Feature documentary in post-production

LOGLINE

Physics, geology, and democracy collide across the expansive American interior, in a series of vignettes from six candidate sites for a sacrificial nuclear dumping ground.

SYNOPSIS

Part dystopian exposé and part folk tableau, TO USE A MOUNTAIN presents generational, rural American stories of environmental ruin, citizen science, and ecopolitical activism in areas that once faced the possibility of federally mandated nuclear waste storage. 

In 1982, six rural communities in Nevada, Utah, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Washington State were chosen, then quietly notified that all of the nation’s nuclear waste might be buried beneath them forever. Over the next several years, each candidate site would be studied in detail by the Department of Energy’s scientists and bureaucrats, resulting in either a recommendation to the president, or removal from the list. 

This process was met with almost unanimous distress and resistance, leaving an enduring emotional and psychological imprint on the communities in each of these places. It was an unimaginable transgression - and for some, insult to injury centuries in the making. In the end, only one site was chosen: a desert ridge in Nevada called Yucca Mountain, on the unceded lands of the Western Shoshone. The radioactive material buried there would require isolation from human contact for countless generations - 10,000 years at a minimum.  But the proposed repository was never completed, and still no durable solution exists for dealing with nuclear waste. 

These alarming and surreal conditions invoke notions of risk beyond our lifetime, even beyond our civilization - notions of time and catastrophe that call into question our personal and collective histories and unsettle our visions for the future.

TO USE A MOUNTAIN engages this ongoing crisis of nuclear waste through present-day vignettes in each of the candidate dump sites, immersing us directly in the landscape and the lived experience of local families, farmers, miners, engineers, scientists, and activists. Through personal anecdotes, scrapbooks, and family photos, we present a people’s history held in fragments of memory and experience that span the continent - in contrast to the institutional history that emanates from the nation’s archives and governing bodies. A bold graphic treatment, immersive cinematography, and absorbing sound animate a sci-fi American folk-epic, and cautionary tale, extending thousands of years into the past and future. 

The structure of the film mimics the procession of site-selection, proceeding in chapters beginning with the communities that were eliminated earliest and ending with the chosen site. Rather than intimately developing one or several key protagonists, we encounter a chorus of characters that endear us to a sense of community and shared experience, while also revealing the complexities and particularities of each region. As the film progresses, layers of context build and information is revealed more clearly, our understanding of the stakes deepens, and the ongoing impact of this historical process is revealed to be ever more present.

In distant pockets of rural America we meet characters whose lives and family histories speak directly to the human experience never acknowledged by the government’s site-selection process: like Sonny Ottinger, a uranium prospector turned dinosaur hunter, who runs a rock shop in Utah; or Evelyn Richardson, who staged a farmer’s revolt when she learned her family’s home might be taken for the waste repository; or Ian Zabarte, a Western Shoshone activist fighting to stop nuclear weapons testing on his people’s unceded lands.

These rich, personal encounters are juxtaposed with the cold and technocratic archive of site studies published by the Department of Energy, framing the central and recurring conflict of the film: the presumed authority of federal institutions against local vulnerability and grassroots resistance. This dramatic opposition cuts directly to the emotional core of these communities, and takes on issues about our collective environment, risk, and the complex role of science in American civic life.

What begins as the utilitarian search for a nuclear dumping ground envelopes us in the dreams, disillusionments, and fortitudes of the people that live within these landscapes. With each new site and cast of characters, the problem of nuclear waste grows more confounding - an ecological and ethical crisis calling into question our relationship to history, technology, and the mythologies of the American landscape.