New documentary highlights indigenous communities fighting nuclear waste dumping on their land

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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

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.’”

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