What Batman can teach us about a nuclear future

L. says:

07:22am | 07/08/12

Wow.. The facts as presented in this article were sobering and informati…. oh, wait… there weren’t any facts presented in this article.

Seriously though, it’s interesting that James mentions Germany and Japan shutting down nuclear industries…

Germany now burns the dirtiest of the dirty.. Brown Coal.. to generate their power shortfall, while Japan was forced to import massive amounts of fuel oil for theirs…

As a typical NGO, James gives no rational, and more importantly..IMMEDIATE..alternative the power generation requirements of these two massively industrialised nations.

But hey, who am I to argue, nuclear power is bad, it has to be, a movie told us so…

wakeuppls says:

07:45am | 07/08/12

Wow you must be a greenie. The hypocrisy is amusing. You claim that nuclear will never be safe but leftists like you also love to claim it is only a matter of time before green energy is actually useful. This is fairly prime evidence that you along with the rest of you progressives are only interested in satisfying your own precious utopian vision for the future, regardless of the consequences to developing and developed countries.

As long as you feel like a hero afterwards, right? No matter how many people you starve because they lack access to cheap efficient energy?

TimB says:

08:17am | 07/08/12

I think if this article proves anything, it’s that rabid Greenies are nothing but a dangerous blight on modern civilization.

Squirrel says:

08:30am | 07/08/12

But James, It doesn’t matter if rogue states use nuclear power for evil instead of good because Batman will save us all.

TimR says:

09:03am | 07/08/12

Actually if batman taught us anything, its that a city needs the powerful elite to oppress the masses.

Anonymous says:

09:17am | 07/08/12

You’re looking too far into it. The nuclear bomb plot in the latest Batman was sloppy and was just a cheap way to generate tension and build for a trilogy-ending climax. Oh yeah, and suggesting that someone could turn a fusion generator into a nuclear bomb in around a minute after tinkering with the controls is unbelievably stupid. Now, with that out of the way…

I don’t think I’ve ever been more offended by a closing paragraph well… ever. You might as well just have saved everyone the time and typed in all caps: “Nuclear Energy Bad!”.

Here’s the kicker, James. You might not like it, but Nuclear Power is one of the cleanest and perhaps the most efficient sources of power in the world. Enriched uranium is hundreds of times more potent than coal, and Australia has one of the best deposits of it in the world. Waste can also be contained properly and stored in a small area.

Also, let me just say: How dare you correlate Fukushima with Hiroshima. One disaster was the result of a tidal wave destroying a power plant. The other was the result of a NUCLEAR WARHEAD designed to kill as many people as possible. There’s a DIFFERENCE! YES, Nuclear Power is risky and carries a great responsibility, but that’s the amazing thing. Just because it has the potential to be used for evil, doesn’t mean it should be vilified by pseudo-intellectuals like yourself. If you think we should abandon it just because it’s difficult, then you’re a quitter.

Nuclear Power can save this world. As an environmentalist, I say you’re not doing us, OR the world a favour. Peddlers of hysteria and fact-twisting like you make us look bad. You’re a disgrace.

Tim the Toolman says:

09:18am | 07/08/12

Wow….pushing ideology based on interpreting the message in a hollywood film!  Who needs actual facts when you can talk about how a popular movie made you feel, and determine policy off that! 

Now, I’m off to learn to play rock and roll and build a time travelling phone box, ‘caus that’s what Bill and Ted have taught me!  Station!

Seriously?

Gregg says:

09:19am | 07/08/12

Perhaps we could have a movie about what life will be like with greatly reduced power availability, perhaps Lord Monckton and Al Gore being the equivalent of Batman and the Joker.

Zeta says:

09:58am | 07/08/12

I’m pretty sure the movie was really about a single person taking on a city’s collective responsibility and how the net result of fighting anarchy with anarchy is more anarchy.

That’s the whole point of the series. It’s not about nuclear power, or the surveilance state, or as US pundits on both sides keep saying, the Occupy movement.

Instead of doing what most superhero movies do, which is take one aspect of comic book mythology and blow it out to a 16:9 aspect ratio, Nolan dares to ask a question without letting the comics answer it for him - what would happen if one of the world’s richest men decided to dress up as a bat and fight crime?

Batman Begins was written at a time when America stepped outside the law to take revenge, and that post 9/11ness bleeds through the rest of the films. The only reason Bane has a nuclear weapon in The Dark Knight Rises is because in The Dark Knight, the Joker just had boats full of explosives. The whole series has been about escalation. Bruce Wayne dresses up as a Bat, so someone dresses up as a playing card, so cat burglers start dressing as cats - Bane says it himself in the final movie, about how no one noticed him until he started wearing the mask. Bane exists, just like the Joker, because Bruce Wayne put on his mask. Ultimately, Bruce Wayne is responsible for everything that happens to Gotham City in the the three movies.

There’s no deeper subtext about nuclear energy there. The writers just needed a plot device that represented a bigger threat than they had in the last movie.

Daylight Robbery says:

12:50pm | 07/08/12

The world has over 1000 nuclear reactors

Chernobyl was a grotesque lapse of risk management; if the same lapse was applied to the Burrup Penninsula in Western Australia we could blow up an area the size of Melbourne taking all with it.

Wind is suited to some of our smaller isolated towns but by gees its expensive for anything else.

Japan built their nuclear power stations on a fault which produced one of the biggest earthquakes and tsunamis ever occured in modern civilisation.  But wait, again now collusion and corruption have surfaced in the maintenance of these old run down nuclear power plants which wouldnt of happened if protocol hadnt been neglected.

