The Fight for Renewable Energy: Revisiting The China Syndrome (1979)
The China Syndrome hit cinemas at the tail-end of the 1970s, a decade known for its shift in American culture following tragic events and activism from the 1960s. Women’s liberation movement, Roe v. Wade abortion laws, gay liberation movement, black power movement, racial injustices, declining confidence in the Vietnam War, and of course Watergate — a scandal so impossible to grasp, it created a deeply rooted distrust in the United States government for decades to come.
The unbearable weight during this volatile period of time was reflected on the silver screen, moving beyond Hollywood’s golden era of cinema into a harder hitting realm of storytelling with the emergence of New Hollywood. Gritty crime stories like The French Connection (1971) and Taxi Driver (1976), revival of the gagster films like The Godfather (1972) and Mean Streets (1973), creation of the modern blockbuster like Jaws (1975), a new era of horror with The Exorcist (1973) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), the rise of blaxploitation like Shaft (1971) and Superfly (1972), and paranoid and anti-establishment political thrillers including Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974), Network (1976), All The President’s Men (1976), and Marathon Man (1976) helped define a decade of cinema still meticulously studied and often considered one of the most important decades in film history.
Led by exceptional performances, The China Syndrome follows reporter Kimberly Wells (Jane Fonda) and her cameraman Richard Adams (Michael Douglas) as they stumble upon what appears to be a coverup surrounding safety protocols at a California nuclear plant during an emergency shutdown administered by plant supervisor Jack Godell (Jack Lemmon). The term “China Syndrome” refers to a scenario in which a molten nuclear reactor core could could fission its way through its containment vessel, melt through the basement of the power plant and down into the earth “all the way through to China.”
The film is a nail-biting suspense drama, not by way of a moody photography, frenetic editing, or an unrelenting musical score — there is in fact no score in the film — but through writer/director James Bridges maintaining a calculated and steady simmer, giving as much weight to the space between the spoken dialogue as the dialogue itself. At the surface, humanity’s inquisitive nature propels the story forward. At its core, the film tackles workplace gender inequality, corporate malfeasance, the energy-media industrial complex, and ethical, moral and environmental responsibility.
Kimberly is a force to be reckoned with, looking to break through a male dominated industry by covering her first major story. Richard is the anxious radical unwilling to compromise his own beliefs even if it means severing personal and professional friendships. Jack, a by-the-books supervisor, over-come with enormous guilt and curiosity following the averted disaster, begins to suspect something is amiss with the very company he works for.
Over the film’s opening weekend, the nuclear-energy industry claimed the events depicted on screen as outright fiction; a Hollywood fantasy. Only twelve days later on the 28th of March 1979, a nuclear reactor partially melted down at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Pennsylvania, giving the film something of an eerie gaze through the looking glass.
At a time when environmentalism was becoming a broader social movement — the federal government passed legislation like Clean Water Act (1960), Clean Air Act (1970), along with numerous preservation measures, and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA, 1970) — the incident at Three Mile Island gave rise to anti-nuclear sentiment and the push for clean sustainable energy.
The decades long battle for clean energy has undoubtedly been in flux, seeing forward progress and major setbacks. Environmental deregulations can be pinned on powerful anti-environmental lobbies, greed from the oil-gas-nuclear industries, and the elections of both Ronald Reagan in 1980 and Donald Trump in 2016.
Reagan appointed Anne Gorsuch Burford as head of EPA, where she cut the organization’s budget, staff, reduced the number of cases filed against polluters, and later resigned over mismanaging $1.6 billion dollars. In 2018, Trump appointed Andrew Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, as the head of the EPA. Wheeler eradicated environmental protections, rolled back Obama-era Clean Air & Water Acts, and eliminated the role of scientists in the policymaking process. In February 2020, nine conservation groups unanimously announced that “Donald Trump’s administration has unleashed an unprecedented assault on our environment and the health of our communities”, calling it the worst administration for the environment in United States history.
Whether it’s the devastating spread of wildfires, fierce winter storms, sea levels rising or more intense hurricanes, human activity — particularly from the power sector burning fossil fuels — is directly responsible for climate change. Fossil fuels account for three-quarters of carbon emissions, yet a small minority of skeptics are denying, and will continue to deny, the very existence of climate change.
Of 13,950 peer-reviewed climate studies from 1991 to 2012, only 24 rejected global warming. There is no myth or conspiracy surrounding an overall consensus that climate change is man-made. In 2019, 11,000 scientists from around the world declared “unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency. To secure a sustainable future, we must change how we live”. 18% of electricity across the U.S. today is generated through renewables like solar, wind, hydropower, 20% from nuclear energy, and 63% from fossil fuels.
In what should be rendered as a logical point of view, moving away from our fossil fuel and nuclear dependency is a given. Nuclear energy may not produce direct carbon emissions, however, it creates obscene levels of radioactive waste — waste that can remain “radioactive and dangerous to human health for thousands of years”.
March 11th, 2021 will mark the ten-year anniversary of the tsunami that destroyed three reactors at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in Japan, making it the most recent nuclear disaster, and the worst since Chernobyl in 1986. Where will be the next? When will be the next? And most importantly perhaps, will that particular region of the world have the resources and infrastructure to handle it? If the most recent history-making winter storm crippling the power grid in Texas is any indication, no.
The unfortunate aftermath of the storm and subsequent deep freeze — which left 4.4 million Texans without power and 86 dead— was the result of politically-motivated deregulations, unpreparedness, and the state’s power grid having been handed over to private corporations. Shortly after the outages, baseless claims began to surface on social media placing blame on the yet-to-be-enacted Green New Deal and wind farms. Nearly 90% of power failures in Texas were from nuclear, natural gas and coal plants.
A question central to The China Syndrome is whether the averted nuclear disaster ever posed a genuinely dangerous threat to the plant’s workers, the television crew, or even the state of California. As one character so frustratingly states when interrogated about safety hazards, “The [emergency] system works!” That’s all that seemed to matter. Willful ignorance will be the end of us, unless we take bold steps addressing the climate crisis before it’s too late.
The China Syndrome received four Academy Award nominations — Best Actress (Fonda), Best Actor (Lemmon), Original Screenplay, and Art Direction-Set Decoration.
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Climate Generation— Empowering individuals and their communities to engage in solutions to climate change. Minneapolis, Minnesota based.
350.org —The Alliance’s mission is to address climate change and other environmental issues via peaceful local, state, national, and international actions.
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Clean Air Task Force—We push the change in technologies and policies needed to get to a zero-emissions, high-energy planet at an affordable cost. Imagine a world where the energy needs of all humans are met efficiently without damaging the atmosphere.
Climate Emergency Fund—CEF was formed at the intersection of philanthropy and climate activism to focus funding on radical action as opposed to incremental change. We fund the most impactful climate activists working to disrupt the status quo, inspire others to do the same and force policy-makers to take action. Our role in winning the future is to turbocharge activism, to put pressure on government leaders, divest from fossil fuel financing, and diversify the movement by engaging new voices.
