{"id":604064,"date":"2026-08-25T10:58:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T10:58:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/604064\/"},"modified":"2026-08-25T10:58:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T10:58:09","slug":"environmental-violence-inside-the-fight-to-save-indigenous-land-from-becoming-a-nuclear-dumping-ground-documentary-films","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/604064\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Environmental violence\u2019: inside the fight to save indigenous land from becoming a nuclear dumping ground | Documentary films"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nuclear energy<\/a> was supposed to be our salvation, humanity\u2019s chance to retool technology first conceived as a weapon of mass destruction into an engine of limitless prosperity. But even as the industry touted nuclear fission as an economic game-changer (never mind the astronomical startup costs<\/a>), a safety paragon (never mind the spills at Chornobyl<\/a>, Three Mile Island<\/a> and Fukushima<\/a>) and harmless fodder for an American comedy institution<\/a> (never mind that glowing rod on Homer\u2019s back or the three-eyed fish), there was no getting around the matter of what to do with all the toxic waste (never mind nuclear\u2019s claimed green credentials).<\/p>\n

The stagnant state of that dirty business brought Casey Carter, the director of the new avant-garde documentary<\/a> called To Use a Mountain<\/a>, back to his interview with a Washington state farmer who was part of a class-action lawsuit against the government over the release of radioactive material from the Hanford nuclear reservation<\/a> \u2013 site of the world\u2019s first full-scale plutonium production reactor. The farmer\u2019s words still echo, despite ultimately being cut to fit the film\u2019s 90-minute runtime. \u201cHe joked that nuclear power is the only faith-based energy because everyone always asks, \u2018Do you believe in it?\u2019\u201d Carter says. \u201cHe was like, \u2018You don\u2019t have to believe in solar. It\u2019s just a pretty good idea.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

To Use a Mountain could exist as a coda to Christopher Nolan<\/a>\u2019s Oppenheimer<\/a>, showing how the Manhattan Project physicist\u2019s fears about nuclear technology\u2019s vast potential for devastation proved more justified than even he could have imagined. In particular, the film trains its lens on the passage of the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act \u2013 which, among other things, placed six rural communities across the US in a derby of sorts to become the permanent site for more than 90,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste.<\/p>\n

The plan was for the waste to remain isolated for 10,000 years, and that humans would still be around to celebrate the Reagan-era edict<\/a> as a triumph. But the affected communities are more inclined to believe there may be no one left to parcel out due credit once the waste leaches into groundwater, pollutes the air and contaminates the food chain. Ultimately, Nevada\u2019s Yucca Mountain, about a two-hour drive from Las Vegas, was selected as the nuclear burial site, but after decades of scheming and development, legal challenges and obstruction from activists and prominent politicians such as Senate majority leader Harry Reid<\/a>, the Yucca Mountain project was halted \u2013 leaving the US with no permanent repository for its nuclear waste. (In the meantime, the federal government pays utility companies tens of billions of dollars<\/a> to hold on to their spent fuel until a place for it opens up.)<\/p>\n

Carter\u2019s documentary unspools like an art installation, steeped in mood and texture, as it urges viewers to reckon with the anxious state of play. Gone are the voice-of-God narrator, the talking-head experts and even basic chyrons; the subjects who appear on camera aren\u2019t named until the film\u2019s end credits. Instead, To Use a Mountain papier-maches reams of Department of Energy<\/a> (DoE) surveys, analyses and internal memos on to contemporary footage of decaying storage sites and interviews with community members who speak to the personal and environmental damage those false starts have wrought. A sound bath that samples from salmon-rich rivers and one-room church worship only serves to further underscore the stakes.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a prevailing sense of doom established in shaky handheld shots that search the sky for danger, then paid off in archival footage of Oppenheimer\u2019s bomb going off beneath desolate US landscapes before giving way to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to have a traditional journalistic conversation,\u201d says Casey, stressing the importance of humanizing the communities and concerns that the energy department documents treat with clinical distance. \u201cThese people were written about, mapped and diagrammed in excruciating detail. The Department of Energy was looking at them through this purely utilitarian lens, just kinda scanning the American landscape and trying to figure out which place was disposable enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ian Zabarte on Yucca Mountain in To Use A Mountain. Photograph: To Use A Mountain, LLC<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, the Department of Energy disposal list quickly homed in on sparsely populated rural communities that mining and farming industries had left behind. In some cases, those communities were largely made up of marginalized Black and brown people whose claims to the land date back generations. Advocates against the Yucca Mountain site argue that its designation as a DoE nuclear disposal ground disregards a US government treaty obligation<\/a> to the Western Shoshone tribe. The area\u2019s history of seismic activity is another reason to be wary of Yucca\u2019s structural integrity over the ensuing millennia.<\/p>\n