But its too late, dont even bother with these conversations. We have only about 30 years of uranium left globally. 

By the time Australia builds a beautiful ‘modern’ power station in one of the most stable continents on earth with strict safety guidelines that can produce hydrogen fuel as a byproduct and burn down existing nuclear waste the world will have little left making nuclear an expensive option.

Dont let the Gilalrd and the Greens make you feel guilty about having one of the highest CO2 emmission per head of captial in an industrial nation.  Everyone elase has nuclear power stations thats why.

The Greens didnt want nuclear power and now they are making you pay a tax for the continuation of the use of coal.
Not only that, now modern factories are being built overseas where you jobs are being shifted overseas along with lower emmisions due tot he carbontax.

Thousands of people have suffered respitory demise from the coal emmisions in the mean timeunder Gillard and Greens policy

Epic fail

Jamesman says:

01:04pm | 07/08/12

Neo-fascist?
Neo-fascist? He is clearly a tyrant, but not fascist, neo or otherwise. The way he convinces the populous is very socialist. His desire to inflict his ideology on the world at whatever expense is ironically reminiscent of communism inflicting poverty, corruption and suppression of free speech (in order to combat those things).
Just because Hitler and Mussolini were fascists doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing (though it is).
Just because Stalin and Mao were communists doesn’t make it a bad thing (though it is).
Perhaps I wasn’t paying attention to the parts of the movie where he displays his fascism? Or perhaps you correct yourself further on in the article in between trying to assign morality to technology, and pushing your agenda (under the guise of warning us of an agenda?) Perhaps though, you are using a word ignorantly, and putting neo in front of it. 
If you don’t know what a word means, don’t use it.

Alex says:

02:25pm | 07/08/12

Microwave technology has already been weaponised, going to ban 1 minute buritos now.

bananabender says:

02:43pm | 07/08/12

Germany is building 53 coal-fired power sations to replace their mothballed nuclear reactors.  They are also reducing subsidies for renewables. So much for green energy repalcing nuclear.

Timinane says:

06:44pm | 07/08/12

First off Bane was a crusader wanting to destroy Gotham for it’s sins. It’s an extension of the them from the first movie in the trilogy which introduced Ra’s al Ghul who was the father of the brains behind Bane. (sorry spoilers)

Fusion bombs already exist and also we wouldn’t be alive if a fusion reaction wasn’t the source of all our power *points to the sun* Magnetic field and Ozone layer are at least 2 things I know that protects us from it’s harmful effects. Yes radioactvity is harmful, a Helium nucleus, electron and gamma rays aka Alpha, Beta and Gamma radiation. But we absorb a lot of it already. One thing I’d like to point out is all things going boom is bad be it Trinitrotoulene, or nuclear it’s not nice when things go boom around humans. But if you can find a better more energy efficent way to move electrons around a metal circuit so that we can argue this on computers then we can speak.

Meanwhile I take a different view on the batman movie which inspires me to help my fellow man despite not liking them too much, you guys don’t think much.

Richard says:

12:10pm | 17/08/12

This article contains so many errors on a science level that I don’t know where I should even begin commenting .....

Plutonium, uranium, what does this have to do with the movie? In the movie we’re talking about a nuclear fusion device and not about fission. Plutonium, uranium, etc. (heavy elements) are not used for fusion (heavy elements need to be split in smaller ones to generate energy (fission), whereas small elements need to be fused together in heavier ones to create energy (fusion)), so this argument is completely irrelevant. An important thing anyone who makes any remarks about nuclear energy or nuclear bombs should understand that there are 2 varieties: fusion and fission. In the movie fusion was used, not fission. Of course anyone can have their own opinions, but these opinions (for example quite a large portion of the author’s opinions) are simply false if they can be overruled with facts (or science). That’s why it is wise for people to not meddle with stuff they don’t even have the slightest clue about.

Fission is the power behind nuclear generators and atomic bombs: it leaves radioactive waste and can be compared with a chain reaction that needs to be controlled constantly. Although we can do this control easily nowadays, I can imagine people (I personally am not a fan of fission either), prefer not to have this kind of technology.

Fusion is seen as the holy grail of the energy production. It is clean, does barely cause any waste or radiation, its fuel is abundant (water) and it generates alot of energy. The only problem is that is is scientifically and on an engineering scale very hard to do, since fusion is, in contrast to fission which is like a bomb that needs to be controlled constantly, like an incredibly weak flame that needs to be controlled constantly otherwise the reaction simply stops (and nothing happens). If we manage to do this on earth (expected time is in 50 - 100 years), all the energy problems and global warming are solved in one blow.

Although the movie was entertaining, its science was incredibly bad, since you can never turn a fusion reactor into a bomb (because it’s so damn hard to keep fusion going). The sad thing about this is that some people, like the author of this article, simply believe in movie science without doing some research on their own. Hence people can adopt wrong and misleading views of nuclear fusion: something which is not beneficial for our society. Fusion is probably the only thing that even has a slight chance of obtaining enough energy for the growing population in third world countries who are becoming more developed by the end of our century. If fusion is not working by 2100, chances are great that our civilisation will fall and anarchy, poverty, hunger and war will run the world. That’s why it is so sad that something as movie science, or articles written by authors who do not even have the slightest comprehension of the matter he/she is writing about, can lead to such devastating misleading views.

- A nuclear physicist, proudly working in the field of nuclear fusion energy research (trying to save the world bla bla ;p)