Satsop Nuclear Plant
Once part of the largest nuclear power plant construction project in the nation’s history, the Satsop never saw a single flicker of fission. The multibillion-dollar plan ground to a halt in 1983 because of a financial meltdown by its owner—the Washington Public Power Supply System, sometimes nicknamed “Whoops”—resulting in the largest municipal bond default in U.S. history at the time.
Despite its bankrupt past, however, Satsop still looks the part, with a pair of completed cooling towers; demolishing them would have cost even more money that the developer didn’t have, so they remained standing, even as the national appetite for nuclear power faded, a trend no doubt edified by the terror of the 1986 Chernobyl accident.
Satsop continues to try to turn a buck, having been incorporated into a local business park made up of various formerly nuclear- minded industrial spaces. ( At least one warehouse was tapped to grow marijuana, which is legal in Washington.) The site offers up a tech center and workforce training center, though it has also been used for slightly more exciting activities, such as military and first-responder training, complete with hazmat suits and armored equipment, which, of course, is never the most comforting thing to see around a nuclear plant.
“What’s so BIG about Satsop Business Park?” reads a come-on on the group’s website. “Everything!”
Indeed, the towers soar hundreds of feet in the air, poking their gray heads far above the mist-watered trees that surround them ( and most of Elma, southwest of Seattle). Their unique shape—elegantly curved walls, tapering and turning up to the often- cloudy sky—make for curious acoustics, as do the thick concrete walls of some parts of the facility, with some companies doing sound research inside. A metal stairway climbs the side of each tower, leading to a narrow walkway nearly 500 feet
in the air; there is also the still extant reactor building, and a series of tunnels, some hundreds of feet long, that bore underneath the Satsop.
Before Covid shut down, well, “Everything!,” such unique features made the facility popular with sci-fi filmmakers—the Transformers series used the location twice—as well as some more experimental souls. That includes Japanese-born, Seattle-based artist Etsuko Ichikawa, who created an eerie short film there after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in her home country drenched and partially destroyed another nuke: the Fukushima power plant, leading to a massive release of radioactivity.
No such worries envelop Satsop, however, whose pre-enron- era cash crunch never let it go nuclear. And for the time being, not much art is happening there, either, as its owners have stopped rentals for shoots, leaving both killer robots and trippy-film makers scouting for other backdrops.