Bpa Plants Get Down To Business Grays Harbor Official Targets Closed Nuclear Facilities For Industrial Park

In the 1970s, Tom Casey fought construction of two nuclear power plants in this tiny Grays Harbor County community.

Now he’s a utility district commissioner considering whether the partially built, mothballed plants could be transformed into an industrial and business park.

“My nightmare is that we fail to do this,” Casey said at a meeting this week to discuss whether the Satsop Redevelopment Project should buy the 1,600-acre nuclear site from the Washington Public Power Supply System and the Bonneville Power Administration.

Casey, a farmer and commissioner with the Grays Harbor Public Utility District, is one of nine public officials who will make that call, probably by the end of the year. If the project proceeds, the site would likely be redeveloped for a mix of heavy manufacturing, light industrial use and business-park space.

WPPSS and BPA spent about $2.3 million building the Satsop plants before the project was halted in the face of rising costs and evaporating demand for the electricity they would produce. It would cost about $50 million for BPA to restore the site - tear everything out and plant trees and grasses - as required by federal law.

The redevelopment folks figure it would take a BPA investment of about $25 million to put the site in shape for a future as an industrial ite, which also qualifies as reclamation.

The plants, with their distinctive cooling towers, then could be turned over to a county-port-utility agency.

“They’re going to have to spend some money to get us to take it,” said Bill Banks, executive director of the Grays Harbor Regional Planning Commission. “I just hope everybody comes out ahead.”

Local officials have been weighing options for the site since 1993, and have raised $180,000 to study possible uses for the 400 acres available for development. The BPA provided an additional $340,000 to hire NBBJ, a Seattle architectural and planning consulting firm. The locals will have to reimburse that sum if they opt not to accept the site.

NBBJ’s economic analyses suggest the more local money is invested, the longer it would take to show a profit - more than 30 years in one scenario.

Locals would prefer to lease the ground and let others do the developing, except for buildings already on site, some of which have potential.

For example, a University of Wyoming professor, Quentin Skinner, is interested in a huge building that would have housed electrical generators if WPPSS’ plans had not collapsed in the early 1980s in the biggest bond default in history.

Skinner, a range biologist, wants to use the site for a research center where he could build a series of large boxes - like small biospheres - in which researchers could manipulate weather conditions to test the effects on soil and plants.

Banks jokes that the 500-foot cooling towers could be used for bungee jumping or as pots for geraniums: “Of course, they’d have to be irradiated and huge.”

Casey notes, however, that “many communities would kill for an icon like that.”

He figures to back an economically feasible plan.

“I’m worried about the character of our county,” Casey said. “They’re going to be paving our farmlands and polluting our water and wetlands and screwing up our lives if we don’t do something.”