BEST MADE PROJECTS • The Search for Five Cancelled Nuclear Reactor...

The Search for Five Cancelled Nuclear Reactor Cores in the Southern United States, by Jeremy Blakeslee, Best Made Guide to Urban Archaeology

I set out on a journey with fellow photographer and urban archaeologist Michael Cook, who has an inspiring academic understanding of infrastructure. We both have a keen interest in power plants, and, most recently, those of the nuclear variety. We’re not foolish enough to venture into anything that’s actually gone nuclear. These never-completed plants were cancelled in the 1980s, and no fuel ever made it into their reactor cores. In the interest of full (Freudian) disclosure, my father ran a nuclear plant for much of the time that I was growing up.

The 1979 core meltdown in Unit Two at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania is still a cultural moment that many Americans remember, mostly for what could have happened rather than what did; the accident was contained, and no one was hurt. But along with with a lower than expected demand for electricity and expensive construction mistakes in the years that followed, the incident sent the industry to its knees. Billions of dollars of infrastructure was left for dead, and only the carcasses of these sites remain, including the partially constructed reactor cores, containment vessels, turbine halls, cooling structures and condenser chambers that we found.

Being inside a partially constructed nuclear reactor is nothing short of astounding, an experience made sweeter for us by first tackling a many mile hike through tick-infested woods, carrying all of our gear in the blistering heat. Thankfully, we were rewarded by a significant drop in temperature as we went beyond the thick concrete walls of the site. We were also greeted with extremely dangerous conditions that included massive openings in the flooring that delivered a 50 foot drop, stairs that simply stop in mid air, metal studs protruding from the concrete flooring everywhere and thousands of pieces rebar sticking out of the unfinished walls.

Seeing places like this gives you a very different relationship to the built environment than most people have. What you start to learn after seeing a handful of power plants, especially partially built ones, is the incredible engineering and interconectedness of each individual system in the plant. You’re standing where the nuclear fuel was intended to be stored, sitting inside a reactor looking up at the massive steel core or looking straight up through the middle of a 400 foot cooling tower.

I’ll leave you with a short quote from Michael about this experience.

“1500+ miles driven. Miles hiked unknown. 5 unfinished cores visited. Vultures, frogs, turtles, bats, turkeys, deer. Lots of deer. Only people seen were looking for their horse. Now to go home.”

Site: Two cancelled nuclear power plants (southern U.S.)

Gestation and Permission Status: 2 years, you can’t get permission. Landscape: Rural

Gear: Hasselblad 903 Superwide Camera, fixed 38mm lens Toyo 4×5 Large Format Camera Incident Meter Tripod Polaroid film 120mm color film 120mm b&w film First Aid Kit