Oliver Stone’s new movie makes the case nuclear power is the obvious solution to climate change
Director Oliver Stone attends the “Nuclear” red carpet at the 79th Venice International Film Festival on September 09, 2022 in Venice, Italy.
Andreas Rentz | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
Oliver Stone’s new movie, “Nuclear Now,” makes an impassioned case that nuclear energy is a necessary and obvious solution to climate change.
Generating electricity with nuclear reactors does not produce any greenhouse gas emissions, and is therefore worth a serious look, Stone’s movie says, because anthropogenic climate change, caused by excessive greenhouse gas emissions largely emitted from the burning of fossil fuels, is getting worse.
People ought to be more afraid of climate change than nuclear energy, the movie argues. The movie had a special screening at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier in January, opened in New York and Los Angeles this weekend, and is opening in theaters nationally starting Monday.
Stone’s interest in climate change began when he saw Al Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” and was disturbed. He started reading about climate change, including a review of the book “A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow” by Joshua S. Goldstein and Staffan A. Qvist. He was struck by both the review and the book.
“This is a simple, practical, understandable argument for how to solve climate change from nuclear energy,” Stone told CNBC on Friday.
“I didn’t realize it was going to be so tough to pull something like this off,” Stone said, because there is no single main character for the documentary. “The story is the logic of it. Follow the history into the present: What went wrong? What could go right?”
In the movie, Stone presents a case that the beneficial potential of nuclear energy has not been reached because society conflated its collective fear of nuclear bombs with nuclear energy. In the film, which Stone narrates, he says he was anti-nuclear because he generally absorbed the environmentalist anti-nuclear agenda that has been spread for generations.
Changing public perception when fear is involved is a slow process, Stone told CNBC.
“State the facts. You have to give the information that you have,” Stone told CNBC. Not everyone is going to believe what you say, “but some people will believe it. You have to trust in the truth ultimately will obliterate the lie. You have to believe that,” Stone said.
Goldstein, who worked with Stone to write the film, says the feeling of being in a movie theater can have a more powerful effect on people’s perceptions than leaving them alone to parse facts that may feel overwhelming or out of context.
“A film is more than information. It’s an experience, and it’s a collective experience. That’s why I’m really happy we’re getting some release in theaters, because you sit in the theater with everybody else, you have this collective experience,” Goldstein told CNBC on Friday.
Oliver Stone (L) is speaking at a question and answer session after the screening of his new documentary, “Nuclear Now,” in New York City on April 29.
Photo courtesy Cat Clifford, CNBC.com
“Everybody thinks everybody else thinks it’s bad,” Goldstein says of people’s perception of nuclear energy. But watching a movie in a collective situation gives people an opportunity to talk to other people about nuclear energy and conversation is critical, Goldstein said.
“The majority of people actually support nuclear energy, but the people who don’t support it are very loud and very scared and it draws a lot of attention,” Goldstein told CNBC.
Americans’ perspective of nuclear energy fluctuates and has been generally increasing in the last decade, according to a recent poll from Gallup showing 55% percent of Americans either strongly or somewhat favor using nuclear energy as a way to provide electricity. That’s the highest percentage since 2012, according to Gallup.
Stone says a goal of his documentary is communicating the scale of energy demand now and how much more electricity will be demanded in the future as climate change mitigation strategies electrify many processes, and as energy demand grows from countries like India and China.
“One of the things this film I hope achieves is to give you a sense of scale. We have to go wide — you have to go to big mass crowd shots — China, India — to give you a sense of what’s coming,” Stone told CNBC. “You can’t just stay in the green backyard in the United States, and do green things, like ovens and cars.”
Stone was working on “Nuclear Now” for about three years, though he was not working exclusively on the movie in that time. Stone’s memoir, “Chasing the Light,” and his controversial second look at the assassination of John F. Kennedy, “JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass,” also came out in the meantime.
Critics cite cost and time as drawbacks
Stone knew the film will be criticized because he’s making a bold statement, and indeed it has been.
“Oliver Stone’s ‘Nuclear Now’ was another disappointing myth creation falsely casting blame for nuclear power’s impotence on radiophobia and baselessly ignoring truths about climate saving alternatives,” Gregory Jaczko, former chair of the U. S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and author of Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator, told CNBC.
Jaczko says fear of accidents is not the primary reason nuclear energy is not more widespread today. Instead, nuclear energy is expensive and has been managed poorly.
“As with most nuclear fables these days, the film establishes the strawman argument that nuclear is an underutilized technology because people are afraid of nuclear power and confuse it with nuclear bombs: ‘Once we get over our radiation fear, nuclear will thrive and solve climate change.’ This isn’t the main or even a significant problem with nuclear power,” Jaczko told CNBC.
