#1992 - Oliver Stone

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Yeah, I have been fascinated by the subject for a long time, and I'm very, very happy that you made this documentary. And it's a very good documentary, by the way. Thank you for making it, and thank you for highlighting this very, very important issue that seems to have been really confused. And I'm really glad how you covered it in this documentary about Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and Fukushima. We have these ideas in our mind about the dangers of nuclear power. And I love the analogy that you made in the film about how driving a car is not scary, but it's dangerous. Flying in a plane feels scary, but it's far safer.

And this is a great analogy to nuclear power. When you went over the data, when you talked about the amount of deaths from coal every year, when you talk about the amount of deaths overall ever from nuclear, it's stunning.

Oliver Stone (1:10)

It is.

Joe Rogan (1:10)

It's stunning. And then when you cut to, in the documentary you showed the anti-nuclear movement that happened after Three Mile Island, and how crazy it was. There's all these stars and celebrities, and they're doing concerts. We've got to stop nuclear power, and what a mess.

Oliver Stone (1:29)

That happens when a fad, I mean, it becomes fashionable.

Joe Rogan (1:33)

Yeah.

Oliver Stone (1:33)

It was a very successful movement. You're talking about the negatives here, and the accidents, and we cover all that in the film, which is called Nuclear Now. And the idea that was behind it was because I really was like you. I mean, I went along with those things in the 70s and the 80s, because I didn't know better. I didn't know, I wasn't educated. I really wanted to know, what is nuclear power? I wanted to go back to the source. And you gotta go back to the beginning, and you gotta go back to Marie Curie, and Albert Einstein, and World War II, and all, how it got developed. This nuclear energy is a beautiful, incredible, almost a miracle that was given to us. We have an earth, it's all, it's in the earth, uranium. It's everywhere, the planet, the earth, the sun.

And we, in a sense, we took it like Prometheus, and we kind of misinterpreted it, misused it, which is not, which is kind of normal for giving what we do with natural things.

World War II was happening just as the nuclear fission was being understood, and that made the bomb. They made the bomb with it because there was a war on.

They rushed it, and they did an amazing job, Oppenheimer down in Los Alamos, but, and they got it, and they were successful.

But as you know, it was misunderstood at that point that nuclear energy was not nuclear bomb. In the contrary, a bomb is very difficult to build, and it takes years sometimes. It takes scientists, and they have to enrich the plutonium, and they have to work at it. There's all configurations in the bomb that don't exist in nuclear energy. So when people see a nuclear energy plant, they subconsciously, they cross it with both war, and they cross it with horror films that they've seen in the 1950s with radioactivity and monsters that come out of that. You know, Spider Bites the Man, and he becomes Spider-Man. You know, it's incredible, the stuff that happens, and it's all, and Hollywood has done no favors to it. It's continued for years and years and years, and then, of course, you had Three Mile Island. The film was coming out at the same time, China Syndrome, with Jane Fonda. It was a good film. I enjoyed it. We all enjoyed it, but it really was hysterical and alarmist, saying nothing happened at Three Mile Island except the reactor did melt down, but nobody got hurt because the containment structure worked to keep it in. So there was no release of radiation.

And they continued on. Silkwood was another one, and then, if you remember, not too long ago, there was the H.B.Illic thing, Chernobyl.

Joe Rogan (4:26)

Yeah.

Oliver Stone (4:26)

Which was a complete fictionalization of what happened at Chernobyl. So we went to Russia, and we talked to the scientists there, and we wanted to know what happened at Chernobyl, and we find out, and it's in the film.

And the same thing is true for Fukushima, which is unbelievable, because when you go to the bottom of it, I was astounded to find out that nobody died there from radiation. Not one Japanese. They checked the whole thing out, and it's been done to death. But you hear about 15, 20,000 people died from the tsunami, and the earthquake, which was the biggest earthquake Japan ever had. I mean, really, we show the earthquake, we show the tsunami, the wave was 100 feet tall.