Atomic Legacy | Exploring the Abandoned Satsop Nuclear Power Plant

In the distance, a concrete monolith rises from the surrounding Washington State farmland like some old, sleepy nuclear god. The gigantic cooling towers from the mostly-unoperated power plant dominate the view from the verdant Satsop River landscape for miles around. Impossibly, they never seem to stop getting bigger no matter how close one gets.

It’s those first views that hook me, every time.

Officially called the “Washington Nuclear Project,” of five planned reactors at the Satsop Nuclear Power Facility, only one was completed and ever ran. After major cost overruns and a lack of funding, the project was officially halted in 1983—only six years after it began.

Satsop nuclear plant is a failed experiment. A throwback to a time when American prowess in the nuclear energy race seemed unchallenged.

Many reactors were green-lit by the US government throughout the 1970s. At the time, nuclear power was on the upswing, billed as a safe, clean energy alternative. Despite the zealousness with which projects were approved, nuclear power was both expensive and dangerous.

Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I remember seeing the ghostly cooling towers in low-hanging clouds from the highway as a boy. Never in my wildest childhood dreams did I think I’d be able to explore them.

The first thing that hits you about Satsop is the 500-foot-tall concrete cooling towers that can be seen from miles away. After taking the exit for what is now the “Satsop Business Park”—oddly, the home of the Overstock.com support team—a winding county road leads you the rest of the way.

At one point on the drive, close to a mile from the center of the complex, you can notice the fencing from when the now-business park was going to be a highly secure Department of Energy facility.

Once inside the main complex of now-lackluster business park buildings, simply make your way toward any of the enormous, half-finished concrete structures that litter the property. Towards the south side, framed by the cooling towers, are fascinating unfinished reactor structures, the main generation plant, and all manner of other atomic relics.

Though the cooling towers and other abandoned structures are all fenced off, displaying warning signs about motion detection and security systems, you can still get up close enough to satisfy curiosity. The bases of the cooling towers are particularly beautiful in their brutal simplicity, as is an unfinished reactor structure toward the generation center where huge voids mark the parts that weren’t completed.

In terms of exploration, Satsop is about the coolest, cheapest, safest form of nuclear tourism you can do. Of course, you could pay to run around Chornobyl with a questionable guide who really seems to like Putin—but why? Satsop is an hour and a half from Seattle, free to explore, and doesn’t require a waiver or a Geiger counter!

In the end, I took roughly two hours exploring the various pieces and parts of the old sleeping dog. The grounds are now fairly tame, with a cover of lush spring grass already adding to the “business park, not nuclear plant” vibe. There was also as far as I could tell not a single other nuclear tourist anywhere on site.

It was a kind of lonely feeling.

There was more than a hint of failed potential, wasted taxpayer money, and, if I’m being honest, maybe even a whiff of nostalgia for times when things seemed geopolitically simpler and our choices a bit more binary.

Eventually, I left the gate behind and began motoring my way toward home. I finally turned east onto the main highway, watching as clouds moved in behind me.

Every now and again I would catch a glimpse of the receding gray ghosts in my rearview mirror.

After a few minutes, the views got less and less, replaced more and more by lush forest and overcast Pacific Northwest sky. A background that, despite my love of all things both old and nuclear, was the way the land in the Satsop River Valley always should have looked.

I can live with that.