From the Hanford site in Washington State (home to scientists working on the Manhattan Project in 1943), to La Hague in France (a plutonium reprocessing plant), to Rokkasho in northern Japan (a nuclear plant built atop a seismic fault), this film tracks the origin and uses of plutonium.  Along the way it questions the transference of this material from military use to civilian use.  We hear citizens and politicians share their thoughts, and often their experiences of living near nuclear sites.  “Nuclear Lands” brings into focus the scientific, industrial and geopolitical stakes of plutonium, while recreating a history of the world-changing choice made in the mid-twentieth century, and the secret birth of dangerous industrial environments often sited in arid and desolate locations.

Join us after the film for a presentation by several Masters of Public Health students from the University of Washington who have been studying plutonium releases at the Hanford nuclear site in the past year.  Tom Carpenter from Hanford Challenge will also be present.

When plutonium was first manufactured at Berkeley in the spring of 1941, there was so little of it that it was not visible to the naked eye.  Now there is so much that we don’t know what to do to get rid of it.  We have created a monster.  (Jeremy Bernstein, Plutonium: A History of the World’s Most Dangerous Element)