“The primary problems are cost competitiveness, operational ineffectiveness, engineering weakness, managerial incompetence, and design mistakes. These are well documented deficiencies. For example, after the Fukushima accident, as NRC Chairman I was under no pressure to shut down nuclear reactors due to radiophobia,” Jaczko told CNBC.
Another problem is the length of time it takes to build nuclear reactors.
Stone “cites in several places IPCC’s reference of a 2050 goal for decarbonization, which implies there is time for nuclear to contribute, notably sidestepping the inability of nuclear to deploy quickly,” Jaczko told CNBC. “But this ignores that most experts believes these IPCC estimates require decarbonization in the electricity sector, the easiest area to decarbonize, to happen by 2035, an unrealistic timeline for significant nuclear power contribution. The remaining 15 years would be for decarbonizing other sectors, which nuclear may or may not contribute to,” Jaczko told CNBC.
Gordon Edwards, president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, echoed similar concerns. Renewable energy, like wind and solar, are cheaper and faster to build than nuclear, Edwards told CNBC. (Edwards has not seen the full documentary yet, but is responding based on what he has seen and heard about the documentary.)
“If you believe the climate crisis is a real emergency demanding immediate action to reduce carbon emissions quickly, then the fastest, cheapest, and most proven technologies should be employed first,” Edwards told CNBC. That means that energy efficiency measures and renewable energy should be the top priorities, Edwards says.
But Stone also felt compelled to make the documentary because he sees nuclear energy as an underappreciated and misunderstood climate solution.
“The film is a warning, a dramatic warning, of a major distortion in history, and a need to return to the using nuclear in any possible way,” Stone said.
The US wind industry installed just 5.2 gigawatts (GW) in 2024 – the lowest level in a decade, according to Wood Mackenzie’s new US Wind Energy Monitor report. Installations are expected to rebound in 2025, but the real concern lies in US wind’s sharply downgraded 5-year outlook. As for the reason behind that bleak forecast, we’ll give you one guess as to why, and it starts with a T.
Wood Mac reports that 3.9 GW of onshore wind came online last year, along with 1.3 GW of onshore repowers and 101 megawatts (MW) of offshore wind.
Onshore wind
The US is expected to achieve more than 160 GW of installed onshore capacity by 2025, and onshore growth is projected to bounce back from 2024 and surpass 6.3 GW this year.
“The cliff in 2023 and 2024 created by the Production Tax Credit (PTC) push in 2022 will come to an end,” said Stephen Maldonado, research analyst at Wood Mackenzie. “Despite the uncertainty created by the new administration, the massive number of orders placed in 2023 culminating in projects now under construction support the short-term forecast.”
The pipeline for onshore has 10.8 GW currently under construction through 2027, with another 3.9 GW announced.
GE Vernova led onshore wind installations in 2024 with 56% of the market and will continue to lead in connections for the next five years. It was followed by Vestas (40%) and Siemens Gamesa (4%).
Offshore wind
Offshore wind is projected to increase in 2025 as well, with 900 MW of installed capacity, up from a disappointing 101 MW in 2024. However, several projects have been shelved in the wake of Trump’s anti-wind executive orders, which downgraded the five-year outlook by 1.8 GW.
Electrek’s Take on US wind’s 5-year outlook
According to Wood Mac, 33 GW of new onshore wind capacity will be installed through 2029, along with 6.6 GW of new offshore capacity and 5.5 GW of repowers. However, due to Trump’s anti-wind policy and economic uncertainty, this five-year outlook is 40% less than a previous total of 75.8 GW. Growth will happen, but it’s going to be slower.
The main reason is Trump’s flourish of his Sharpie on executive orders that include “temporary” withdrawal of offshore wind leasing areas and putting a stop to onshore wind on federal lands. Plus, firing all those federal employees will likely make permitting wind farms a slower process. (Trump just wrote more executive orders today allowing coal projects on federal lands; he won’t have federal employees to issue permits for those, either.) He’s worked to throw up obstacles for wind projects in favor of fossil fuels. He won’t stop the wind industry, but he’s managed to get some projects canceled, and he’ll make things more of a slog over the next few years.
Read more: Coal is dead and Trump’s executive order won’t revive it
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BYD’s cheapest EV in China just got even more affordable. After cutting prices this month, the BYD Seagull EV starts at just 56,800 yuan, or under $8,000.
BYD cuts Seagull EV price to under $8,000 in April
Despite an intensifying EV price war in China, BYD is cutting prices once again. The Chinese EV giant announced a new promotion this month across several Ocean Series models, including the Seagull.
