In the mid-1960s, a couple of counterculture kids named Stewart Brand and Denis Hayes met at Stanford. Brand had traveled with Ken Kesey as part of the Merry Pranksters, and Hayes had recently returned from hitchhiking around Africa. Each went on to help launch the environmental movement: Brand created the bible of commune living known as the Whole Earth Catalog and Hayes organized the first Earth Day—which celebrates its 40th anniversary next month.
Mark Danielson
A utility group has big plans for new "backyard reactors" at Hanford.
Laura Onstot
Jack Baker in front of the holding tanks for waste at the Columbia Generating Station: "You can hug one."
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Today, Brand lives on a tugboat outside San Francisco and Hayes is the head of Seattle's Bullitt Foundation, one of the most important environmental grant-giving organizations in the Northwest. They recall their early achievements in the documentary Earth Days, which premiered at Sundance last year and screens on PBS in April. But while they speak fondly of each other, policy-wise they're at odds.
In Brand's view, Barack Obama's announcement last month that the federal government would guarantee up to $54.5 billion in loans over two years to build nuclear power plants across the country was a win for the environment. Brand believes going nuclear is the key to shutting down coal power plants, which he says is an essential step in combating global warming. Hayes, meanwhile, describes nuclear power with imagery that bespeaks his hippie roots—"spherically senseless," he says, meaning: "It makes no sense no matter how you look at it."
Greens are divided over atomic energy. Brand has been called an eco-traitor, as has Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, another nuclear proponent. Long-standing anti-nuke groups like the Sierra Club are still officially opposed, but individual members, like former chapter chair Scott Howson of Virginia, are dissenting. The same rift is showing up among politicians: Former Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, who launched the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, says he backs nuclear energy, while former veep Al Gore disagrees.
Until now, the debate has been largely academic. But with 13 plants seeking approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and Obama on board, the split within the environmental movement could be the key to overcoming the last political opposition to nuclear power in the U.S. Three decades after construction of new reactors stopped following the accident at Three Mile Island, the country may be at the dawn of a new nuclear age. Many players from the old days are back after a long exile, while innovative businesses, backed by the likes of Bill Gates, say their technology will make nuclear power cleaner and cheaper than before.
In Washington state, a group of local power agencies, led by a veteran of the infamous Washington Public Power Supply System—perpetrators of the biggest municipal-bond default in U.S. history—have pooled their money to study how so-called "backyard" reactors might be built in the Northwest. They've been meeting with state legislators and other Olympia officials, laying the groundwork for building permits. They're hoping to bring more plants to the birthplace of nuclear power: the Hanford Reservation in southeastern Washington, where the first atomic bomb was built, and where cleanup from the Manhattan Project continues to this day.
Though he still sports a Ditka mustache, Jack Baker actually left Chicago 28 years ago, when he came out to Richland, Wash., to be a nuclear engineer at WPPSS. His timing couldn't have been worse.
The U.S. had recently experienced the nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island outside Harrisburg, Pa., on March 29, 1979. In response, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Bruce Springsteen, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and others gave a series of concerts under the name Musicians United for Safe Energy, and on Sept. 23 of that year, 200,000 people flooded a New York rally, hosted by the musicians, to oppose nuclear power plants. A documentary and album of the concert series was released, entitled No Nukes. Browne, Raitt, and company made the cover of Rolling Stone.
And that was just the political side. The '70s had also brought dramatic inflation and sky-high interest rates that eventually crippled the taxpayer-owned agency Baker came to work for.
By the time Baker arrived, WPPSS had started construction on five nuclear power reactors around the state: three on the Hanford Reservation and two more near the Satsop River at the southern edge of the Olympic Peninsula. But as the cost of the project rocketed from $5 billion in 1975 to $24 billion in the early 1980s, and public opinion turned against it, WPPSS was forced to halt construction. Its plants not operating, WPPSS didn't have enough revenue coming in to pay its debts. As a result, it defaulted on $2.25 billion in municipal bonds. The default insured that the agency will forever be known by its acronym, pronounced "Whoops." (To escape the legacy, the company later changed its name to Energy Northwest.)
The only nuclear power plant WPPSS succeeded in opening was the Columbia Generating Station, which started delivering power in 1984. Today, in the distance behind that plant, the remnants of two other reactors sit unfinished, like Roman ruins. Over in the town of Satsop, abandoned cooling towers built by WPPSS off Highway 101 have become a roadside tourist attraction. An office park and conference center is now nestled on the grounds between the two towers.
