The years 1962 to 1972 represented a boom time for nuclear energy proposals in New York. In December 1962, Con Edison announced it had submitted a formal application to the AEC for permission to build a nuclear reactor at a site called Ravenswood. This was in the New York borough of Queens, on the East River just across from the United Nations in Manhattan. About five million people lived within five miles of the site. The first US protests against reactors took place against Ravenswood, including petitions to President John F. Kennedy and Mayor Robert Wagner. The organizers, mostly Queens community leaders, pressed their case throughout 1963. Finally, in January 1964, Con Ed withdrew its plans for the Ravenswood plant. The company contended that the decision had nothing to do with opposition to the plant, but that it had decided to buy large amounts of hydroelectric power from Canada. But the real reason for the withdrawal was stated by none other than former AEC Chair David Lilienthal, suggesting even the pro-nuclear AEC had opposed a reactor in such a densely populated area: “I regard this as a decision very much in the interest of the health and safety of Metropolitan New York … I think this decision is very much in the public interest.”
But the demise of Ravenswood did not mean an end to proposed nukes in New York City. In 1967, the magazine Power suggested that Con Edison might build a reactor underneath Central Park, in the middle of Manhattan. After The New York Times followed with an editorial critical of the idea, Con Edison denied it had any such intention the following week. Then, in October 1968, Con Edison made front page headlines when it proposed a nuclear reactor below Welfare Island (now known as Roosevelt Island), a thin, one-mile long strip in the East River just across from Manhattan, which housed two large municipal hospitals for the chronically ill. On the same day as the announcement, a task force headed by philanthropist Laurence Rockefeller (brother of the New York State Governor) also endorsed a below-ground reactor.
Laurence Rockefeller soundly supported the Welfare Island proposal. His rationale betrayed a delusion about the risks of placing nuclear reactors anywhere, let alone in the most densely populated city in the nation:
Mr. Rockefeller said he believed that the dangers of nuclear power were so slight that there was no longer any reason to bar them from cities. But he said public opinion was insisting on a completely no-risk installation. He believes the slight risk of leakage from a nuclear reactor – there is no danger of explosion, he said – is well worth it, considering the contamination that exists now with air pollution. Mr. Rockefeller said that he did not understand “why we have to go to ‘no-risk’ there (at a nuclear generating plant) when it isn’t even that safe to go home at night.” He continued “We might just as well sleep in the office.”
The public wasn’t buying such a myopic view of nuclear power in the big city, and thus the Welfare Island idea never generated any support. By 1970, it had disappeared from the Con Edison radar screen, in favor of other projects.
Proposals for reactors within the New York City limits went nowhere, so utilities persisted by floating ideas to build them in the immediate outskirts of the city. In March 1971, the New Jersey Public Service Electric and Gas Company announced it had acquired a site in Bayonne, New Jersey, and had told the AEC it intended to build two large nuclear reactors on the site. Bayonne lies on the Hudson River, just three miles from Manhattan’s southern tip where Wall Street is located. That the company would even make such a purchase and proposal was puzzling. Its Executive Vice President Robert Baker stated that any formal proposal to the AEC from the company would be at least two to three years away (this proposal again never went anywhere):
“We have good reason to believe that any application in the immediate future would be fruitless,” Mr. Baker said. He added, however, that the company hoped that public fears of the environmental dangers would be overcome by the safe operation of other large nuclear plants by Public Service and other utilities.
In October 1971, the city government co-sponsored a conference, in which the novel concept was proposed of building a nuclear “jetport” in the ocean just south of the New York City shoreline. While no number of reactors was indicated, the city was excited by the possibility. “Five years ago, such a project would have been considered silly. But now there’s some optimism that it can be done,” said City Planning Commissioner Donald Elliott. But coverage of the same article that quoted Elliott also noted that “the concept still is considered an extremely long shot.” Again, the plan never made it past the conference.
The nuclear delusion of the greatest scale ever proposed for New York City occurred on April 1, 1970. On that day, Con Edison chairman Charles Luce announced the company’s intention to build two man-made islands off the coastline of Brooklyn, a New York City borough with a population of three million. Each island would contain four large nuclear reactors. On August 9 of that year, Luce announced that a contract with the Bechtel Corporation was imminent to study the feasibility of such a project, and predicted that offshore nuclear reactors near Brooklyn would succeed because it represented an environmentally friendly way to generate power:
This would be one solution to the problem of thermal pollution, or thermal effects that we encounter with our other nuclear plants… The toughest environmental problem is water heating, but we believe we can beat this by drawing low-temperature water from deep supplies and pouring it back into the ocean. These man-made islands would do just that.
The proposal of man-made “nuclear parks” just off the waters surrounding of New York City, plus other proposals in the city, totally ignored the many dangers of nuclear reactors, including occupational exposures to workers, routine releases to the general environment, the chance of a meltdown, and the accumulation of large amounts of deadly radiation.
