
          The Inner Life of the Deadly Machine
          By Shortal, HelenHelen Shortal
          Vol. 12, No. 5, 1990, pp. 7-10
          
          Building
Bombs. Produced and directed by Mark Mori and Susan
Robinson.
          Building Bombs is making news. Both CNN and NBC News have broadcast footage from the one-hour
documentary that examines the human cost of nuclear-weapons production
at the Savannah River Plant in Aiken, S.C.
          Even MTV has taken notice of the film, since Building
Bombs has been promoted by rock musicians such as Michael
Stipe of R.E.M. and Dave Wakeling of the now defunct General
Public. When MTV learned that Wakeling would be on hand for the film's
premier in Washington, D.C., the network dispatched a video crew to
the Biograph Theater in Georgetown. A segment featuring interviews
with Wakeling and Atlanta-based filmmaker Mark Mori along with the
music of R.E.M. was later shown on MTV.
          The five-year effort to produce and distribute BuildingBombs began in 1984 when Mori and two friends decided to film
a peace demonstration near the mammoth weapons complex. The ad hoc
film crew paid a visit to the antinuclear activists who were living at
a peace encampment near the Savannah River Plant. "We just started
shooting protesters," says Mori. "But then we met Arthur Dexter
and Bill Lawless."
          Both Dexter and Lawless had worked at "the bomb plant," as it is
known to local residents. And both men recounted highly personal tales
of their disillusionment with the nuclear industry.
          Lawless, a former Department of Energy investigator, was sent to
the Savannah River Plant to assess the amount of radioactive waste
buried in the South_Carolina soil. He submitted a report that detailed
the widespread contamination and serious hazards at the plant. And
DuPont de Nemours & Co., which managed the plant until last year,
pressured him to retract his findings. Lawless became the first
Department of Energy official to testify about the bomb plant's
hazardous conditions.
          Of the many horror stories Lawless told, the one that received the
most attention concerned the disposal of low-level radioactive
materials at the plant; objects contaminated with radioactivity were
place in cardboard boxes and buried in pits. The 192-acre burial
ground at the plant contained everything from protective gloves to
bulldozers. And the boxes were caving in, contaminating the soil and
the groundwater with radioactivity.
          Arthur Dexter was a former physicist at the plant. Ironically, he
had gone to work at the bomb plant to avoid fighting in the Korean
war; only DuPont had the power to exempt Dexter from the draft. His
new job, testing the movement of gases through various materials,
"seemed quite innocent at the time," says Dexter in the
film. "Only later did I realize I was working on weapons."
          As the years passed, Dexter became uncomfortable with the
stockpiling he observed at the bomb plant, which housed enough
plutonium and tritium to manufacture 30,000 bombs like the one dropped
on Nagasaki. "It seemed rather obscene," he says. After Dexter quit
working at the plant he became involved in the Aiken Peace Movement
and with Warhead Watch, a group that tracks nuclear weapons
transported on public highways.
          As Mori interviewed the pair of Savannah River Plant insiders, he
began to envision a different kind of protest film. Building
Bombs would focus on life inside the bomb plant rather than
rail against the hazards and abuses of the nuclear industry.
          During 1985, Mori met his future partner, Susan Robinson, at
Atlanta's IMAGE Film/Video Center for independent film and video
artists. A producer of interactive projects and corporate videos,
Robinson had a background in instructional design--and a strong
interest in environmental issues. She had attended her first
demonstration at the Savannah River Plant when she was 16.
          But neither Mori nor Robinson had produced a feature length film
before. "We were first-time filmmakers, and everyone told us to
just make a simple expose--the story of Dr. Lawless and those
cardboard boxes," says Robinson. "But we felt that personal
responsibility, political ideology, and history all came together in
this story, and we wanted to tell the whole thing. Becoming
politically aware and active is a developmental process, and we
believed that if we could tell the stories of these men and the
changes they made in their lives, they would serve as role
models."
          Robinson and Mori began compiling research materials, photographs,
film footage, and interviews about a wide range of topics pertaining
to the bomb plant. They unearthed archival footage of cardboard boxes
labeled "Radioactive Waste" being tossed into pits in the burial
ground. They filmed a pro-nuclear rally in 1984 where former Secretary
of Energy James Edwards delivered a speech about the economic benefits
of the nuclear industry. And they interviewed workers and family
members about working conditions at the plant, the region's mounting
health problems and life in the company town.
          "We tried to design the film for people who weren't necessarily
sensitive to these issues," says Mori. "People expect
Building Bombs to be a regular anti-nuclear film, but
we wanted to make it more than that. We wanted to look at the lives of
the human beings who work in the nuclear industry."
          Not that Building Bombs skimps on the Savannah River
Plant or its role in the arms race. But its litany of mismanagement
and impending doom is softened by the filmmakers' empathy for the
people whose lives have been affected by the bomb plant.
          As the film begins narrator Jane Alexander describes the growth of
the nuclear industry in South_Carolina. In 1950, the Atomic Energy
Commission selected the region near rural Ellenton, S.C., as the ideal
location for manufacturing plutonium and tritium. The U.S. government
relocated more than 6,000 residents to dear a vast trace of
land. Three towns were demolished to make room for the bomb plant,
which encompasses some 300 square miles of land in three counties.
          "But with the destruction came prosperity," recounts
Alexander. The Savannah River Plant was one of the largest
construction projects in modern history. More than 200 miles of
highway wind through the five-reactor complex, which currently employs
about 15,000 workers.

