontinental ballistic missiles that were never launched. A colonel in a bunker ignored the alarm on a 50/50 hunch, narrowly averting a nuclear holocaust.
Two months later, US forces staged “Able Archer 83” — a massive nuclear-strike drill on the doorstep of the USSR. Soviet commanders panicked at the show of force and nearly bathed America in thermonuclear energy. Once again, an act of human doubt saved the planet.
Today these and other chilling tales seem like dusty history to the population born after the Cold War and those too young to remember the conflict’s many close calls.
But the grave nuclear threat persists. Ageing weapons systems, evolving terrorist threats, and a worryingly hackable digital infrastructure make the danger perhaps even greater today. That’s the message that the makers of “The Bomb” — an ambitious, experimental documentary that Netflix began streaming on August 1 — have tried to make breathtakingly real.
“Nine countries have 15,000 nuclear weapons. That’s an existential threat to mankind,” said filmmaker Eric Schlosser. Schlosser is the author of “Command and Control,” an investigation into nuclear weapons accidents that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. To write the book, he spent more than six years steeped in declassified government materials and interviewed military experts, scientists, and “broken arrow” eyewitnesses.
“The Bomb” is an unnarrated, non-linear film that riffs on the major themes in Schlosser’s book. It leans heavily on archival nuclear weapons footage, roughly a third of which the public had never seen before the movie came out. Cold War-era documents and blueprints are also brought to life with eye-catching animations, and everything is synced to a trippy electro-rock musical score by The Acid.
Co-directors Smriti Keshari, Kevin Ford, and Schlosser told Business Insider in April 2016 that their ultimate goal is to get people to feel something they will never forget — and then do something about it.
Not your father’s nuclear weapons documentary
When “The Bomb” premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, it was formatted as an immersive, 360-degree experience. The film now playing on Netflix is a “flat” version edited for a high-definition screen.
The original version continues to travel the world, however — it was recently shown in Berlin and Glasgow — and projects the footage onto eight huge screens while “The Acid” jams out a live score.
Keshari, Ford, and Schlosser said this experience is what makes “The Bomb” unique. “Being surrounded by 30-foot-high screens upon which nuclear explosions are being projected, while really loud music plays,” Schlosser said, “I think that’s going to be a memorable life experience for anyone who sees it.”
Keshari likened it to a form of “shock treatment,” meant to help people feel something about nuclear weapons instead of dismissing their existence.
“These weapons are literally buried underground. They’re out of sight, out of consciousness,” Keshari said. “It’s shocking how many we have, the countries that have them, how powerful these are, how much money is spent on them. And yet we’re in complete denial of it.”
They have a point.
The so-called Millennial generation has never experienced the dread of imminent thermonuclear war. For me, the existential threat of nuclear weapons didn’t really click until a few years ago, when I wrote a story about a byproduct of the nuclear arms race.
Today’s nuclear arsenals are packed with a variety of exceptionally deadly weapons.
Enhanced warheads, for example, are dozens of times more powerful than the relatively crude bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fusion bombs are also on alert and ready to launch, and they are thousands of times more powerful than any nuclear weapons detonated during World War II.
The US and Russia together harbour roughly 90% of the world’s supply of more than 14,900 nuclear weapons, and they’re maintained under tight systems of control. The US is also spending $US1 trillion to upgrade its devices. Nuclear terrorism continues to be a major point of concern, too.
But the central thesis of “The Bomb” — one Schlosser made strongly in “Command and Control” as well — is that mortifying accidents have happened and will happen again, because people are human, and nuclear weapons aren’t foolproof…….
e filmmakers don’t want the film to simply bum people out.
“There’s no point in that. For me, this sort of knowledge should be empowering. Because to live in denial is a much greater danger than to have your eyes open and have the ability to do something about it,” Schlosser said. “It helps you enjoy the day. It puts a lot of bulls**t worries into perspective and helps you not take anything or anyone for granted.”
Text at end of the film drives home this sentiment with a call to action.
“A nuclear war anywhere in the world would affect everyone in the world. These weapons pose an existential threat. The widespread lack of knowledge about them, the lack of public debate about them, makes the danger even worse,” it reads. “Our silence is a form of consent.”https://www.businessinsider.com.au/netflix-the-bomb-nuclear-weapons-film-2017-8?r=US&IR=T
For years, the local population has suffered from the extensive environmental degradation caused by mining operations, responsible for the high frequency of radiation related sicknesses and developmental disorders found in the area. Increases in miscarriages, impotency, infant mortality, Down’s syndrome, skeletal deformities, thalassemia have been reported. With raw radioactive ‘yellow-cake’ production to increase and more than 100,000 tons of radio-active waste stored at Jadugoda the threat to the local tribal communities is set to continue.
