* Power Matters

There was a time when the 40-story cooling tower of a nuclear power plant might have loomed over Lyman from nearby Bacus Hill. Another plant was once envisioned for tiny Kiket Island, connected by a finger of land to Fidalgo Island at the southern entrance to Similk Bay, and yet another plant was contemplated on Samish Island.

Instead, Skagit County was where the push to build multiple nuclear power plants in Washington seemed to finally run out of steam.

A decision by the Skagit County commissioners to put the nuclear question to a public advisory vote in 1979 put an exclamation mark on the demise of Puget Power’s Bacus Hill project. The Kiket Island project, proposed by Seattle City Light, had earlier been scrapped along with the Samish Island site.

Even now, as the nuclear industry has begun to tout itself as a “clean” alternative to fossil fuels, it seems unlikely that it will find rebirth here or, according to some, anywhere in the state.

“Nuclear power will come, but it won’t be built in Washington state,” said state Rep. Jeff Morris, D-Anacortes, giving his assessment of what he considers a political reality.

To understand why is to delve into the dismal history of the organization once called the Washington Public Power Supply System — now going by Energy Northwest — and its ambitious nuclear power program.

The consortium of 16 public utility districts, however, would become forever labeled by its acronym — WPPSS, often derisively pronounced, “whoops.” But “whoops” hardly describes the financial debacle that it became.

Driven by what proved to be faulty predictions of skyrocketing demand for energy, WPPSS tried beginning in the early 1970s to build five nuclear power plants nearly all at the same time, utilizing three different designs. But the projections had not factored in the impacts of conservation and the effects of higher prices on demand.

The projects and their many contractors and subcontractors were so poorly managed that the WPPSS nuclear program spiraled out of control. The original estimate of $4.5 billion for all five plants had rocketed to $23.8 billion by 1981.

Collapse of the grand plan for five plants accelerated in 1982 when WPPSS defaulted on $2.25 billion in bonds, then the biggest municipal bond default in U.S. history. Only one plant was ever completed, the Columbia Generating Station on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Eastern Washington. The 1,250-megawatt plant produces power at a relatively inexpensive 3.34 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Coal and hydropower, according to Seattle City Light, cost between 3 cents and 5 cents per kilowatt-hour to produce.

The remnants of two other plants sit uncompleted at Hanford, and two other plants were left unfinished on the Satsop River in Grays Harbor County.

In Skagit County, the three county commissioners had found themselves besieged during the late 1970s by both opponents and proponents of nuclear power.

Then-Commissioner Jerry Mansfield, now 91 and living in Anacortes, recalls the heavy pressure that came from organized labor backing the project. It meant paychecks, especially in a community hard hit by a downturn in the timber and fishing industries. The project’s opponents, including some prominent pastors, were equally active.

The commission in 1973 had granted a change to industrial zoning on Bacus Hill to Puget Power on the condition that the project be under way within five years.

“I, at the time, had a summer home over on Guemes Island,” said Mansfield, then the lone Democrat on the commission. “I got calls at all times of night from labor leaders and church leaders. But none of us really knew what we were talking about.”

Bud Norris, then a Republican commissioner in his first term, had opposed the nuclear plant because, to him, it simply didn’t pencil out. The late Howard Miller, commissioner and local Republican icon, and Mansfield favored the plant.

“A lot of my concern at that time was financial viability,” Norris said. “I felt that it appeared from the numbers I was given by a number of sources that we could save more by conservation.”

He said he pushed for an advisory ballot measure to gauge the public support for the Bacus Hill project and was eventually joined by Mansfield in approving the measure.

The commission approved the advisory vote just minutes before Puget Power applied for an extension on its five-year timetable for Bacus Hill.

The citizen advisory vote was overwhelming, with 72 percent opposed to the nuclear plant. Puget Power, later to rename itself Puget Sound Energy, gave up on the project and turned its attention elsewhere. The company now focuses heavily on producing energy from “green” sources.

“It was a very important vote and one of the more satisfying issues I’ve ever worked on,” said Norris, now beginning his second term as mayor of Mount Vernon.

Besides the question of financial viability, Norris said there were two other key factors contributing to the public attitude toward nuclear power — the escalating costs of the WPPSS plants and Three Mile Island.

A sudden loss of cooling water to the reactor core at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Middleburg, Pa., led to a partial meltdown of the fuel rods and a release of radiation into the air outside the plant.

To date, no adverse effects to public health have been definitively identified as coming from the incident. But it helped close the door to new nuclear plant construction for decades to come.

Today, even as nuclear power technology has improved, both in safety and efficiency, Morris says the political climate may never be right for new plant construction in Washington.

A new plant proposed in Idaho Falls would be state-of-the-art, he said, using “ostrich egg-sized balls of uranium that would last 40 years,” after which the plant would be decommissioned.

Morris sees wave technology as having the greatest potential as a “green” power source because “the wave buoys don’t cause that concern about marine mammals being hit.”

As for WPPSS, it has reinvented itself as Energy Northwest, a builder and purveyor of sustainable energy. In 2002, the consortium sold $70 million in bonds, its first bond sale since the catastrophic default of 1982.

The project is a wind turbine farm in Finley in Benton County, about 15 miles from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the graveyard of the old WPPSS nuclear dream.

Skagit Warming Series:
Skagit Warming Page
Climate change and the Skagit Valley
Temperatures rising, glaciers melting in Northwest
Nature's Laboratory
Researchers explore effects of climate change on health
Warming's impact on Skagit water
Climate change poses threat to regional icons
Warming shifts odds away from salmon survival
Climate change could have dramatic impact on local agricultural scene
Cashing in on global warming
Warming: A rising tide
Tribe, La Conner on front lines
Green Power
Skagit Warming: Government action
Climate and You
What You Can Do
Why turn off the lights?
Skagit Warming: Tell us what you think