Hollywood, business and nuclear power

In Wall Street and Vine: Hollywood’s View of Business, I discuss Hollywood's long record of bashing big business in popular films. I note the potentially significant public policy effects of audiences sitting in dark rooms, their attention riveted on big screens presenting popular stars enacting effectively written and photographed films that hammer home the idea that big corporations can’t be trusted. I conclude that “the fantasy about business that audiences see presented in films has real world political effects in government regulation of business.”

One of the films I highlight is The China Syndrome. Here’s what Dubner and Levitt have to say about that film in today’s NYT:

If you were asked to name the biggest global-warming villains of the past 30 years, here’s one name that probably wouldn’t spring to mind: Jane Fonda. But should it?* * * “The China Syndrome” opened on March 16, 1979. With the no-nukes protest movement in full swing, the movie was attacked by the nuclear industry as an irresponsible act of leftist fear-mongering. Twelve days later, an accident occurred at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in south-central Pennsylvania. * * *

The T.M.I. accident was, according to a 1979 President’s Commission report, “initiated by mechanical malfunctions in the plant and made much worse by a combination of human errors.” Although some radiation was released, there was no meltdown through to the other side of the Earth — no “China syndrome” — nor, in fact, did the T.M.I. accident produce any deaths, injuries or significant damage except to the plant itself.

What it did produce, stoked by “The China Syndrome,” was a widespread panic. The nuclear industry, already foundering as a result of economic, regulatory and public pressures, halted plans for further expansion. And so, instead of becoming a nation with clean and cheap nuclear energy, as once seemed inevitable, the United States kept building power plants that burned coal and other fossil fuels. Today such plants account for 40 percent of the country’s energy-related carbon-dioxide emissions. Anyone hunting for a global-warming villain can’t help blaming those power plants — and can’t help wondering too about the unintended consequences of Jane Fonda.

The article concludes that nuclear power may be making a comeback because people now fear the uncertain effects of global warming more than they fear the uncertain effects of nuclear power. Of course that may be because of films like Day after Tomorrow and An Inconvenient Truth.

The ultimate result, say Dubner and Levitt, “may all depend on what kind of thrillers Hollywood has in the pipeline.”