Climate change: Al Gore gets inconvenient againMichael E. Mann, Nature, 27 July 2017
Michael Mann views the US statesman’s second film probing climate change.
An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power
Bonni Cohen & John Shenk Participant Media/Actual Films: 2017. Nobody (and given my experiences with climate deniers, I speak with some authority here) has been more vilified for their efforts to communicate the climate threat than Al Gore.
As US vice-president under Bill Clinton, Gore became the figurehead of the movement to combat human-driven global warming. He also became the preferred punchbag for climate-change cynics in search of a straw man. Gore is such a towering, seemingly unassailable figure in this arena that critics have gone after him with all guns blazing. As Tom Toles and I noted in our book The Madhouse Effect (Columbia Univ. Press, 2016; see D. ReayNature538, 34–35; 2016): “They have criticized his weight, his energy bills, and incidents in his personal life — indeed, pretty much anything else they can scrape up.”
There’s one problem with taking on Gore. He punches back, and above his weight. After all, he’s up against arguably the most entrenched, wealthy and powerful industry the world has ever known: fossil fuels. And this pugilist is still very much in the fight. Witness his new film An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power — the follow-up to his 2006 An Inconvenient Truth.
For those fearing a preachy PowerPoint lecture on climate science, be assured: An Inconvenient Sequel isn’t that. Rather, it largely takes the scientific evidence as a given, not least because Gore has already done a whole film on that. This instalment is an attempt to show us how striking climate impacts have become in the decade since his first movie.
Early in An Inconvenient Sequel, there’s a scene on the Greenland ice sheet, where glaciologists Eric Rignot and Konrad Steffen point to the dramatic retreat of ice in recent years. We witness rivers of surface melt water gushing away from the ice sheet to the open water of the North Atlantic Ocean. Gore poses the question: “Where is all of that water going?” He then answers it. We’re transported to Miami Beach, Florida, where we witness the flooding of streets that now comes simply with seasonal high tides. If melting Greenland ice seems distant and abstract, the perennial flooding of Miami and other coastal cities, and low-lying, highly populated countries from Bangladesh to Belgium is anything but.
The drought that has afflicted Syria for more than a decade is the most pronounced and prolonged for at least 900 years (as far back as we have reliable palaeodata). Climate change has undoubtedly had a role. Gore shows us how the impact of the drought on rural farmers led to increased conflict, a civil war, mass exodus, global conflict over immigration and, as a consequence, the emergence of Islamist terrorist group ISIS. If drought in Syria seems distant or even mundane, the threat of terrorism and global political instability is immediate and visceral. Gore has a genius for joining the dots in the global mapping of climate impacts.
In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore showed a version of the famous ‘hockey-stick’ curve that my co-authors and I published in the late 1990s (M. E. Mannet al. Geophys. Res. Lett.26, 759–762; 1999), revealing a dramatic spike in temperature over the past century. There is a ‘hockey stick’ in the new film, but it charts instead the remarkable global growth in renewable energy over the past decade. Climate change is accelerating; so too is our ability to tackle it. There are reasons for cautious optimism……
Finally, the film casts an inconvenient light on humanity. It is astonishing that we’re still mired in a political debate about whether climate change even exists when, with each passing year of insufficient action, the challenge of averting a catastrophe becomes ever greater. Knowing that Al Gore is still optimistic is a shot in the arm at a time of uncertainty. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v547/n7664/full/547400a.html?foxtrotcallback=true
Pictures from a Hiroshima Schoolyard presents the aftermath of the first atomic bomb through the remarkable drawings and stories of surviving Japanese school children who were part of an extraordinary, compassionate exchange with their American counterparts after the war.
In 1995, a parishioner of the All Souls Church in Washington, D.C., discovered a long-forgotten box containing dozens of colorful drawings made by Japanese children from the Honkawa Elementary School in Hiroshima just two years after their city was destroyed. The surprisingly hopeful drawings were created and sent to the church nearly 50 years earlier in appreciation for much-needed school supplies received as part of the church’s post-war humanitarian efforts.
The Honkawa school was just 1100 feet from ground zero on August 6, 1945. Nearly 400 children died in the schoolyard that fateful morning. Surviving students and teachers describe the horror of that day and reflect on their difficult lives amidst the rubble of their decimated city, as well as the hope they shared through their art.
