Prehistoric Women

Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 75 Years Later

Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 75 Years Later is told entirely from the first-person perspective of leaders, physicists, soldiers and survivors.

Inside Chernobyl with Ben Fogle

Ben Fogle spends a week living inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, gaining privileged access to the doomed Control Room 4 where the disaster first began to unfold.

Secrets of Egypt's Lost Queen

Move over, King Tut: There's a new pharaoh on the scene. A team of top archaeologists and forensics experts revisits the story of Hatshepsut, the woman who snatched the throne dressed as a man and declared herself ruler. Despite her long and prosperous reign, her record was all but eradicated from Egyptian history in a mystery that has long puzzled scholars. But with the latest research effort captured in this program, history is about to change.

Chernobyl and Fukushima: The Lesson

Chernobyl 1986. A nuclear reactor exploded, spewing out massive quantities of radiation into the atmosphere. Within days, the pollution had spread across Europe. Living on land contaminated with radioactivity would be a life-changing ordeal for the people of Belarus, but also for the Sami reindeer herders of central Norway. It even affected the Gaels of the distant Hebrides. Five years ago there was a meltdown at the Fukushima reactor, and thousands of Japanese people found their homes, fields and farms irradiated, just as had happened in Europe. This international documentary, filmed in Belarus, Japan, the lands of Norway's Sami reindeer herders and in the Outer Hebrides, poses the question: what lessons have we learned?

Fukushima: Is Nuclear Power Safe?

Six months after the explosions at the Fukushima nuclear plant and the release of radiation there, Professor Jim Al-Khalili sets out to discover whether nuclear power is safe. He begins in Japan, where he meets some of the tens of thousands of people who have been evacuated from the exclusion zone. He travels to an abandoned village just outside the zone to witness a nuclear clean-up operation. Jim draws on the latest scientific findings from Japan and from the previous explosion at Chernobyl to understand how dangerous the release of radiation is likely to be and what that means for our trust in nuclear power.

Inside Chernobyl's Mega Tomb

Documentary which follows the construction of a trailblazing 36,000-tonne steel structure to entomb the ruins of the nuclear power plant destroyed in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

Reflection

Eerie images of landscapes after the Fukushima nuclear disaster shot on black and white 8mm.

Seabrook 1977

In April 1977, the small coastal town of Seabrook, New Hampshire became an international symbol in the battle over atomic energy. Concerned about the dangers of potential radioactive accidents, over 2,000 members of the Clamshell Alliance, a coalition of environmental groups, attempted to block construction of a nuclear power plant. 1,414 people were arrested in that civil disobedience protest and jailed en masse in National Guard armories for two weeks.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

60 years ago, in the Algerian desert, an atomic bomb, equivalent to three or even four times Hiroshima, exploded. Named the “Blue Gerboise”, it was the first atomic bomb tested by France, and of hitherto unrivaled power. This 70 kiloton plutonium bomb was launched in the early morning, in the Reggane region, in southern Algeria, during the French colonial era. If this test allowed France to become the 4th nuclear power in the world, it had catastrophic repercussions. France had, at the time, certified that the radiation was well below the standard safety threshold. However, in 2013, declassified files revealed that the level of radioactivity had been much higher than announced, and had been recorded from West Africa to the south of Spain.

Nuclear Now

With unprecedented access to the nuclear industry in France, Russia, and the United States, Nuclear Now explores the possibility for the global community to overcome the challenges of climate change and energy poverty to reach a brighter future through the power of nuclear energy. Beneath our feet, Uranium atoms in the Earth’s crust hold incredibly concentrated energy. Science unlocked this energy in the mid-20th century, first for bombs and then to power submarines. The United States led the effort to generate electricity from this new source. Yet in the mid-20th century as societies began the transition to nuclear power and away from fossil fuels, a long-term PR campaign to scare the public began, funded in part by coal and oil interests.

Charcot: Secret Poles

The adventures and exploits of Jean-Baptiste Charcot (1867-1936), an intrepid scientist and explorer who laid the foundations of modern oceanography.

