This film is, at its simplest, the story of a father's loss of his only child to brain cancer. Yet the reverberations run even deeper, since the father is the designer of a nuclear station that will produce the potent carcinogen plutonium. The world's nuclear power stations continue to produce hundreds of tons of the carcinogen, and there is a lack of safe storage methods. Plutonium remains lethal to the living environment for at least 500,000 years, an eternity in human terms.