Classes resumed soon after in the window-less concrete shell of the remaining Honkawa school building to provide some sense of normalcy. The film features recently found archival footage that shows what life was like in the weeks and months after the bomb fell and how Hiroshima gradually recovered.
The rediscovered drawings were restored by members of the All Souls Church, who several years later embarked on an emotional journey to Japan to exhibit the artwork at the Honkawa school and reunite the surviving artists for the first time with the drawings they created as children.
The artists and church members reflect on the lessons that resulted from a compassionate exchange nearly 70 years ago between American and Japanese children following a bitter and devastating World War.
The film is produced by Shizumi Shigeto Manale and written and directed by Bryan Reichhardt. More information here.
Noted philosopher Noam Chomsky, world renowned physician, author and activist Helen Caldicott, MD, and founder of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation David Krieger come together through interwoven interviews to create a narrative that addresses one of the most urgent needs of our planet:
The modern dangers of nuclear weapons and the threat of nuclear terrorism in the world today.
“The World Awaits” is a documentary feature depicting the effects of nuclear weapons and the urgent need for the nuclear states to reduce and eventually eliminate these highly destructive weapons of mass destruction. The narrative presents the dangers of these weapons, including recent close calls and almost
attacks we’ve had had over the 70 years since the first use of nuclear weapons in August of 1945.
The film also explores the current threat of nuclear terrorism and the dangers of nuclear power plants in our world today. The three core interviews are interwoven with archival footage of presidents Barack Obama, John Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman.
“The World Awaits” makes a strong argument for never using these weapons again and how these outdated arms and power sources should be abolished in the best interests of the survival of humanity and our planet.
The five-part series will star Jared Harris as a Soviet scientist tapped by the Kremlin to investigate the accident.
The series will dramatize the events of the 1986 Ukrainian nuclear catastrophe that resulted in widespread radioactive fallout. Thirty people were killed and more than 100,000 had to be relocated.
HBO announced at the Television Critics Association’s summer meeting on Wednesday that production on “Chernobyl” is set to begin in Lithuania in spring of 2018.
Fall Film Festival includes Documentary on St. Louis Nuclear Waste Site and Landfill Fire, Huntington News, July 23, 2017 BY TONY RUTHERFORD , HNN ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR “……….The Fall International Film Festival includes a not yet shown HBO documentary, “Atomic Homefront,” which details the anguish of confronting state and federal agencies over nuclear waste dumping in St. Louis. The film is by Sarah Spurlock, wife of Morgan Spurlock.
HBO documentary, “Atomic Homefront” at St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase
Left unsaid, both the NY Times , Wall Street Journal, and HNN have revealed that Huntington , too, had a uranium and nickel carbonyl plant that processed and recycled fuels for three gaseous diffusion plants. When the process was found to not be cost effective, the structure — owned by the Atomic Energy Commission — was dismantled and the most contaminated portions buried in Piketon,Ohio. Workers from the Huntington Pilot Plant have received compensation from the Dept. of Labor for working in a facility covered under the Atomic Energy Commission definition that includes the St. Louis site, Oak Ridge, Paducah, and Piketon, Ohio.
According to IMDB, “Atomic Homefront” reveals :
“… St. Louis, Missouri’s atomic past as a uranium processing center for the Atomic bomb and the governmental and corporate negligence that lead to the illegal dumping of Manhattan Project radioactive waste throughout North County neighborhoods. Our film is a case study of how citizens are confronting state and federal agencies for the truth about the extent of the contamination and are fighting to keep their families safe. ”
Film International published the following review of Oscar winning director’s Rebecca Cammisa reviewed at the AFI film festival:
f you’re not screaming mad by the end of Atomic Homefront, you obviously believe the systemworks. As a study in government failure and corporate greed, this HBO-supported documentary from director Rebecca Cammisa shows that your trust is grievously and tragically misplaced if you expect the Environmental Protection Agency to serve a desperate public. Likewise, if you believe a large waste service company would provide honest guidance and responsibility in serving its customers, think again.
This passionate film, having its world premiere as one of the 11 Spotlight Screenings at AFI DOCS in Washington DC, is a heart breaker. Cammisa, an Oscar nominee for her 2009 documentary feature Which Way Home (dealing with child migrants) and her 2012 short God Is the Bigger Elvis (a lovely look at Dolores Hart, a Hollywood actress turned nun), spent several years following the problems of two St. Louis neighborhoods that have seen their residents ravaged by cancer and death. http://www.huntingtonnews.net/150485
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