The media coyly called it the “Trojan Implosion.” It was a controlled demolition of the 500-foot cooling tower that loomed as a landmark over the lower Columbia River for nearly 30 years at the site of now-defunct Trojan Nuclear Power Plant.

The demolition of the cooling tower was an inconvenient reminder that Trojan was sold as a “clean, inexhaustible” supply of electric power in the 1970s. It went on line in 1976 after a protracted political battle over nuclear energy’s safety and economics. It was expected to produce power for 30 years or more.

Trojan’s owner, Portland General Electric, shut it down just 17 years later in 1993, not because of environmental or safety concerns, but because of economics. The utility learned that the corrosion inside the reactor’s cooling system was so severe that the plumbing would have to be replaced. It would be so costly that Trojan could no longer generate affordable electricity. So PGE shut it down. Trojan’s ratepayers are still paying off the 30-year bonds sold to build the plant even though it has not produced electricity for 13 years.

Trojan cost about $400 million to build in 1976. It is costing ratepayers $410 million to decommission the plant.

The beginning of the end

The reactor and its associated radioactive machinery went first. Encased in concrete and lead, it was dropped on barges and hauled up river to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington. The stately parade had a funereal air. The barge, pushed by a tugboat, was followed by a Navy grey warship, operated by a private contractor, constantly sniffing the air for any escaping radiation.

Last week, the huge cooling tower came down. But decommissioning is not done. Every year over its 17-year life span, Trojan was shut down for a month or so while technicians replaced one-third of the fuel rods in its reactor core.

These radioactive fuel rods were supposed to be moved to a federal nuclear waste repository for reprocessing and safe storage. But the promised federal repository never materialized. The official repository under Yucca Mountain in Nevada hasn’t opened because of public opposition. So spent radioactive fuel rods have accumulated at every nuclear power plant in the country, stored in basins of water, from the time each plant began producing electricity. At Trojan, there are 17 years of spent fuel rods, accumulated in a glorified swimming pool, on the flood plain of the lower Columbia River, sitting on an earthquake fault with no serious plans to move them in the foreseeable future.

The legacy of the Atomic Age has not been kind to the Pacific Northwest. The Hanford Nuclear Reservation is a product of the Manhattan Project, the super-secret effort to build the atomic bomb during World War II. Plutonium from Hanford was in one of the two bombs dropped on Japan in 1945, persuading the Japanese to surrender and ending World War II.

During the war, officials at Hanford deliberately released radioactive gas from Hanford to see where the wind currents would carry it. Decades later, thousands of people who had lived downwind were treated for or were dying of cancer – usually thyroid cancer – attributed to the radioactive releases.

After the war, Hanford became a facility for producing more material for atomic and hydrogen bombs. It also became a repository for high-level radioactive waste from all over the country.

Radioactive material is highly corrosive. It has eaten through the tanks designed to hold it and it is leaching into the water table below Hanford. A plume of radioactive water is advancing on the Columbia. The federal government is years behind and billions of dollars short doing what it promised to stop the leaks and clean up the ground water. No one is sure what the consequences will be if radioactive tritium reaches the Columbia and heads for the sea.

Whoops indeed

There is also the saga of the Washington Public Power Supply System, aptly nicknamed Whoops! WPPSS began construction of five nuclear power plants in the 1970s. Only one ever generated electricity. The other four were doomed by huge cost overruns when construction was stopped in 1982, resulting in the largest public bond default in history – $2.25 billion.

The Northwest has not built a new thermal power plant in decades and is not running out of electricity. Why? It’s the accelerated construction of wind farms in Eastern Oregon and Washington, conservation of electricity we already generate and more efficient use of the hydropower generated in the region.

The long, tragic history of incompetence in the nuclear industry and government has made the Pacific Northwest skeptical. You will forgive us, please, if their PR offensive hailing a “revival” of “clean” nuclear power sounds like the same old song and dance.

Russell Sadler is a Eugene-based writer