With impressionistic flourish, the film traces the arc of the resistance. Among others, it follows Ian Zabarte \u2013 a Shoshone principal who has lost family members to radiation-related diseases connected to the government\u2019s nuclear testing on tribal lands. As he goes from testifying on Capitol Hill as a young man to hiking the desolate area decades later, Zabarte never wavers in his belief that Yucca belongs to the Shoshone, arguing effectively that eminent domain is just racism by another name. \u201cIt\u2019s heavy, it\u2019s tragic and unfortunately it\u2019s an all-too-familiar state of affairs,\u201d Carter says. \u201cThe amazing thing was having these conversations and really gaining a deeper understanding of the duration, persistence and willpower within these communities.\u201d<\/p>\n

In one scene drawn from archival footage from Hanford, which was fully decommissioned in the 1980s and has since been described as<\/a> \u201cthe most contaminated place in the western hemisphere\u201d, the film lowers viewers into a disused storage tank that has been leaking contaminants into the groundwater system and threatening the Columbia River \u2013 a lifeline to Portland, Oregon; Boise, Idaho; and scores of communities in between.<\/p>\n

Casey Carter, the director of To Use a Mountain. Photograph: To Use a Mountain, LLC<\/p>\n

\u201cIn traveling to these places, you realize each one of them has dealt with issues of environmental violence or racism even prior to being nominated as a potential nuclear waste storage facility,\u201d Carter says. \u201cIt\u2019s gut-wrenching to think about people encountering this level of treatment from their government. It really shows how much of this anger exists in many parts of rural America, not just Maga rural America. This film is just a tour of example after example.\u201d<\/p>\n

Carter\u2019s stylistic confidence suggests he\u2019s been at this auteur thing for a while. But the truth is, To Use a Mountain is his first attempt at an ambitious, feature-length people\u2019s history. A double major in physics and photography, Carter went to grad school for architecture in hopes of \u201cunifying my left and right brain\u201d, he says. That thirst for scientifically driven aesthetics, combined with formative years spent in the shadow of Oak Ridge national laboratory in east Tennessee, which also figured prominently<\/a> in the Manhattan Project, compelled Carter to devote six years to retracing the US government\u2019s slog-footed effort to bury its nuclear shame. In hindsight, there\u2019s no missing those signatures in the CAD images Carter uses to depict Yucca Mountain and other disposal-site candidates.<\/p>\n

Doubtless, some audiences may be tempted to return the concerns raised in To Use a Mountain to the back burner \u2013 to file it under \u201cnot my problem\u201d because the energy department hasn\u2019t sized up their community or their local power plant hasn\u2019t been designated a Superfund site yet. Never mind that just last month, Idaho, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Utah were named<\/a> as finalists for \u201cnuclear lifecycle innovation campuses\u201d \u2013 federal sites that would handle spent fuel and waste management. The DoE plans to pick three host states by the end of this year. Oppenheimer\u2019s existential dread is roaring back to the fore.<\/p>\n

If anything, Carter\u2019s film is a reminder of how our unsolved nuclear problem connects to all the other existential threats that keep us doomscrolling through the night and calling on a higher power \u2013 God? The government? \u2013 to restore our faith that humanity can outlive the toxic waste it leaves behind. \u201cWhen I started this film in the summer of 2018, Covid hadn\u2019t happened,\u201d Carter says. \u201cWar in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran hadn\u2019t happened. Artificial intelligence hadn\u2019t been invented yet. The big tech companies are advocating for microreactors to power datacenters. Even by taking this methodological approach to making the film, it\u2019s still opened up to this kaleidoscope of impacts that touches on military history, the environmental impacts and human psychology and fear. There\u2019s just a sprawling network of consequences associated with this material.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nuclear energy was supposed to be our salvation, humanity\u2019s chance to retool technology first conceived as a weapon…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":604065,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[93,61,60,270],"class_list":["post-604064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=604064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604064\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/604065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=604064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=604064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=604064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}