Robb Moss and Peter Galison will present a finished cut of their nuclear waste doc at this weekend’s Tales from Planet Earth Festival. Here’s what we thought of their rough cut back in 2013
At one point, one of Containment‘s talking heads remarks that most students of history are capable of imagining no more than 2,000 years of human civilization; for the average person, the perceivable breadth of time is closer to a tenth of that. Therein lies the fundamental problem at the heart of Containment, a documentary on the long-term consequences of nuclear waste storage from Harvard professors Robb Moss and Peter Galison.
Inspired in large by the resulting Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster during the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami, Containment presents the remains of the evacuated city as a ghost town. Hanging laundry and still-stocked restaurant pantries offer plaintive relics of a place frozen in time. The images would be beautifully poetic were they not burdened with the disasters that caused thousands of deaths and a massive release of nuclear radiation from Fukushima’s power plant. Now evacuated, the region in Japan still recalls the impossibility of the combined natural disasters; one interviewee classifies the incident as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Hurricane Katrina and the “Three Mile Island meltdown x 3” all rolled into one.
Such an inconceivable combination makes for a poetic match with the concerns of containing nuclear waste, that the impermanent human species might express such concerns over nuclear waste’s comparatively infinite future. Some particles take tens of thousands of years for a single half-life, the length of time a particle halves its radioactive properties. It’s a humbling possibility, and as Moss and Galison include reports from “futurist” experts on possible long-term scenarios, terrifying to imagine.
As a series of “what if” possibilities, Containment asks a compelling question, but its singular concern is driven by seemingly infinite denouements. Nuclear waste must be contained. Nuclear waste must be contained. Its portraits of past meltdowns, at the aforementioned Fukushima plant or the Chernobyl incident of the 1980s, are evocative but amount to little more than a tumbleweed of half-conclusions. In fairness to Moss and Galison, who previously collaborated on 2008’s Secrecy, theĀ Tales from Planet EarthĀ festival offered Containment as a work in progress, so many if not all criticisms should be met with reservation. Judging from what was screened Saturday at the Union South Marquee however, the film’s “rougher” elements appeared as post-production concerns — really, a CGI rendering here or there. The monolithic concerns over impending disaster are wonderfully illustrated, but the film’s title alone is almost enough to encapsulate its breadth of focus.