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New documentary To Use a Mountain spotlights the pain and triumph of resisting government efforts to turn parts of rural US into disposal sites
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Film — Andrew Lawrence
Nuclear energy was supposed to be our salvation, humanity’s 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 safety paragon (never mind the spills at Chornobyl , Three Mile Island and Fukushima ) and harmless fodder for an American comedy institution (never mind that glowing rod on Homer’s 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’s claimed green credentials).
The stagnant state of that dirty business brought Casey Carter, the director of the new avant-garde documentary called To Use a Mountain , 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 – site of the world’s first full-scale plutonium production reactor. The farmer’s words still echo, despite ultimately being cut to fit the film’s 90-minute runtime. “He joked that nuclear power is the only faith-based energy because everyone always asks, ‘Do you believe in it?’” Carter says. “He was like, ‘You don’t have to believe in solar. It’s just a pretty good idea.’”
To Use a Mountain could exist as a coda to Christopher Nolan ’s Oppenheimer , showing how the Manhattan Project physicist’s fears about nuclear technology’s 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 – 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.
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 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’s 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 , the Yucca Mountain project was halted – 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 to hold on to their spent fuel until a place for it opens up.)
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Carter’s 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’t named until the film’s end credits. Instead, To Use a Mountain papier-maches reams of Department of Energy (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.
It’s a prevailing sense of doom established in shaky handheld shots that search the sky for danger, then paid off in archival footage of Oppenheimer’s bomb going off beneath desolate US landscapes before giving way to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “I didn’t want to have a traditional journalistic conversation,” says Casey, stressing the importance of humanizing the communities and concerns that the energy department documents treat with clinical distance. “These 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.”
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 to the Western Shoshone tribe. The area’s history of seismic activity is another reason to be wary of Yucca’s structural integrity over the ensuing millennia.
With impressionistic flourish, the film traces the arc of the resistance. Among others, it follows Ian Zabarte – a Shoshone principal who has lost family members to radiation-related diseases connected to the government’s 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. “It’s heavy, it’s tragic and unfortunately it’s an all-too-familiar state of affairs,” Carter says. “The amazing thing was having these conversations and really gaining a deeper understanding of the duration, persistence and willpower within these communities.”
In one scene drawn from archival footage from Hanford, which was fully decommissioned in the 1980s and has since been described as “the most contaminated place in the western hemisphere”, the film lowers viewers into a disused storage tank that has been leaking contaminants into the groundwater system and threatening the Columbia River – a lifeline to Portland, Oregon; Boise, Idaho; and scores of communities in between.
“In 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,” Carter says. “It’s 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.”
Carter’s stylistic confidence suggests he’s 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’s history. A double major in physics and photography, Carter went to grad school for architecture in hopes of “unifying my left and right brain”, 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 in the Manhattan Project, compelled Carter to devote six years to retracing the US government’s slog-footed effort to bury its nuclear shame. In hindsight, there’s no missing those signatures in the CAD images Carter uses to depict Yucca Mountain and other disposal-site candidates.
Doubtless, some audiences may be tempted to return the concerns raised in To Use a Mountain to the back burner – to file it under “not my problem” because the energy department hasn’t sized up their community or their local power plant hasn’t been designated a Superfund site yet. Never mind that just last month, Idaho, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Utah were named as finalists for “nuclear lifecycle innovation campuses” – 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’s existential dread is roaring back to the fore.
Related: Can we afford to be afraid of nuclear power?
If anything, Carter’s 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 – God? The government? – to restore our faith that humanity can outlive the toxic waste it leaves behind. “When I started this film in the summer of 2018, Covid hadn’t happened,” Carter says. “War in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran hadn’t happened. Artificial intelligence hadn’t 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’s still opened up to this kaleidoscope of impacts that touches on military history, the environmental impacts and human psychology and fear. There’s just a sprawling network of consequences associated with this material.”
To Use a Mountain is out in the US now with UK and Australia release dates to follow
The stagnant state of that dirty business brought Casey Carter, the director of the new avant-garde documentary called To Use a Mountain , 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 – site of the world’s first full-scale plutonium production reactor. The farmer’s words still echo, despite ultimately being cut to fit the film’s 90-minute runtime. “He joked that nuclear power is the only faith-based energy because everyone always asks, ‘Do you believe in it?’” Carter says. “He was like, ‘You don’t have to believe in solar. It’s just a pretty good idea.’”
This report is published with credit to theguardian.com. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on theguardian.com →
Source: theguardian.com · Andrew Lawrence. Published 25 Aug 2026, 09:00 am.
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