L'Aventure Rosetta : Aux origines de la vie

It was November 12, 2014, at 5:03pm. Humanity had just accomplished a feat that will forever mark its history. Philae, the miniature laboratory integrated into the Rosetta probe, landed softly on comet 67P Chourioumov-Guérassimenko, better known as Tchouri. The culmination of a project decided twenty-one years earlier, in 1993, by the European Space Agency - the first to display the immense ambition of landing on one of these bodies made of ice and dust, archives of the solar system's infancy. To achieve this, it took years of preparation, a decade-long flight, six billion kilometers flown, thousands of scientists and engineers involved... Astrophysicist Anny-Chantal Levasseur-Regourd sums it all up: "From this mission, we hope - and can reasonably expect - to understand the origin of the solar system and how life appeared on Earth.

I'm So Sorry

In a quiet forest, a sign warns of radiation hazard. “Is this the past or the future?” muses the masked figure who appears like a kind of ghost in nuclear disaster areas. At a time when nuclear power may be re-emerging as an alternative to fossil fuels, this calmly observed and compelling tour takes us to places that may serve as a warning.

After the Big One: Nuclear War on the Prairies

This film deals straightforwardly with the consequences of a nuclear attack for the Canadian Prairies. The Prairies are singled out because of their proximity to huge stockpiles of intercontinental ballistic missiles located in North Dakota. Scenes include a visit to a missile base and to an emergency government bunker in Manitoba. A doctor, a farmer and a civil defence coordinator provide different perspectives on nuclear war. Although the film focuses on one region, it provides a model for people everywhere who would like to know more about their own situation but don't know what questions to ask.

Waste: The Nuclear Nightmare

The documentary presents the results of research on nuclear waste management in the U.S., Russia, Germany and France. The authors Eric Noualhat Guéret and Laure were accompanied by the independent French laboratory technicians radiation control, CRIIRAD. They have detected and measured radiation in many places like the U.S. Columbia River or the French plutonium factory called reprocessing plant at La Hague.

The Conqueror: Hollywood Fallout

The story of one of the great environmental disasters to befall the United States, and the terrible movie that helped bring the catastrophe to light.

Nuclear Rescue 911: Broken Arrows & Incidents

Since 1950, there have been 32 nuclear weapon accidents, known as "Broken Arrows." A Broken Arrow is defined as an unexpected event involving nuclear weapons that result in the accidental launching, firing, detonating, theft or loss of the weapon. To date, six nuclear weapons have been lost and never recovered.Now, recently declassified documents reveal the history and secrecy surrounding the events known as "Broken Arrows". There have been 32 nuclear weapon accidents since 1950. Six of these nuclear weapons have been lost and never recovered. What does this say about our defense system? What does this mean to our threatened environment? What do we do to rectify these monumental "mistakes"? Using spectacular special effects, newly uncovered and recently declassified footage, filmmaker Peter Kuran explores the accidents, incidents and exercises in the secret world of nuclear weapons.

Nuclear Savage: The Islands of Secret Project 4.1

A shocking political exposé, and an intimate ethnographic portrait of Pacific Islanders struggling for survival, dignity, and justice after decades of top-secret human radiation experiments conducted on them by the U.S. government.

The Horses of Fukushima

Fukushima's Minami-soma has a ten-centuries-long tradition of holding the Soma Nomaoi ("chasing wild horses") festival to celebrate the horse's great contribution to human society. Following the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in the wake of the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami, local people were forced to flee the area. Rancher Shinichiro Tanaka returned to find his horses dead or starving, and refused to obey the government's orders to kill them. While many racehorses are slaughtered for horsemeat, his horses had been subjected to radiation and were inedible. Yoju Matsubayashi, whose "Fukushima: Memories of the Lost Landscape" is one of the most impressive documentaries made immediately after the disaster, spent the summer of 2011 helping Tanaka take care of his horses. In documenting their rehabilitation, he has produced a profound meditation on these animals who live as testaments to the tragic bargain human society made with nuclear power.