Although these were the only known proposals to build reactors in New York City, many more in proximate locations were made. In fact, applications for sixteen reactors within 100 miles were officially submitted to the AEC (and to its successor organization, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission). But of these, only five were built and operated (three at Indian Point thirty-five miles to the north, one at Oyster Creek sixty-five miles to the southwest, and one at Haddam Neck, ninety miles to the northeast). Of these five, Indian Point #1 and Connecticut Yankee have closed permanently, and Oyster Creek will close by 2019 (see below). The other eleven reactor orders were withdrawn for safety and cost considerations, and at least nineteen other proposed reactors, including those mentioned in the preceding paragraphs, never even made it to the formal application stage. Thus, an area that might have had thirty or more reactors wound up with just five at the maximum, a number that is now three (below).
Of the many dangers involved in operating a nuclear reactor in or near a city like New York, none are as blatant as the impossibility of safely evacuating the area if a large-scale meltdown occurred. On a normal day, the New York area is snarled with traffic. If all people in the area were to be evacuated after a meltdown, not just the working population, the massive jam would far exceed all previous ones. The federally-required evacuation plan of just the ten mile radius around a reactor would be woefully inadequate, as radiation would travel with prevailing winds much further than ten miles, into New York City, which has no evacuation plan.
One of the sixteen New York-area reactors that were ordered was Shoreham, on Long Island, fifty-five miles northeast of New York City. An evacuation from this site would be a nightmare; Long Island is a small strip of land with nearly three million people perpetually plagued by traffic jams. Moreover, there is only one way to evacuate Long Island by land – through New York City! Nonetheless, the 1968 reactor order was approved by federal regulators, and construction began. But the New York State government was required to approve the evacuation plan; and beginning in the early days of Shoreham, the answer from the Governor and state legislators was “no.” Legislators were spurred by public protests organized by local groups including the Sierra Club and Audubon Society, the largest of which occurred on June 3,
1979, during which 15,000 persons attended the demonstration and 600 were arrested. The Long Island Lighting Company pressed on with construction, hoping that somehow it could persuade the state to change its mind. But the change never came. Shoreham was completed but never opened, except for a brief test of the reactor at very low power, and it closed permanently in 1989. The company had originally pegged the cost of the reactor at $65 to $75 million, but the final tab was closer to $6 billion. These costs were passed on to the Lighting Company’s ratepayers over a three year period. The large reactor stands quietly at the site, a symbol of the failure of nuclear power. A final legacy of Shoreham was that two small wind turbines began operating at the site in 2005.
The New York metropolitan area’s dance with nuclear power is almost complete. Where dozens of reactors were once envisioned, only three remain (one of which will close by 2019). The two reactors at Indian Point are aging, and will eventually close. No new reactors in the NYC area have been proposed in decades. And despite the hyperbole about how nukes were the “best” means of generating electricity in New York, the city and its suburbs have been able to produce and import enough to satisfy its ever-growing demand. The extensive effort to bring nuclear power to America’s largest city was a house of cards, which ignored or minimized threats – threats that will exist indefinitely, as large amounts of radioactive waste remain stored at suburban plants in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.
While the New York City area was going through its nuclear dance, an even stronger effort was being made on the other side of the nation, in California. As the twentieth century evolved, the “Land of Milk and Honey” was the place to go. The state’s population from had rocketed from 1.5 million to 10.5 million from 1900 to 1950, and predictions of 30 million or more by the year 2000 abounded. The need to accommodate this huge influx of people entailed many things – including figuring out how to generate enough electricity.
The utilities in California salivated at the chance to build nuclear reactors all over the state. If proposals for New York were in high gear, they were even more frenzied in California. In August 1969, the California state assembly supported a twenty-year development plan by utilities to build sixty-three nuclear reactors at various locations in the state. This number may now seem incredibly large, but just four decades ago was readily accepted by legislators and utilities alike.
California had gotten a jump start in building nuclear reactors, at both ends of the long state. The Humboldt Bay reactor, well north of San Francisco, was the first to operate west of the Mississippi River when it opened in 1963. The San Onofre reactor, south of Los Angeles, began operations in 1967. At that point, there were only twelve reactors producing electricity nationwide, and California had two of them. There were also research reactors operating at Vallecitos, just east of San Francisco, and Santa Susana, just northwest of Los Angeles.
But California’s nuclear dream died. The death process began early; Vallecitos and Santa Susana experienced multiple problems, and both had closed their reactors by 1964. The shut-downs did not immediately sway utilities; by 1970, they had submitted a total of twelve California reactor applications to the AEC, and two more were delivered in 1975. But of the fourteen reactors, seven were cancelled before they were constructed and three more closed, leaving the state’s thirty-eight million residents with just four units (see below):
The story of how the atomic dream in California died featured all the elements of its decline across the US. At first, the great hype about how reactors would benefit people made atomic energy almost seem like fun. In 1958, a “nuclear park” was proposed for Bodega Bay, on the Pacific coast just north of San Francisco. But the proposed site was very close to the fault that had caused the 1906 earthquake that destroyed the city of San Francisco. In the mid-1960s, Pacific Gas and Electric proposed a second location at Bodega Bay, but it too was too close to the presence of a nearby fault. As the AEC asked for more documentation about the site, the company realized the folly of its idea, and dropped the proposal in 1972.
