Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 6/24/23: EXCLUSIVE: Oliver Stone On Nuclear Energy, RFK Jr

Episode Date: June 24, 2023

 Saagar interviews Oliver Stone on his new documentary "Nuclear Now" on the power and hope of nuclear energy to save our world.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Very excited to be joined by Oliver Stone. He's got a new film, Nuclear Now. Let's take a look at the trailer, and then I'm'm gonna get you an interview with him We may have come to a point in time when earth is asking us Do you know what you're doing Most of our power still comes from burning gas and coal. And the amount is going up, not down. If we do not cut carbon emissions by nearly 100%, the world will suffer serious damage. This is an even bigger problem than we thought.

The answer to solving climate change is very straightforward. What's the best solution in your mind? Largely nuclear. Nuclear. Nuclear. Nuclear. We've been trained from the very beginning to fear nuclear power. The very thing that we fear is what may save us.

What's scary is not the same as what's dangerous. Coal is dangerous. More people die from coal in a couple of weeks than have ever died from nuclear, which is all from the one accident in Chernobyl. First question is, what about the waste? Nuclear waste is nothing compared to climate change. Once you understand it, people have a better sense of not being afraid. We have to provide clean, affordable energy to the world. In general, we need to move faster. We do this for our families, we do this for our kids and those generations. We've run out of time to be afraid.

Joining us now is the legend Oliver Stone. He is the director and creator of the new film, Nuclear Now. It's a very important film, which I believe everyone should see. Sir, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. Nice to be back again, Sagar. Oh, of course. So first of all, Oliver, we've heard a little bit from you on the Joe Rogan experience and more, but I'm a big proponent of nuclear power and we wanted to have a discussion here to focus primarily to the skeptics of which some of you engage with in the film, which you were kind enough in order to show me a few months ago. So first of all, just why did you decide to make this film? Well, because of the future.

You know, I was concerned that we've been hearing so much about climate change and the changes in the atmosphere. So, you know, the thing is that we're not dealing with it. There's a lot of talk and a lot of hyperbole. People say we're getting better, but we looked at all the facts. I read this book that I bought in 2019. It was called A Bright Future by Josh Goldstein and by Stefan Skobist, a Swedish nuclear scientist. The book is very simple, lays out the facts, where we came from in 1980, 2000, and now 2020 period to 2050.

And looking ahead, we just aren't going to make it. The atmosphere is going to get warmer and we're not getting rid of the carbon dioxide pollution that's all over the world. It's in the atmosphere. And we're not, year by year, it seems to climb a little bit. Now, people talk about all these changes like renewables, wind and solar and hydropower changes, but you don't see the result in the graphs. And the IPCC, the International Panel, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control,

it's a UN body, many scientists are in it. It's a very solid organization. They've been right. Their 1980 graphs, their 2000 graphs, they were right on the money. From now, from 2000, 2020, things have not gotten better. We've spent billions of dollars, in fact, trillions of dollars on renewables, and it hasn't gotten better. So we're kidding ourselves. And we really have to think seriously from 2005, 50, back to now now kind of be analytical about it and that's what this book is and i wanted to put it into film terms because it's it's dry reading but frankly we try it's very difficult to to concretize science but that was a challenge for me right i think the movie speaks for itself it's very clear that nuclear is not the only answer,

but certainly it's a backup. It's a backup, very important backup to what we're doing now. And this will really cut the CO2 down because basically it's clean energy. It's completely clean. It has no side effects. The problem with our present solutions are we keep putting in renewables, but renewables don't work all the time because the sun is not always out. It's night, it's winter, certain climates are better than other climates.

As a result, we back it up with gas. And that's why the oil companies love gas, because they call themselves the perfect partner for renewables. But what it is, essentially, gas leaks all along the line. This is methane, as we try to show in the film. It's invisible. You don't see it. But it's almost 25% of the global warming problem is now methane.

That's serious. Right. So we have to get rid of the coal. We have to get rid of the oil, which is hard. And we have to get rid of the coal. We have to get rid of the oil, which is hard. And we have to get rid of the gas. And the only way we can really do anything about this is to bring in an alternate energy like nuclear energy, which has been proven safe, clean, reliable, and scalable. Scalable in a time frame that makes sense before 2050.

