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  • Nuclear Implosions: The Rise and Fall of the Washington Public Power Supply System
  • Bruce Hevly
Daniel Pope . Nuclear Implosions: The Rise and Fall of the Washington Public Power Supply System. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xix + 282 pp. ISBN 978-0-521-40253-8, $91.99 (cloth).

Two generations of students have been introduced to the functioning of American commercial enterprise by successive editions of The Structure of American Industry. Produced by Walter Adams, his co-editors, and successors since 1950, the wonder of these books has been the sense they give readers of why particular industries work the way they do: the manufacturing, financial, regulatory, and management elements are laid out as though exposed by anatomical dissection. Daniel Pope has achieved something similar in his study of the failure of the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS—familiarly known in the northwest as "whoops"). This lucid account of the prospects and the failure of an ambitious program to build nuclear reactors for electrical power production in a region dominated by hydropower introduces and assesses all the relevant structural issues in the emergence of what became the largest bond default in U.S. history.

While WPPSS planned to put reactors at two sites on either side of the Cascade mountains, the project had its roots in Eastern Washington and in the environs of a federal nuclear facility. From the establishment [End Page 653] of the Hanford Works by the Army's Manhattan Project during World War II, the possibility of catastrophe was on the minds of its planners, managers, and operators. Set in the Columbia River basin of south-central Washington, Hanford was built to operate nuclear reactors for the production of fissionable material by extracting it from used reactor fuel after the reactor's neutron flux had transformed a small amount of uranium into plutonium. Operated without a discrete, major accident at any of the nine production reactors—the last of which was closed in 1987—or at the chemical separation and waste storage facilities on the site, any resulting catastrophes have been widespread and subtle; the environmental and health consequences of plutonium production remain uncertain and controversial. What finally came, though, was a financial disaster rather than physical one, arising from attempts by WPPSS, which was based in nearby Kennewick and had produced electricity from generators attached to Hanford's N reactor, to leverage the federal investments in nuclear technology and public power into a regional network of five purpose-built nuclear power plants.

Pope describes both the construction and the dismantling of WPPSS in terms of overlapping national and regional contexts. In the 1960s, U.S. industrial policy began to look to nuclear power as a source of heat, and hence steam, for electrical generation, a trend reinforced by rising petroleum prices and by federal commitments to the development of nuclear power as a counterpoise to nuclear weapons development. But the Pacific Northwest was a geographically, politically, geologically, and historically distinctive region, as well. Abundantly provided with resources for hydropower, which rewarded large-scale dam building undertaken during the Depression and yoked to the ideals of public power, by the end of World War II energy-intensive industries such as aluminum refining gave a glimpse of a path to economic development that would supplement the extractive industries on which the region had depended. Hanford's presence suggested a foundation for a nuclear industrial center, and public utility districts throughout Washington and Oregon provided financial partners for the endeavor. Animated by the "democratic spirit of the movement for public power" (p. 38), the Planned Unit Developments (PUDs), often overseen by governing boards lacking construction, management, or financial expertise, had the legal power to undertake financial commitments without a vote of their memberships and were exempt from constraints on borrowing that restricted municipal and state governments. In the absence of feasible sites for new hydro projects, nuclear power offered thermal generating facilities to provide electricity without the competing demands of irrigation, flood control, and navigation. On the national scale, financial [End Page 654] interests including underwriters and the managers of growing pension and insurance funds saw bonds from WPPSS as "pseudo-munis" to be added to...

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