A new avant-garde documentary, To Use a Mountain, examines America's decades-long failure to find a permanent home for its nuclear waste, focusing on rural and indigenous communities who fought government plans to turn their land into disposal sites. Director Casey Carter builds the film around the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which pitted six rural US communities against each other to host over 90,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste, ultimately settling on Nevada's Yucca Mountain before the project was halted amid legal and political opposition. The film matters because it reframes nuclear waste disposal not just as a technical problem but as an ongoing act of "environmental violence" against the communities forced to bear the risk indefinitely.

Rather than using conventional documentary techniques such as narration, expert interviews or on-screen captions, Carter combines Department of Energy documents with footage of decaying storage sites and unnamed community members describing the personal toll of these failed projects. The waste was meant to be safely isolated for 10,000 years, but affected communities fear contamination of groundwater, air and food long before then, while the US government currently pays utility companies billions of dollars annually to store spent fuel with no permanent site available. The film draws visual and thematic parallels to Oppenheimer, tracing a line from the Manhattan Project's bomb tests to the unresolved legacy of nuclear waste today.