Atom a jeho energie

Ever heard of the Thorium molten salt reactor? That's hardly surprising, as for 70 years, it has been inexplicably kept under wraps by the nuclear industry, despite the fact it could revolutionise energy production. It offers the promise of nuclear energy without waste and without danger. The "green atom": fact or fiction? Research that was dropped without explanation in 1973, has now become a topic of lively discussion...

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.

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.

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.

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?

With a wealth of fantastic archive footage and a series of revealing interviews with those who had first-hand experience, filmmaker Vicki Lesley tells the turbulent story of the West’s love-hate relationship with a nuclear power over the past seventy years. Capturing both the tantalising promise and the repeated disappointments of this singular technology, the film reveals how the post-war, romantic fantasy of an Atom-powered future developed into the stormy, on-off relationship still playing out today. A tale of scientific passion and political intrigue all wrapped up in the packaging of a sentimental screen melodrama.

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.

About the question of whether we should proceed in developing and using nuclear power and the breakdown at Three Mile Island, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in March 28, 1979.

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.

TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant is the site of one of history's worst nuclear disasters: the meltdown of three nuclear reactors. The decommissioning program in Japan learns from the Three Mile Island decommissioning in the US after the nuclear plant accident in 1976 in Pennsylvania.

Farmers and parents of young children, who live in the Harrisburg, Pa., area, discuss their fears of radioactive contamination from the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor accident in 1979. Scientists and physicians also expound on the lethal dangers of nuclear power and the risks in containment processes.