VSsome would say it’s fiction or pochade, or both. Without a doubt. But can fiction or pochade, or both, justify twisting reality to the point of potentially misinforming a very large audience? The visitor from the future, by Frenchman François Descraques, plays with the truth about nuclear energy. And the public, rather young (the film is taken from a successful series first broadcast on the Web), probably does not realize it.
One of the first plans puts the flea in the ear. There is panic in France these days: a nuclear power plant is exploding. More precisely, the air-cooling towers explode in an incredible crash, with lots of lightning, smoke, rubble flying everywhere. Admittedly, these huge concrete towers from which a plume of smoke often emerges are characteristic of nuclear power plants; using them on screen is a classic way to represent a reactor, although thermal power plants (gas and coal) are also sometimes equipped with them. But cooling towers cannot explode from the inside, as is the case here. They are made of concrete, scrap pipe and… water, since they are used to cool the water circuit. That’s about it, and it doesn’t explode.
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Toxic storm cloud
This oddity might be forgivable. After all, it in no way modifies the perception that we can have of the atom. The rest of the film, on the other hand, is open to criticism. We are in 2555, more than five hundred years, therefore, after the explosion of the power plant mentioned above. The radioactive cloud released after the accident circles the Earth and, exactly every seventy years, destroys everything in its path. The black and crackling mass, a sort of toxic storm cloud, destroys buildings, breaks the Eiffel Tower in two, shreds cars and, above all, strikes down humans as soon as they touch it. The poor explode and disappear, as if swallowed by the cloud.
Let us pass on the meteorological incongruity which would carry, with regularity, this murderous mass around the sphere. The important thing is above all in the message: in the film, a toxic cloud destroys everything and kills those who approach it. One can imagine the reaction of young spectators to the sight of the murderous effects of the cloud; even if they don’t believe in it, doubt can settle in their minds.
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radioactive tsunami
It is obviously not a question of making people believe in the harmlessness of the discharges after an accident on a reactor, but of tempering the effects. First, a radioactive leak is not a nuclear bomb like those that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki; it is an impalpable release of toxic materials. Its impact is geographically limited. In a report published in 2016, the Institute for Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety concluded that, five days after the Chernobyl accident, “radioactive elements are detected in North America and Japan”, but “in extremely low concentrations “. In France, the rains deposited some cesium releases in the soil at high concentrations, particularly in Corsica, but in 2016 they had no effect on health. The Institute thus noted that a nap in a place where the concentrations had been major was equivalent to a Paris-Marseille flight by plane, due to cosmic radiation. Thirty years had therefore passed since the explosion of the Ukrainian reactor. How to imagine, even in the cinema, that a radioactive cloud ravages everything on Earth for more than five hundred years, like a radioactive tsunami?
Nope ! My film is not an anti-nuclear tract.
The film ends well. The deputy who had signed for the construction of a power station at a discount changes his mind after the intervention of the famous visitor from the future. Informed of the disasters caused by the explosion of a power station – the extinction of humanity, no less –, the deputy (Arnaud Ducret) prefers to commit to… renewable energies. Here again, the message is questionable: renewable, intermittent energies require gas, or even coal, to operate (in any case in 2022), which releases much more CO2 than the atom, and most experts consider the opposition of nuclear energy with wind or solar to be unproductive. Even organizations like the International Energy Agency support the development of nuclear power plants to meet greenhouse gas reduction targets, alongside renewable energy.
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Asked by Point at the beginning of September, the director François Descraques denies being an opponent of the atom. ” Nope ! My film is not an anti-nuclear tract, I want to reassure the readers of the Point : it’s not a bobo leftist film, we qualify the subject and the characters, even the one played by Arnaud [Ducret, NDLR]. Nuclear power is not my obsession and it is even for me, in the short term, the best energy production solution. Above all, I wanted to deal with the subject of the film from the angle of the generational conflict and the notion of the short term/long term. How future generations must bear the consequences of problems that received only short-term solutions from their elders. »
” Freedom of expression “
However, nuclear power is not just a short-term solution: several countries, including France, are involved in reactor programs designed to supply electricity for at least half a century, and research projects ( transmutation of nuclear waste, fusion, etc.) are promising. There remains, no doubt, the problem of waste, which seems to have found a long-term solution in France with landfilling in deep clay areas.
The visitor from the future conceals other curiosities. To find them, you have to look at the list of financial partners of the feature film. And there, who do we find? The Grand Est region, among others. However, in this region there are at least two sites linked to the atom industry, defended by the president of the community, Jean Rottner: the Bure underground storage center, and the Fessenheim power plant, shut down in 2020 despite the opposition of the regional president. “The principle of our support is that of freedom of expression, we do not judge the message that a film transmits”, explains a spokesperson for the Grand Est. Jean Rottner, ardent defender of Fessenheim when he was mayor of Mulhouse, is he happy to finance a film which descends the atom in flames?
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