What connects The Simpsons, Doctor Who and HBO’s Chernobyl?
These — along with many other film and television productions — parody, problematise or otherwise show us nuclear power stations in action and, of course, in meltdown.
Such pop culture representations are the closest many Australians will have come to experiencing the nuclear world.
And that could affect what they think of opposition leader Peter Dutton’s proposal to build seven nuclear power plants if elected.
Pop culture has significant potential to influence people’s thinking on important topics. In particular, it informs the frames of reference that people use to form views about controversial issues.
From belief in conspiracy theories, to role models, to the way music can promote racial justice, pop culture powerfully influences the way people perceive themselves and the world.
It has likely played a considerable role in shaping the way Australians think about nuclear power, especially given that Australians have very minimal actual experience with nuclear energy.
There is only one nuclear reactor in Australia, in Lucas Heights, a southern suburb of Sydney. However, unlike the plants in The Simpsons and other pop culture examples, it is used strictly for nuclear medicine and research, not to generate power.
While the day-to-day reality of nuclear energy is largely unknown in Australia — unlike countries such as France where nuclear power stations are largely an everyday part of the landscape — one doesn’t have to look too far to find fictitious and potentially misleading references to nuclear power.
Mr C. Montgomery Burns’ nuclear power plant in The Simpsons is the most prominent and longstanding example in pop culture.
Homer Simpson has spent his entire working life in sector 7G of this power plant as (hilariously) its safety officer.
Mr Burns’ plant has gone into meltdown several times, been condemned for literally hundreds of safety violations, caused strange mutations in local wildlife, leaked radioactive waste into the water supply, caught fire and in general simply loomed above the town of Springfield, its two cooling towers marked with the symbol of atomic energy.
Of course The Simpsons is a cartoon with the inbuilt “reset” switch allowing for any scenario to be undone by the next episode.
Chernobyl and other disasters
HBO’s Chernobyl in contrast shows the terrifying irreversibility of an actual disaster in a nuclear power plant.
Chillingly, the Chernobyl plant is back in the news as one of the battle sites in the war between Ukraine and Russia, with Russian troops choosing to dig into the radioactive soil, while their tanks throw red dust from contaminated sites into the air.
In 1979 the film The China Syndrome pointed to what might happen if nuclear energy is not managed properly.
This Hollywood drama about corruption, coverup and the danger of meltdown in a nuclear power station came into cinemas just days before the actual nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in the United States. Strikingly, these dramas present the exact same nuclear anxieties and threats as do The Simpsons.
But whereas The Simpsons is a comedy, these other works make it clear that there would be environmental and human disaster if a power plant went into a full meltdown scenario.
In 1991, when the 1986 Chernobyl incident was still fresh, Anglia Television dramatised the murder mystery Devices and Desires by the British crime writer P.D. James.
Set in and around the fictional Larksoken Nuclear Power Plant, the production filmed on location at the Sizewell Power Station in Norfolk.
The fact the authorities at Sizewell gave permission is surprising as the miniseries takes every opportunity to make nuclear energy look as ominous as it can.
On the soundtrack, warning sirens and the nuclear reactors drone and wail, characters allude anxiously to Chernobyl and the possibility of a meltdown caused by computer hacking. The series even suggests that the actions of a local serial killer may be somehow linked to the effect of nuclear energy on the environment!
Of course, there are no known links between nuclear energy and psychopathic behaviour, but the generally negative attitude to nuclear power seen in popular culture means that outlandish claims and associations can go uncontested, and indeed might even seem plausible.
British television also presented nuclear power stations as places of inherent drama and danger in Doctor Who.
In the 1970 story Doctor Who and the Silurians, a nuclear-powered cyclotron (a type of particle accelerator) went into dangerous levels of overload, posing the same threat that would actually happen at Chernobyl 16 years later: large swathes of the country becoming irradiated.
In these examples the nuclear power is at the service of drama, which extracts tension from the risk of nuclear accidents.
In reality, nuclear power stations have inherent (built-in) safety features. While Chernobyl and Fukishima were famous incidents, they are the only two major accidents in the documented 18,500 reactor years of nuclear-generated power.
Another important consideration is that nuclear weapons, nuclear experimentation and nuclear energy are often conflated in pop culture.
This reinforces the concept of nuclear anything being dangerous to both people and to the environment.
Mutants and monsters
In 1996’s Independence Day, the character played by Jeff Goldblum wants to save the planet and is concerned with things like recycling and scolding people who don’t do so, but baulks at the use of nuclear weapons to destroy the extraterrestrials threatening earth.
Yet the nukes don’t stop the extraterrestrial invaders when deployed and humanity has to come up with a smarter solution to defeat the aliens.
Nuclear experimentation and associated outcomes such as radioactivity also results in ordinary people — or even certain ninja turtles named after Renaissance masters — being given generally helpful superpowers, such as Dr Manhattan in Watchmen and the various reimaginings of Peter Parker aka Spider-Man.
But it also results in uncontrollable monsters such as what we see in the Godzilla films, with Godzilla and similarly awakened monstrous creatures from the deep representing physical manifestations of what happens when humans try to “play God” with nuclear testing.
Nuclear energy has also been depicted as a dangerous and primitive source of energy that will soon become dated.
In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Mr Spock, the Enterprise’s science officer, describes fission reactors — that is, conventional nuclear power — as having been phased out in the fusion era.
Nuclear power is thus seen in science fiction as a dangerous 20th century experiment on the way to more genuinely sustainable — and safer — forms of energy.
Such depictions work against the federal opposition’s plan to present nuclear power as a reliable and safe day-to-day energy source and hence clearly differentiate themselves from the Labor government on energy policy.
To get there however, Australians will need to divorce themselves from the predominantly ominous nature of nuclear energy that is presented in pop culture.
Clearly, nuclear power needs to be assessed according to its economic and scientific merits rather than the hyperbolic, and literally cartoonish, depictions of it in pop culture.
But nuclear energy being almost always presented as dangerous, unreliable and experimental assists the narrative of renewables being the safer long-term alternative.
Indeed, pop culture asks us to consider: if somebody as logical as Mr Spock didn’t think that nuclear power had much of a future, should we?
The article has been republished from 360info under the Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
