Legendary director Oliver Stone talks new documentary, the misconceptions behind nuclear energy

Two-time Academy Award-winning director Oliver Stone joined "The Claman Countdown" last week to discuss his new documentary, "Nuclear Now," which explores the misconceptions behind the energy source and how other countries are approaching the industry. 

OLIVER STONE: Well, first of all, I want to preface that by saying I'm not a scientist. I am going off a book that I purchased and I...we optioned the book. It's called Bright Future. It's by Josh Goldstein and Staffan Qvist, who's a nuclear engineer. They wrote this book in 2019, and they explored all the nuclear history and business from the beginning to now. And that's why we went into this movie. So this is based on information that's coming to me. Not that I... You understand what I'm saying. So it's important because I don't claim this, but this is to me, the most accurate documentary about nuclear energy that I have seen yet. And it needs it. People don't really understand it. 

They all have an opinion. Everyone has an opinion about everything. And they'll tell you, I'm pro-nuclear, I'm anti-nuclear, this [and] that. But that doesn't get to the bottom of the problem, which is we don't have enough clean energy in the world. And it's a growing world and it's getting bigger and bigger. The demand for clean energy is important, crucial. And we find that there's a big gap as we look to the future 2030, 2040, and we examine those decades and we see that renewables, which are very....which we're positive about, we have to be it's the sun and solar and wind are helpful, but they're not going to close this gap, that room between the world that's growing-- India, Africa, Asia, the whole, the works. 

I mean, this is a gigantic global enterprise and that's what this film addresses-- the world problem. Let me put this to you in one quick way. The head of Rosatom who's a brilliant man, Andrei Likhachev, he's in the movie. He says, he says, you know, right now we have 490 gigabytes of energy, of nuclear energy in the world. Okay. 490. That sounds like... That's a lot. It's a billion. A gigabyte's a billion. So we're talking a huge amount. And yet he says this, he says, if we substituted that with carbon dioxide and methane, we would have 2 billion tons of exhaust in the sky. It would be even more. The world would... It's impossible. He said you remember he said, Charlie, he said, This is a third lung for the world. A third lung. We need another lung too...

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It's the same way. Plane crashes are more dramatic and melodramatic than a car crash. But car crashes happen all the time. More people die in cars than in planes. Planes have been made safer and safer and safer. The same is true about nuclear. The more you build, the more you have-- it gets safer and safer and safer. And there's all kinds of techniques to build a nuclear. And different countries are doing different things. The most promising countries, frankly, are China and Russia. They're doing the most amount. But now it's growing. And we have... Korea is coming back into the game, Japan is coming back into the game. And France has always been in the game, never been out of the game. So it's fascinating to see. Look at the results. And when you look at the results, you see it's been working for 50, 60 years-- nuclear. There's been one serious accident and that was at Chernobyl, we explain that in detail. There was no containment structure. 

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Approximately 4 million people a year die from pollution. Two million die in industrial accidents, at least 500,000 from coal pollution. So, I mean, the figures on Chornobyl are 50 dead at the site, the first responders, they were not properly equipped and about...their estimating, that's the U.N. and World Health, about four or 5,000 died from cancer from the low-level radiation that was in the air for over northern Europe at the time. 

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So all in, you know, compare this to the deaths from a Bhopal explosion, gas explosion in India where 18,000 people were killed or a hydroelectric dam in China crashing in 1975. You know, 250,000 people dead. We have to be honest about this in order to save ourselves as a planet. And we're not being honest. We're not giving... All I see in newspapers is when they mention nuclear, they say "and the dangers of nuclear." Well, what are the dangers? Let's be realistic about the dangers.