NUCLEAR ENERGY FOR PEACEFUL PURPOSES

Year Published: 1970s

Format: 16mm

Description: To see simultaneous translation of this video, turn on close captions and select "auto translate to English" from settings. This 1970s Soviet film "Nuclear Energy for Peaceful Purposes" looks at the different peaceful applications of nuclear energy. It shows some of the pioneers of Soviet nuclear research and footage from nuclear power plants across the country. It contrasts footage of brightly lit cities in the USSR with people in the West pushing their cars during the oil crisis to highlight that this is the energy of the future. It also features some advancements in nuclear research, such as plasma and laser reactors. The film ends by showing protests around the world against nuclear weapons and by stressing that the USSR only wants to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, unlike the US who militarize it (ha ha). 0:09 a large ship sailing on the ocean, 0:28 a water mill, 0:40 a steam train driving, 0:56 electric streetcars, 1:25 Marie and Pierre Curie, 1:38 "Nuclear Energy for Peaceful Purposes", 1:43 Abram Ioffe and his students, 2:08 animation of an atom splitting, 2:34 Enrico Fermi in his lab, 3:01 the New York City skyline, 3:25 a nuclear bomb exploding in Nevada, 3:35 footage the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 4:35 Igor Kurchatov, 4:59 the control room of the first Soviet nuclear reactor, 5:43 operators working in the reactor core, 6:09 animation of how a nuclear reactor produces electricity, 6:44 map of the USSR showing where nuclear reactors have been built, 6:54 a nuclear powered ice breaker, 7:22 a more modern nuclear power plant and its control room, 7:46 animation showing the makeup of control rods and how the atomic reaction works, 8:55 street views from the city of Shevchenko, 9:18 a nuclear reactor being constructed, 10:00 power lines, 10:07 women on computers, 10:16 map of the electricity network of the USSR and Warsaw Pact countries, 10:40 overview of different things powered by electricity, 11:13 oil wells, 11:33 people in capitalist countries pushing their cars and using horse drawn carriages during the oil crisis, 11:58 close up footage of the surface of the sun, 12:11 the ocean, 12:31 scientists working on a Tokamak plasma reactor, 12:54 animation of how a tokamak reactor works, 13:40 a model of the reactor, 13:50 animation of the atomic reaction in the reactor, 14:03 scientists working with equipment and looking at diagrams, 14:23 the so-called "Dolphin" laser installation by the Physics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 14:48 animation of how laser induced thermonuclear fusion works, 15:06 Anatoly Petrovich Aleksandrov, 15:52 Nobel Prize winner Nikolai Basov, 16:00 people on the street, 16:18 footage from underground nuclear tests, 16:30 anti-nuclear weapons protests in different countries. Nikolay Gennadiyevich Basov was a Russian physicist and former Soviet educator. For his fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics that led to the development of laser and maser, Basov shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics with Alexander Prokhorov and Charles Hard Townes.