We recently had RFK Jr. on the show. We actually asked him about nuclear power. And one of the reasons that he gave for why he was opposed is that he says an insurance company will not be able to deliver them a policy. I'm curious what you make of that argument and of others who have good faith disagreements around nuclear power.

I admire Robert very much. In fact, I'm supporting it. I mean, his campaign is a breath of fresh air. He says things that don't get said in our culture. But on this issue, I think he's unfortunately behind the eight ball. We are really in a hole, and I think it's much darker than he knows or may know. And he's not facing up to the truth of this, which is it's bad news for everybody in the world. It's going to get much harder. And you have to take some chance. You have to take some initiative. Nothing important, airline travel, all kinds of breakthroughs and medicine cannot occur without

some kind of risk okay so the insurance companies uh won't handle it well so what there's governments all over the world that are can back up this issue you don't need insurance companies you need government cooperation and backup as they have in all these big countries that are doing anything. The most advanced people in nuclear energy are China and Russia by far. Rosatom is a 250,000 man agency. They do a great job. They not only develop nuclear energy inside their own countries, but they export it to many countries who are willing to make arrangements with them. They put in turnkey plants in places like Bangladesh, Turkey, all over the world. China is building the most ferociously. Of course, they have the most coal, but they are building, as far as I know, committing $440 billion to their program. By 2038, they expect to have 150 new nuclear reactors online, which means in addition to this 50-some that they have now,

they're going to be the world's leader in nuclear reactors in terms of volume. That's quite significant. And President Xi has made a commitment to the United Nations that by 2060, he won't be at net zero in terms of emissions. It's a big statement. I hope they can live up to it because that would be the key. The United States and China would be the key in terms of population, the biggest players here in terms of changing the way we do business. Oliver, what went wrong for the climate left in the 1970s?

You talk some about that in the film. Where did the missteps happen and what were some of the dangerous myths that kind of became concretized in a lot of people's minds who do believe in climate change? OLIVER HIRSCHHORN Whether I believed in it or not, some conservatives don't. It doesn't really matter. The point is we still must do the right thing, and nuclear energy is the right thing to do. It's cleanest energy of all. It doesn't require backup.

It's very important. It's functioned, self-reliant on its own. Once you build a nuclear reactor, it lasts 50, 60, sometimes 70 years, and very little maintenance. It's expensive at first, but it pays off in the end. Compared to what? Compared to what? You have to keep asking. Compared to coal, compared to oil? Look at the damage from all this waste that's in the atmosphere.

All this is the responsibility of coal and oil and gas. We come talking about the waste from nuclear plants, but that waste is nothing compared to the waste that we're facing now. The problem we have is waste. It's chemical waste, oil waste, gas waste. So it's just it's illogical the way that it's being argued. The point is serious. It's a serious issue and we don't face up to it because the numbers are staring us in the face. So you asked, what was the question you asked? I'm sorry.

Just about what went wrong for people, for the climate left in the 1970s. It's always a problem because you guys, a lot of people, a lot of news people concentrate on the pro-nuclear, anti-nuclear argument, which is frankly senseless at this point because we're way beyond that. But in history, I think it will be written off as a great tragedy, a great tragedy, somewhat like the Kennedy killing in the sense that we were going in the right direction. President Eisenhower, his Adams for Peace

program started the whole thing. John Kennedy supported it entirely. They were building in America – we were on target. We built about 100 and some reactors, 105, 10 reactors, and maybe a little bit more, but we were on the road to completely nuclearizing our society, or a lot of it. Let's say we'd gotten up to 80%, 90% of our society. But that was on the way in the 1970s, early 70s. Coming off of the Navy's program, the Navy had done initial work on nuclear submarines and

tremendously successful. Hyman Rickover built submarines and then he built the first civilian reactor for the government in Shippingport, Pennsylvania. It opened in 1959. Now that's important because in other words, the Navy had set a pattern. Now of course with this military usage, they had enriched uranium, which is not what we're using for civilian nuclear plants. We're not going to enrich uranium.

That's a big difference between it being a bomb and it being nuclear energy. You cannot blow up a nuclear energy plant, a generator, so, a reactor rather. So we came to this place where the United States is really moving along and we show it in the film, the vision of a society. And what happens is that essentially the Rockefeller Foundation starts the war.

