‘Atomic Bamboozle’ Unpacks Another Nuclear Ballyhoo

A new documentary challenges the public relations campaign boosting nuclear power as the solution to the climate crisis.

Over the decades famous spokesmen have deployed shifting rationales in an attempt to persuade taxpayers to support a risky, expensive form of power: nuclear. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy gave an “Atoms for Peace” speech at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, where the first nuclear reactors were built to produce the plutonium used in the A-bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Similarly, in an animated short entitled “Our Friend the Atom,” introduced by Tinkerbell as she flies over the Magic Kingdom, Walt Disney declares: “The atom is our future.”

But as filmmaker Jan Haaken reminds us in a new documentary, these are tricks, and they are making a comeback. In Atomic Bamboozle: The False Promise of a Nuclear Renaissance, Haaken contends that the atomic industry and its advocates are still trying to pull the wool over our eyes.

nuclear power plant

Nuclear power plants, like this one near Perry, Ohio, are finding new proponents as the climate crisis deepens. Filmmaker Jan Haaken wants his audiences to remain wary. Photo courtesy of First Entergy.

The latest narrative from the nuclear industry is that it can save us from the climate catastrophe. “Climate change is the problem of problems,” YouTube science educator Kyle Hill proclaims in a 2021 video that has more than 1.5 million views and was produced in conjunction with the Department of Energy and Idaho National Laboratory. “Nuclear power is getting smaller, safer, and more energy efficient by the day,” Hill says. “The world needs more nuclear power, and it needs it right now.”

Activists, academics, attorneys, Indigenous leaders, and others challenge this repackaging of pro-nuke propaganda throughout Atomic Bamboozle, which won the International Uranium Film Festival’s Special Jury Documentary Award in 2024. After all, for all its advances, nuclear power produces waste that is unsafe. The dangers of hazardous nuclear waste solidified the anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s, which curtailed the development of thousands of plants.

“The ultimate puzzle is: What do we do with the waste?” Lauren Goldberg, an attorney and the executive director of Columbia Riverkeepers, tells the filmmakers. “That’s not solved.”

Anti-nuclear activists also remind us of the cost of nuclear plants — in taxation as well as endangerment. It is the public that often foots the bill for nuclear plants. And yet the famed spokesmen continue to appear. Today, it is Bill Gates, the billionaire, who proclaims, “The next miracle is nuclear energy.” His company, TerraPower, is building a nuclear plant in Wyoming, with $2 billion in pledges from the US government and another $1 billion in private funding, according to Forbes.

atomic bamboozle poster

Though proponents of small modular reactors often tout their smaller footprint and less expensive building requirements, some studies show that they may produce even more waste than conventional reactors.

Atomic Bamboozle illuminates major risk factors, providing a powerful counternarrative to the propaganda that nuclear power, including small modular reactors, are a reliable, carbon-free form of energy that can solve the climate emergency. Instead, the documentary argues for reducing emissions and the expansion of renewables as alternative sources of energy. These are not only safer and cheaper, but faster than building nuclear plants from scratch.

Directed by Jan Haaken, professor emeritus of psychology at Portland State University and a clinical psychologist, this 46-minute documentary insightfully, analytically deconstructs and debunks what Russell Jim, a member of the Yakama Nation near Hanford who has led the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Indian Nation’s Environmental Restoration and Waste Management Program, calls “the mass public deception.” This deception is deployed by nuclearism and its apologists to dupe the public into supporting a dubious, dangerous form of power.

Activist Cathy Sampson-Kruse is Atomic Bamboozle’s associate producer and a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. She also appears onscreen, pointing out the impact of uranium mining and the nuclear industry on Indigenous people. Onscreen Jim, stresses this environmental racism, pointing out how many nuclear facilities have been constructed at “isolated wastelands where the people were expendable.” That is, of course, unless you happen to be one of those “expendable” people.

Atomic Bamboozle: The False Promise of a Nuclear Renaissance is streaming on Vimeo. Find more info here.

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