BRATTLEBORO — At its core, The Atomic States of America is about ordinary people asking questions. It's about people tending to accept their circumstances as normal until these questions yield disturbing patterns that obliterate the faith that everyone wishes to have in presumed experts charged with keeping us safe.
The film, which premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival, does an excellent job crisply laying out the basic issues surrounding nuclear power in the U.S.
Since one in every three Americans lives within 50 miles of a nuclear reactor (the radius that U.S. officials recommended be evacuated in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe in Japan), nuclear power is an issue that has an impact on everyone. The film's rare contribution is its focus on communities that live with nuclear reactors and the patterns they share.
Independent documentary filmmakers Sheena Joyce and Don Argott never thought much about nuclear power until they read author Kelly McMasters' memoir Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town, about growing up on Long Island next to the Brookhaven National Laboratory, which housed several nuclear research reactors.
“There's no running theme in our work other than we are always looking to make great stories [about] things hidden in plain sight,” Argott said. The filmmaking duo's 2009 film The Art of the Steal garnered numerous accolades for its inside look at money and art.
“We were given Kelly's book and fell in love with her voice. We wanted to know if her experience was the experience of those in other reactor communities around the country,” Joyce said.
“What we found were not people railing against the system, but unlikely activists asking tough questions,” she continued. “We wanted to see how all of it squared with the 'nuclear renaissance' we kept hearing about.”
“Making the film was a discovery process,” Joyce said. “We came into it from Kelly's personal story, but then it was like climbing Everest, trying to make the complexities of the nuclear power story understandable for the general public.”
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The filmmakers accomplish this goal with imaginative animation and sound that bring alive the science of and statistics on nuclear power for audiences in an entertaining way.
Interviews with officials from the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (the agency in charge of keeping America's 103 nuclear reactors operating safely) and nuclear industry representatives like former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman are balanced with stories from those in the trenches of raising community awareness when regulators appear to fall short of the job.
“The NRC becomes a convenient scapegoat when people are pointing fingers,” Argott said. “We found that they are really good people trying to keep communities safe, but they are also in an unfortunate role where they can only be as effective as the funding they have. That's where the scariest breakdown occurs.”
“What was eye opening to us was how the NRC budget is controlled by a Congress that is receiving lots of contributions from nuclear companies,” Joyce said.
The nuclear industry spent more than $650 million on lobbying and campaign contributions from 1999 through 2008, according to an analysis by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University. In the first three quarters of 2009 alone, the nuclear energy industry spent $84 million lobbying Congress.
A Japanese parliament report issued this month found that the Fukushima nuclear accident, though provoked by a natural disaster, was also the consequence of lax enforcement and a too-cozy relationship between industry and regulators.
Last week, two NRC risk analysts charged that superiors had deliberately buried reports advising action to secure nuclear reactors below major dams, especially a South Carolina nuclear complex owned by Duke Energy.
NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko resigned this year after having been the sole dissenter in a vote to approve the first new reactor license in 30 years, a vote that came along with $8 billion in federal loan guarantees.
“This is not an anti-nuclear film; there's plenty of those. It's not trying to scare you, just provoke a debate,” Argott said.