In 1982, six communities across the Southern and Western United States were marked as candidates for an unthinkable fate — to be the final burial ground for 77,000 tons of nuclear waste.
visits all six of the candidate towns and speaks with those who live there in order to reveal their common socio-economic conditions, namely poverty and racialized citizenry, that made the federal government view these communities as ideal sites for generations of environmental contamination.
Faced with a mandate to isolate the waste for 10,000 years, the Department of Energy mapped, analyzed, and assembled data, while the unsuspecting stewards of sacrificial territory found themselves fighting for their homes, health, history, and dignity. The potential nuclear dumping sites were the communities of Vacherie Dome, LA; Richton Dome, MS; Deaf Smith, TX; Davis Canyon, UT; Hanford Site, WA; and Yucca Mountain, NV. As the evaluation process for these sites continued over a period of years, scientists and bureaucrats measured depths and stability, while existing residents measured potential loss. Blindsided but unyielding, one by one each community put up enough resistance for the DOE to move on to the next suitable candidate.
In the end, one site was chosen: the unceded lands of the Western Shoshone on Yucca Mountain, NV effectively breaking a treaty signed in 1863. After decades of controversy and continued protests from the local community, construction at Yucca Mountain was halted, and the crisis of nuclear waste remains unresolved.
Against the impassive logic of government analysis and archives, To Use a Mountain assembles a people's history of resistance and stewardship through a visceral journey across the landscapes, ecologies, and personal histories of the candidate sites. Farmers, miners, citizen scientists, Native Americans, and activists— each carrying a story bound to this enduring threat— stand in stark contrast to the cold, silent machinery of bureaucracy, in a meditation on resistance, memory, and the timeless struggle between power and place.
FILMMAKER'S STATEMENT: "You could always smell my hometown before you could see it. Eventually, I learned that Eastman Kodak refined uranium for the world's first atomic bombs, at the nearby OakRidge Laboratory during World War II. The comforts of middle-class prosperity reeked of rotten air, tainted water, and scientific grandeur.
Like many other places in the country, immense power of science, technology, and industrialism were nestled in those hills. Higher than average rates of cancer were the only obvious blemish and the stink in the air. But opportunity, security, and renditions of the American dream were sufficient consolation.
The landscapes and communities in this film reflect in some way the same extreme and mysterious conditions as those in East Tennessee, where I grew up: the co-mingling of hope and fear, resilience and disillusionment, ruin and salvation.
This crisis of nuclear waste is a threat to our health and environment that will outlive us all, and a chapter of American history that ceases to end. I hope this film can illuminate the gravity and context of this issue, and the experiences of those who have suffered across its many dimensions. But I also hope to convey a more complex, poetic, and reverent picture of the American landscape, its layered histories, and its many dedicated stewards— bound together by the land, the air, and the water. This film is a citizen's inquiry, and people's history of a story yet to conclude."
— Casey Carter
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