Thorium, la face gâchée du nucléaire

With unprecedented access to the nuclear industry in France, Russia, and the United States, Nuclear Now explores the possibility for the global community to overcome the challenges of climate change and energy poverty to reach a brighter future through the power of nuclear energy. Beneath our feet, Uranium atoms in the Earth’s crust hold incredibly concentrated energy. Science unlocked this energy in the mid-20th century, first for bombs and then to power submarines. The United States led the effort to generate electricity from this new source. Yet in the mid-20th century as societies began the transition to nuclear power and away from fossil fuels, a long-term PR campaign to scare the public began, funded in part by coal and oil interests.

The climate crisis, Germany’s nuclear phase-out and Russia’s war against Ukraine are just three of the heavy pieces in the dramatic game about the future of energy. A game with global and unpredictable consequences far beyond where the electricity will be coming from tomorrow. And in the middle of the game we find two small European towns with barely a thousand inhabitants each. Gundremmingen in Bavaria is located around a deactivated nuclear power plant, while the small Polish town of Choczewo will open its first nuclear power plant in 2033. What do the good people on the ground think about it all?

Ben Fogle spends a week living inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, gaining privileged access to the doomed Control Room 4 where the disaster first began to unfold.

On April 26, 1986, a 1,000 feet high flame rises into the sky of the Ukraine. The fourth reactor of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant just exploded. A battle begins in which 500,000 men are engaged throughout the Soviet Union to "liquidate" the radioactivity, build the "sarcophagus" of the damaged reactor and save the world from a second explosion that would have destroyed half of Europe. Become a reference film, this documentary combines testimonials and unseen footage, tells for the first time the Battle of Chernobyl.

In April 1977, the small coastal town of Seabrook, New Hampshire became an international symbol in the battle over atomic energy. Concerned about the dangers of potential radioactive accidents, over 2,000 members of the Clamshell Alliance, a coalition of environmental groups, attempted to block construction of a nuclear power plant. 1,414 people were arrested in that civil disobedience protest and jailed en masse in National Guard armories for two weeks.

In this thrilling documentary, indomitable women fight back against the nuclear industry to expose one of the biggest cover-ups in US history: the 1979 Three Mile Island meltdown and its aftermath. The film reveals the never-before-told stories of four intrepid homemakers who take their case all the way to the Supreme Court, and a young female journalist who's caught in the radioactive crossfire.

Using only archive film and a new musical score by the band Mogwai, Mark Cousins presents an impressionistic kaleidoscope of our nuclear times – protest marches, Cold War sabre-rattling, Chernobyl and Fukishima – but also the sublime beauty of the atomic world, and how x-rays and MRI scans have improved human lives. The nuclear age has been a nightmare, but dreamlike too.

This film does not deal with Chernobyl, but rather with the world of Chernobyl, about which we know very little. Eyewitness reports have survived: scientists, teachers, journalists, couples, children... They tell of their old daily lives, then of the catastrophe. Their voices form a long, terrible but necessary supplication which traverses borders and stimulates us to question our status quo.

A journey through several countries to find those who really know Kim Jong-un, North Korea's leader, in an attempt to profile a contradictory dictator who seems to rule his nation with both disturbing benevolence and cold cruelty while being worshipped as a living god by his subjects in exalted displays of ridiculous fanaticism.

Thirteen years since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, the government's plan to decommission the plant is at a crossroads. We take a close look at the efforts to secure Fukushima's future.

An initiative discusses a videotape in which a group of activists portrays themselves and their work against the "nuclear power mafia." After argumentatively and polemically confronting the economic and political power of the energy industry, the activists call for the shutdown of escalators to counteract people's electro-paralysis.