It's the oil company business. John D. Rockefeller's foundation. Now, his son was running it at that time. Not his son. No, at that time they were both dead. But the Rockefeller Foundation had tipped the scale with a report published in the New York Times in 1956 saying that any amount of radiation any amount of radiation is dangerous to the human body that was significant because it got public republished in

the New York Times the publisher of the New York Times needless to say was on the Rockefeller Foundation and that puts their thumb on the scale you You don't need to advertise it, you just put it on the front page and it gets around. Radiation of peril to man, you know, period. And that was the myth that kept going around and around and around. Even the fact that DNA had been discovered by Crick and Watson in England, and they had suggested, and it's now been proved, that DNA is repairing the body as we live. We have a double, we have a sense of a double person, a double helix. The DNA is a repair mechanism by which we continue to survive.

That includes radiation. It repairs the radiation in your body. What people don't know is we walk around in radiation. Radiation is every day, it's inside the studio. It's inside your banana when you eat it. If you live at a higher altitude, it's more radiation, et cetera, et cetera. It's everywhere in the world.

It's a fact of life. Radiation has kept the earth warm since the beginning of time. It's a belt of energy. It's a belt of tremendous warmth and energy. And it's a wonderful discovery. Marie Curie discovered it in 1895. And she knew that they were onto a miracle energy here, that this was something

different, that matter was energy. Einstein proved it in 1905, but then – and Einstein was a big supporter of it. And then of course we learned how to deal with nuclear energy. By the time of 1930s we improved, and in 1940 or roughly then, Fermi – Enrico Fermi on our U.S. program – would manage to show how to control radiation, how to control the uranium, and so that we could have a limited energy usage for civilian purposes. However, the war was on, and what is the natural instinct in war is to build the biggest bomb you can.

So unfortunately, timing was bad because that energy was so valuable, but it was used to maximize the amount of damage that a bomb could do in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks. And those two bombs set off the fear of uranium and the fear forever of nuclear energy, which has really damaged us because they're so different. As I said before, it's not – nuclear energy is not enriched uranium. Right.

Yeah, they're completely different. You do such a good job of playing that out. People will never separate that, and they've confounded it ever since because of the word nuclear. Exactly. We have a bunch of, as you know, all those, I grew up on horror movies in the 1950s, everything, every mention of radiation was negative. Every Hollywood movie, monsters, a radioactive spider could bite a man and he would be turned

into Spider-Man. There was all kinds of fantasies about it. And then the films in the 1970s started to register, which was The China Syndrome comes along. That's a good film. Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon. It's made at the same time as, it comes out at the same time as The Three Mile Island breaks in the news.

And that was a scare. There had been a shutdown and a meltdown, but there was no release of radiation in the area. There was a containment structure that was built. So it was much hyped and scared to people, but there was absolutely no damage to the civilian population at Three Mile Island. It was a false accident, so to speak. It was an accident, but it didn't get out of hand. And they deal with it and they keep improving these reactors, obviously. But then of course, 10 years later we have the Chernobyl or seven years later, 1986, Chernobyl is the worst accident in nuclear history. The only accident where people died, really.

Unfortunately, we don't know that. We just feel the hysteria because, again, the film business. HBO made that horrible Chernobyl series. It was very successful. And it scared people. It works. You can scare people. That's the easiest thing to do. The hardest thing to do is to make them understand and believe.

Yes. And that's always the problem with filmmakers. They have – they tend to go the easier way out. So anyway, Chernobyl convinced people that this was a disaster, and of course many governments started to move in that direction. And then Fukushima in 2016 – no, I'm sorry, 2012 – my dates, I think it was 12, was another called a nuclear disaster when in fact no one died. The Japanese citizens – there was what they call a hydrogen explosion.

It was built – the sea wall was too low, the backup generators were flooded, but no one died. The reason 20,000 people died was from the tsunami in Japan. Tsunami was the worst they ever had and the worst earthquake, following the worst earthquake they ever had. 20,000 people perished and it was all called a nuclear disaster, which is a misnomer. So here we are reacting to all these hypothetical fears again from going back to the fear of radiation. Radiation we talk about in the film, radiation we live with, it's in our bodies, we go to the

dentist we get radiation, huge amounts of radiation poured into us. If you're a cancer patient you obviously know what chemotherapy is and radiation and what it does to you but it has been highly effective in those persons and people don't die unless they get massive massive doses of it So we're running around scared of as usual and misinformed Well, luckily though Oliver one of the things I thought was that your your film would be a big sea changer obviously, you know a world-famous filmmaker you Were talking just now about the HBO series Chernobyl

You took it took a lot of courage to get this film made, as you've said previously about how it was really difficult to do it, but ultimately always find a way to make the films that you want to make. Could you talk about that process and then about the reception? Now that the film is out there, people are watching it, it's finally been consumed, people like me, we're trying to get the word out about it. Have you seen thoughts, minds begin to change as you've got it out there? Well, not yet, frankly.