The 2025 BYD Seagull EV is available starting at just 56,800 yuan ($7,800). The offer is for the non-Smart Driving Vitality Edition model, which usually starts at 69,800 yuan ($9,500).
After launching the new Seagull last year, BYD said the low-cost electric car officially opened “a new era of electricity being lower than oil.” Earlier this year, it upgraded most of its vehicles, including the Seagull, with its new “God’s Eye” smart driving system at no extra charge.
BYD’s Seagull is offered in three trims in China: Vitality, Freedom, and Flying. It has two battery options, 30.1 kWh or 38.9 kWh, which is good for the 305 km (190 mi) and 405 km (252 mi) CLTC range, respectively.
At just 3,780 mm long, 1,715 mm wide, and 1,540 mm tall, the Seagull is even smaller than the former Chevy Bolt EV (4,145 mm long, 1,765 mm wide, and 1,611 mm tall). It’s about the size of a Fiat 500e.
The price cut comes as BYD’s sales continue surging. With another 377,420 new energy vehicles (EVs and PHEVs) sold last month, the Chinese automaker has now sold over one million NEVs in 2025.
BYD’s EVs accounted for 416,388 while PHEV sales reached 569,710, an increase of 39% and 76% from last year, respectively.
| BYD Seagull EV trim | Starting Price | Range (CLTC) |
| Vitality | Normal: $9,500 (69,800 yuan) Now: $8,000 (56,800 yuan) |
190 mi (305 km) |
| Freedom | $10,300 (75,800 yuan) | 190 mi (305 km) |
| Flying | $11,700 (85,800 yuan) | 252 mi (405 km) |
Perhaps even more importantly, BYD sold over 206,000 vehicles overseas in 2025, more than doubling from last year. The Seagull EV is also sold in other global markets like Mexico and Brazil as the Dolphin Mini.
Later this year, it will launch in Europe as the Dolphin Surf, with expected prices starting under £20,000 ($26,000). Although it may not be the cheapest EV, BYD’s executive vice president, Stella Li, recently told Autocar it will be “the best value” when it arrives.
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Tesla has new Model Y inventory available today in the US, just days after opening orders for what is supposed to be its most popular model.
This proves that demand is terrible and Tesla is trying to hide it.
On Friday, Tesla launched the new non-Launch Edition Model Y in North America.
Prior to the launch, only a fully loaded $60,000 Launch Edition Model Y was available to order since January, and had been delivered since early March.
Now, North American buyers are able to buy a much cheaper version of the new Model Y for $49,000.
Only the Model Y Long Range AWD is available for now, but that’s Tesla’s most popular model in North America.
At the time, we noted that this is a great demand test for Tesla in the US amid some critical brand issues due to CEO Elon Musk.
We only have a few metrics to track the demand of the new Model Y in the US:
- Delivery timelines on new orders
- Available inventory
- Discounts/incentives
For most US zip codes tested by Electrek with different Model Y configurations (wheels and paint colors), Tesla quotes delivery within “1-3 weeks”.
But we also found several zip codes on both the West Coast and the East Coast where Tesla claims it can deliver the new vehicle “today”:
This would point to Tesla already having vehicles in inventory despite launching it just 4 days ago.
But Tesla is hiding the inventory.
If you search for Model Y in Tesla’s new inventory, you can’t find any in the US at the time of writing:
However, Tesla is showing some units in inventory to people configuring new Model Ys.
Some potential buyers are reporting that Tesla has a tab that pops up and directs them to some new inventory available (via TroyTeslike on Patreon):
This confirms that Tesla already has new non-Launch Edition Model Y in inventory available for sale in the US – pointing to Tesla having no backlog of demand for the new vehicle.
Electrek’s Take
This is much worse than I thought. I thought that Tesla would build a backlog of demand for the new Model Y in the US from people who didn’t want the fully loaded version, but it looks like that backlog lasted 4 days.
Of course, it’s all because of Tesla and Elon, and brand destruction.
Many people who invested in the stock market lost a lot of money over the last few weeks, and these people often happen to be people who buy new cars.
Now, the only thing left is for Tesla to start offering discounts and subsidies financing – the latter likely coming first, as it is already the case with new Model 3 orders in the US.
The good news for Tesla is that if Trump continues to crash the stock market, the Fed will likely have to reduce rates, making Tesla’s 0% financing cheaper to subsidize.
That’s a fun balancing act.
Either way, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Tesla offer incentives on the new Model Y in the US within the next 2 weeks – way ahead of schedule.
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