Ever since the first nuclear test in 1945, nuclear power it has been having both positive, and negative effects on the world. It started off as being used as a weapon of mass destruction, but was soon made into a clean energy source. But nuclear power’s deadly history has lead to a great fear around it. Plants can meltdown, the explosion automatically killing many people, and the radiation silently spreading to cause even more damage. In the past nuclear power plants have gone completely wrong, and this fear is still shaping today’s current events.
For a while, during the Cold War, mutually assured destruction kept countries from bombing each other because of the knowledge that their target could just as easily bomb them. This idea has managed to keep the peace for many years. Nuclear weapons “are a type of weapon that countries spend enormous sums of money to develop but don’t actually intend to use.” But if a country is to get nuclear weapons, who isn’t afraid of destruction, and feels the devestation they could cause is enough to justify a nuclear attack, the story may change.
An unopened ferris wheel near Chernobyl
The fear of radiation is widespread, after all, its invisible and odourless yet has the potential to cause mass destruction. On April 26 1986, the a disaster occurred at the Chernobyl Power Plant. Fires and steam explosions released 5% of the radioactive core into the atmosphere. Some newspapers reported 2000 deaths caused by this incident, one even reported 500 000 deaths cause by Chernobyl, but according to a documentary we watched in class, only 56 deaths can be directly attributed to radiation after the incident. The reports of high death tolls were due to radiophobia. In fact, the fear of radiation was probably a bigger issue than the radiation itself. People began taking any little symptom and assuming it was an issue due to radiation even if it was nothing. This backed up the health system which made it hard to treat the more dire issues. According to the video “The threat of human health posed by radiation has been overstated” and it takes a lot more radiation to cause serious damage than originally thought. Nuclear energy is associated with nuclear bombs which creates more fear than it may deserve. This video does a good job of making people question whether or not our fear of nuclear power is warranted, because the benifits may outweigh the risks.
But the fear of radiation is still warranted. In The China Syndrome a reporter visits a nuclear power plant and witnesses something in the reactor that worries her. What she doesn’t realize is that there is such a big issue with the plant that it could cause a meltdown that would make an area the size of Pennsylvania uninhabitable. The radiation at Chernobyl may not have caused too many deaths, but it still made the area uninhabitable and the threat was for sure there.
Today’s nuclear weapons are much more powerful than the ones dropped on Japan at the end of WWII so it’s in everybody’s interest that the mutually assured destruction policy stays intact. Nuclear weapons can be used as threats along with bargaining tools, they are more like political weapons than physical ones. For example, in 2015 Iran agreed to pause its nuclear weapons program in exchange for relief. The countries with nuclear weapons can threaten those without a nuclear program with their weapons, but in reality, World War 3 is in nobody’s best interest, so as long as the world remembers that, doomsday shouldn’t become reality. I may be optimistic, but I like to believe that humans wouldn’t destroy our home planet in nuclear war.
In the TV show The 100 the end of the world made a reality, but even then, the show shows us that our humanity keeps us from destroying each other, and was caused by an Arificial Inteligence hacking nuclear launch codes. It was the program’s lack of humanity that caused the eventual end.
Imagine a class project with 25 people…well this year my class didn’t have to imagine it, in fact we had to face it head on.
After Christmas our class began learning about WWII and Macbeth. We’d spend one class going through the play, and the next learning about the key points of World War II. Once Ms. Willemse felt we had enough knowledge to begin our project she assigned it. Of course, the minute she told us what we were to do, the whole class knew it would be a disaster.
Our project was to create a movie of Macbeth, as a class, in the time period of World War II…yes the whole class….working together…on one project. We knew this wasn’t going to be an easy task. Trying to get 25 opinionated teenagers to work together is one thing, but when the thing they’re working on involves outside of class time work it’s a whole other story. We all have extremely busy schedules, but I’ll get to the issues that created later.
This project didn’t go as well as our teachers had hoped, here’s the story.
We started out this ambitious journey ready to face the struggle we knew was ahead. Most of the class believed at the beginning that they were willing and ready to do anything necessary to create a strong product at the end, of course thing don’t always go as planned, people get discouraged and important ideas get forgotten.
The first thing we did, when beginning this seemingly eternal project was create roles for production. We assigned a director, a producer, story boarders, actors, script writers, camera men, editors, costume designers and set designers. I got the role of assistant director and as an actor, but by the end of the project I became responsible for finances.
Our Roles
Then, the story boarders had a few days to come up with a story board, which the writers would then use to write the script. Meanwhile, props and costumes were being made, sets were being designed, actors began learning their lines, and schedules were being written up. While all this was happening I was focusing on figuring out how much each department was going to need, and how much to ask the class for.
Trying to schedule
After a little while of script writing we thought we were ready to film. But that meant finding days outside of school, because 80 minutes is not nearly enough time to set up the cameras and the props, get in costume and get a scene done. So filming was done on the weekends. Of course I wanted to do what I could for this project, but my weekends are 100% full already. I work basically every Saturday and Sunday, and it’s kinda hard to get out of going to work. The one Sunday I did get off throughout the production of the movie was the one Sunday no filming was happening, otherwise I would have gone. The fact that I had to work during the most important part of production made it hard for me to do my part in the project, so I tried to do what I could in school. I hate the fact that I couldn’t help as much as I would have liked to during those long weekend days, and feel bad about not showing up. I did manage to make it to a few after school filming sessions though, where I got to hold umbrellas over cameras and have the script open for any actors who needed their lines.
Costumes!
The filming setup
At one point Ms. Willemse just wanted to scrap it, but being as ambitious as we are we asked for another week. After that week we still wanted more time, and we knew this was going to be a never ending black hole of a project that we could keep working on forever, at the expense of our happiness. But we did want it to amount to something.
In the end we decided to do voice overs to make the movie flow more smoothly and get it over with. Of course, when that will be done no one knows.
I don’t know if Ms. Willemse was expecting such failure or if she believed we would do it, but either way I did learn lots about teamwork and the production of movies. It was eyeopening to see who would step up in such a big project, and who would sit back and just watch it happen.
Of course, the most important thing I learned through all this is: the nature of evil, aka this project.