And I'm hopeful, but it's a hard process to change public. Well, frankly, let me just tell you that in America, the polling revealed that 60% of the population is pro-nuclear development. So it's happening, but very slowly and not fast enough in terms of this deadline we're facing of 2050. The film, unfortunately, was not supported by the studios or this or that.

Nothing nuclear has ever been positive from the film business. So this was against the grain, as always. And like with the JFK series, no official distribution came our way. We were turned down. And I think this is because the issue is considered a controversial one.

Not that it is, because it's factual, but it's considered controversial and then people back away from it because they don't want to have all the, you know, all the pressure that comes on corporations and so forth and so on. It's getting out there. I would give it away for free if I could, but there are some investors in the film and they're good people. But it's going around. We're on Amazon Prime. We're on the Apple network.

We were number one last week in documentaries. So it will get around. But unfortunately, we have to go country by country. But we have foreign salesmen. I was in Korea recently because they're in a very critical position. They are reopening. They were the best, one of the best countries, standardized. They built standardized nuclear reactors and they kept going and they were doing good work. And then they had

a movie too, Pandora, which scared them after the Fukushima thing. They turned it into a major catastrophe and people got scared. So they closed down for a few years. And as a result, you lose a trained workforce, which is very important to keep going. However, Korea and Japan are coming back online. And there's other countries that are key here. Indonesia is a key country. India is going nuclear and much more so than before, although they have a huge coal problem. The key countries, we've got to keep working at this. I guess I will be devoted to this for many years in terms of going around and talking about it until it happens.

But it's for our children. I don't know why people waste so much time arguing about nuclear because it's a waste of time compared to what the oil companies and the coal companies and the gas companies are doing to us. Yeah, it's fear. It's predominantly fear. So my final question, Oliver, is just if there's one thing that you could get people watching this to do, what would it be, other than watching the film, in terms of spreading the word about

nuclear? That's all you can do, right? I guess you spread the word. You talk. It's word of mouth. What's wrong with nuclear? Nothing's wrong with it. That's the point. It's working. And we have to realize that we talk about all these other solutions and we're all for that. I mean, it'd be great if someone came up with a solution that was working 90 percent or 100 percent of the time,

but none of them are and none of them provide the scale and the volume. We're not talking about making a cell phone or an electric car here. We're talking about a continent-sized need of energy. You have no idea what's coming. The Africa, Asia, South America, they're going to want the same things we have. They want electricity first and they're going to get it. In addition to electricity, we have to look at the other issues which are not just electricity. We have a huge part of our energy that would be safe. Nuclear in combination with hydrogen and carbon is a very likely solution. I was at the Idaho lab in America here, and they're working very hard to break through on the hydrogen front, what they call green hydrogen.

But that's with nuclear hydrogen. It's not with gas back around. So it's important that hydrogen go in this direction, and I think that with nuclear these scientists are really – and there are many young scientists, I have to say, and women too, many women scientists I saw working. This is an important new field, and. Hopefully America will develop a new generation of young people working, trained in this business. And I think that's happening, but slowly.

America is not putting enough money into it. With the government is bipartisan. There's no question that from Obama, Bush, Trump, Biden, they keep supporting nuclear, but they don't give it the lung space, the word of mouth that it needs to get going. They talk about all these false solutions, I think. Well, I think you've done such an excellent service to the public, and I encourage everybody to go watch the film. We're going to have the links into our description.

It's always just such a pleasure to talk to you. You're such a visionary, not only on this issue, but on many others that are so important, JFK, foreign affairs, and so much more. So thank you, Oliver. We always appreciate your time. Thank you, Sigurd. Absolutely. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children.

Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture that fueled its decades-long success. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Father Week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son,

even though it was promised to us. He's trying to give it to his irresponsible son, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. They could lose their family and millions of dollars? Yep. Find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024.

You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy. But to me, voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to voiceover on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.