The most contested nuclear plant was Diablo Canyon, in San Luis Obispo County in mid-California. Diablo Canyon was first proposed by Pacific Gas and Electric in 1965, as a two-reactor plant that would cost $320 million (it would eventually cost $5.3 billion). Local residents and state and national groups were concerned about many issues, including the nearby faults that could cause earthquakes and the damage that would be caused to the aquatic life in the Pacific Ocean – concerns that were dismissed by the utility and federal regulators, which had given the plant the go-ahead. Opposition turned into full-fledged protests at the site, beginning on August 6, 1977 (the thirty-second anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing). Over the next few years, protests grew in size and intensity, especially after the 1979 meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant sparked anti-nuclear protests across the nation. During a two week period in September 1981, when the plant was blockaded by protestors, over 1,900 people were arrested. A number of elected officials, including California Governor Jerry Brown, spoke out against Diablo Canyon. But the utility persisted, and in the mid-1980s, both reactors began operating.
The controversy over Diablo Canyon was accompanied by failures of California reactors that had already begun operations. The Humboldt Bay reactor, which was also located near faults, was small and problematic, and proved unprofitable; the reactor closed permanently in 1976. The Rancho Seco reactor was also unprofitable, operating only 39% of the time in its history due to a variety of mechanical problems. Some were serious. In March 1978, a “dryout” of the steam generators made the plant susceptible to a meltdown, a situation that was deemed the third worst accident in among US reactors by the NRC. In December 1985, another breakdown caused the plant to shut for over two years for repairs. Local residents had had enough, and took action. Rancho Seco was not owned by a private utility, but by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District. In June 1989, a ballot initiative to close the plant was approved by voters, and the large reactor never operated again.
The early nuclear love affair in California didn’t last long. By 1976, a state referendum was placed on the ballot to ban all new orders for nuclear reactors, until a long-term solution for nuclear waste storage was found. Voters approved the referendum, and new orders ended.
Government and industry leaders pushed the perception of nuclear reactors as a safe and inexpensive way to produce electricity. They denied or hid the numerous risks posed by atomic power – the same power used in nuclear weapons, the most devastating force the world had ever seen. Some of this hiding was done through legislation, such as the Price-Anderson Act greatly limiting industry liability in case of a reactor meltdown. Bolstered by this soothing assurance of safety, many overlooked the risks and pursued the development of nuclear reactors. In the early days of nuclear reactors, the vision of their role in the future was as sunny as it gets; in 1974, the AEC predicted that by the year 2000, about 1,200 reactors would be operating in the US.
But when reactors were actually ordered, constructed, and operated, the shine came off their image. Reactors were proposed in dangerous areas, such as New York City and the earthquake-prone California coast. They took an eternity to build, much longer than earlier predictions, as Wall Street investors waited years before a penny in loans could be paid back. Costs of planning and building nuclear plants were billions more than promised. Reactors were small at first, were closed frequently for repairs, and often shut down permanently after just a few years of operation. Beginning in the 1970s, some began to question how much radiation was leaking into the environment, and whether it posed harm to workers and local residents.
Officials were not about to admit to these realities. They maintained the stance that reactors were “clean” and “cheap” and either ignored or opposed anyone who publicly stated otherwise. The beating that the once-rosy image of reactors was taking proved to be too strong to maintain momentum. Perhaps the greatest blows were received from the 1979 partial meltdown at the
Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania and the 1986 total meltdown at the Chernobyl plant in the former Soviet Union, which galvanized a frightened public to many open large-scale protests. Over two dozen US reactors closed permanently, and orders for new reactors ceased after 1978. Over 100 ordered reactors were cancelled. The number of US reactors, instead of reaching the 1,200 number predicted by the AEC, settled at 104, and the percent of electrical power generated by these reactors never exceeded 20%.
But even with this extremely disappointing record, the culture of secrecy and deception endured. The 104 reactors continued to be big investments, not just financial ones, but as means of viewing the atom from a non-destructive standpoint, even as the Cold War ended the immediate fear of nuclear war. The fights over risks from nuclear weapons plants moved to nuclear power plants. The dynamics were the same; citizens and independent scientists and officials seeking the truth challenged the pro-nuclear faction made up of government and industry leaders.
The fight would take place over many plants, with many similarities at each. However, a special fight would take place at a special plant in the hills overlooking Los Angeles, a fight where secrecy and deception would reach amazing heights.
Big Meltdown in Hollywood’s Backyard
The Simi Valley in California is a bowl-shaped geological formation, in southeastern Ventura County on the border of Los Angeles County. It lies just thirty miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Less than twenty miles from the Pacific Ocean, it is surrounded on all sides by hills and mountains, including the Santa Susana Mountains to the north and the Simi Hills to the south.
Mad Science: The Nuclear Power Experiment Page 8