          Building Bombs makes it clear that the nuclear
industry bought its way into South_Carolina with a promise of
prosperity. "Over $30 billion has been brought into South_Carolina
as a result of the nuclear industry," exhorts Edwards at the
pro-nuclear rally. "That's big money.... We talk about all the
problems that nuclear brings, but $5 million has been spent just on
monitoring this area."
          Nowadays, money buys silence from the people who operate the bomb
plant--and live in its shadow. A housewife interviewed in
Building Bombs says that Aiken residents won't petition
for a health study of the local population, even though "it seems
like too much of a coincidence when you have four or five people in
the same block dying of cancer." She says people are afraid of
losing their jobs or their pensions.
          The filmmakers got a firsthand look at the business of building
bombs when they received permission to shoot inside the enormous
complex. Working under constant supervision, their volunteer crews
filmed the remote controlled processes used to produce plutonium and
tritium. When the crew moved outside to shoot the burial ground, they
were given protective booties to wear. "The soil in the burial
ground was radioactive," says Mori. "All of our shots had to be
hand-held. We couldn't even put our tripod on the ground."
          Building Bombs mixes hard facts about the
irresponsible dumping of radioactive chemicals with anecdotes that are
no less thrilling. DuPont officials discovered that the turtles that
swam in these "seepage basins" had become contaminated by radiation,
so plant workers combed the surrounding streams and woodlands in an
attempt to contain the turtle-powered migration of highly radioactive
strontium-90.
          "We've uncovered some things in this film that still haven't
gotten into the mainstream media," says Robinson. A "deep throat"
source at the plant informed the filmmakers that the concrete floors
are disintegrating in the Canyon Buildings, where plutonium and
tritium are extracted from fuel rods. Thirty-five years of bombardment
by radiation is turning the floors into sponge. While Westinghouse,
which currently manages the plant, has made no response to this
allegation, Robinson believes that this silence constitutes
assent. "We've shown the film in Aiken," she says, "and none
of the facts have been refuted."
          There's a dark humor in Building Bombs that arises
from pointing out the gap between rhetoric at the Savannah River
Plant. When plant officials were warned that radioactive wastes might
spread beyond the burial ground, for example, "DuPont stated that
the radioactivity was so low that it would never outcrop,"
recounts Alexander. "The first outcrop occurred in 1978, one year
later." At the Biograph screening of Building Bombs
an explosion of laughter greeted a confession by a rake-happy
Secretary of Energy Edwards that "I'm a sort of environmentalist
myself."
          Robinson and Mori met with initial resistance when they tried to
arrange a screening in Aiken. But when they did succeed in scheduling
the film, the South_Carolina premier of Building Bombs
was the lead item in the local 

news for two days. A plant worker
informed Greenpeace that Westinghouse issued a memo to advise its
15,000 employees that the film would be screened in Aiken. Mori
believes the memo was intended to spur a show of company solidarity at
the screenings.
          More than 600 people attended screenings of Building
Bombs in Aiken and nearby Augusta, Ga. Many of them were
workers from the Savannah River Plant. "People were pretty hostile
going into the screening," says Mori. "But there
were people in the film that they lived and worked with--people that
spoke their language. It affected them. When they left the screening,
a lot of people said they needed to think about what we're doing at
the Savannah River Plant."
          "The most difficult part of getting the film out was raising the
money--convincing people that the film needed to be made," says
Mori. "We started working on Building Bombs before
it was popular to criticize the nuclear industry. We were actually
filming at the Savannah River Plant when Chernobyl happened. We'd been
there getting a shot to show there was no containment dome [above the
reactor]. We were driving home that night, and we heard over the radio
that there'd been a big release of radiation."
          Not surprisingly, fundraising became easier after the April, 1986
accident at Chernobyl released 50-billion curies of radiation into the
atmosphere. Now that Building Bombs is finished,
Robinson and Mori are raising money to promote the film and court a
distributor. During the past year the pair has raised about $20,000 to
finance trips to film festivals, competitions and conventions where
programs are marketed to broadcasters and
distributors. Building Bombs was awarded a Silver Hugo
in the social/political documentary category at the 1989 Chicago Film
Festival.
          "It's always been difficult to be an independent filmmaker,"
says Mori. "The U.S. is one of the worst places for
independents. You can't get funding and you can't get your films
shown." Mori is on the steering committee of the national
Coalition of Independent Producers, which successfully lobbied
Congress to allocate $6 million per year for independent television
productions.
          Robinson and Mori are not the only filmmakers pointing their
cameras at the nuclear industry. But they believe their film is
uniquely successful in capturing the rhythm of Southern
life. "There's something very Southern about Building
Bombs," says Robinson. "It meanders; it takes its
time. Gradually, it tells viewers that the situation is an
emergency."
          Mori believes the slower pace of his hometown fostered his
five-year dream of documenting life at the Savannah River Plant. "I
couldn't have made Building Bombs if I lived in LA or
New_York," says Mori. "As first-time filmmakers, we probably
would have been laughed out of town. The industry there is too
overpowering."
          
            Helen Shortal is associate editor of In Motion
magazine. This review first appeared in In These Times,
and is reprinted here with permission. (For information on rental or
purchase of Building Bombs, write to Box 5202, Station
13, Atlanta, GA 30307.)
          
        
