Visions du Réel 2025: To Use a Mountain (dir. Casey Carter) | Review
Why not use a mountain to store our nuclear waste? That’s precisely what Casey Carter sets out to refute in his feature-length documentary.
In 1982, the U.S. Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, aiming to regulate the management of radioactive waste generated by nuclear power plants and military testing during the development of the atomic bomb. The Department of Energy was tasked with selecting a storage site for this waste. A dozen locations across the United States were considered, but each proposal encountered strong local opposition. To this day, no consensus has been reached, and the project remains at a standstill.
In To Use a Mountain, Casey Carter sets out to document the confrontations that pitted the federal government against local communities. The film had its world premiere at Visions du Réel 2025 in the International Feature Film Competition. Unflinching and prosecutorial in tone, Carter’s documentary brings to light the stories of local residents—Indigenous groups, African American communities, small-scale farmers—who fought against expropriation and the destruction of their land. These were marginalized populations the government seemed willing to sacrifice for the greater good of the nation.
Visually, the film weaves together archival footage—including images of nuclear bomb tests in Nevada and footage of grassroots protests from the era—maps of the country and the various regions studied by the Department of Energy, which help contextualize and clarify complex geological concepts, and testimony from members of the current generation, who either lived through the conflict or inherited its memory.
Carter thus reveals the widespread rejection of the project by communities that are geographically, culturally, and politically diverse—driving home the point that the proposal was not only ill-conceived but emblematic of the federal government’s failure to address a national public health crisis. Beyond this specific plan to use a mountain for nuclear waste burial, the film’s testimonies make it clear that these communities continue to suffer from pollution related to the extraction and processing of nuclear materials. Carter reminds us that the question of long-term radioactive waste management remains unresolved—and that, to this day, governments and nuclear industry stakeholders are relying on temporary fixes rather than sustainable solutions.
