Neighbors Want Wppss Plants Saved As Memorial Despite Liability Costs, Some Want Mothballed Sites Preserved

The Washington Public Power Supply System wants to tear down its four unfinished nuclear power plants, but neighbors of the Satsop plants just west of Olympia want the massive concrete buildings to be left alone.

“They should save it as a concrete mausoleum,” said Tom Casey, a Grays Harbor Public Utility District commissioner who lives about 15 miles from the Satsop site. “It doesn’t hurt anything. They don’t have to come down. The pyramids didn’t have to come down.”

Casey said preserving the Satsop site was part of his campaign platform last year.

“What kind of savage, sick mind would want to tear them down? It’s wonderful architecture,” Casey said.

But supply system executives say the unfinished plants are a massive liability problem, and point to state regulations that say they must tear down nuclear plants that will never run.

“Those towers present a public hazard,” said Dave Fraley, a site restoration manager for WPPSS. “Everyone who sees the towers sees the stairs on their sides and thinks, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to climb up those steps?”’

The supply system wants to knock down plant Nos. 1 and 4 on the Hanford Nuclear Reservations and plant Nos. 3 and 5 at Satsop. Construction ended on the plants in the early 1980s. Plant No. 2 is the state’s only working nuclear power plant.

In March, WPPSS presented a plan to tear the four plants down, in part because it costs the Bonneville Power Administration $10.5 million a year to keep plants 1 and 3 - the most complete plants - closed.

No objections have been made to tear down the plants on Hanford. But the plants at Satsop have built a following.