The Bodega Bay Nuclear Power Plant was a proposed

Northern California Northern California (colloquially known as NorCal) is a geographic and cultural region that generally comprises the northern portion of the U.S. state of California. Spanning the state's northernmost 48 counties, its main population centers incl ...

nuclear power facility that was stopped by local

activism Activism (or Advocacy) consists of efforts to promote, impede, direct or intervene in Social change, social, Political campaign, political, economic or Natural environment, environmental reform with the desire to make Social change, changes i ...

in the 1960s and never built. The foundations, located west of the active

San Andreas Fault The San Andreas Fault is a continental transform fault that extends roughly through California. It forms the tectonics, tectonic boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate, and its motion is Fault (geology)#Strike-slip fau ...

, were being dug at the time the plant was cancelled. The action has been termed "the birth of the anti-nuclear movement."

History

Pacific Gas & Electric The Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) is an American investor-owned utility (IOU). The company is headquartered in the Pacific Gas & Electric Building, in San Francisco, California. PG&E provides natural gas and electricity to 5.2 milli ...

planned to build the first commercially viable

nuclear power plant A nuclear power plant (NPP) is a thermal power station in which the heat source is a nuclear reactor. As is typical of thermal power stations, heat is used to generate steam that drives a steam turbine connected to a electric generator, generato ...

in the US at

Bodega Bay, California Bodega Bay is a village and census-designated place (CDP) in Sonoma County, California, United States. The population was 912 at the 2020 census. The town, located along State Route 1, is on the eastern side of Bodega Harbor, an inlet of Bodega ...

, a fishing village fifty miles north of

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

. The proposal was controversial and conflict with local citizens began in 1958.Paula Garb
Critical Masses: Opposition to Nuclear Power in California, 1958–1978 (book review)
''Journal of Political Ecology'', Vol 6, 1999, Retrieved 14 December 2015 The proposed plant site is close to the San Andreas Fault, a major active tectonic boundary, and in the region's environmentally sensitive fishing and dairy industries. Bodega Head sits on the

Pacific Plate The Pacific Plate is an oceanic tectonic plate that lies beneath the Pacific Ocean. At , it is the largest tectonic plate. The plate first came into existence 190 million years ago, at the triple junction between the Farallon, Phoenix, and Iza ...

, while the town is on the

North American Plate The North American Plate is a tectonic plate covering most of North America, Cuba, the Bahamas, extreme northeastern Asia, and parts of Iceland and the Azores. With an area of , it is the Earth's second largest tectonic plate, behind the Pacific ...

. Fishermen feared that the "plant's location and thermal discharge would interfere with their livelihood." Other citizens did not want their "simple isolated lifestyle" disturbed. Bodega Bay resident Rose Gaffney, who owned acreage on the Bodega Head that PG&E needed to buy, sued the utility company to keep her land and invited government officials to see the fault lines on the proposed nuclear site. The

Sierra Club The Sierra Club is an environmental organization with chapters in all 50 United States, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico. The club was founded on May 28, 1892, in San Francisco, California, by Scottish-American preservationist John Muir, who be ...

became actively involved and opposed the choice of the site. The Secretary of the Interior,

Stewart Udall Stewart Lee Udall (January 31, 1920 – March 20, 2010) was an American politician and later, a federal government official. After serving three terms as a congressman from Arizona, he served as Secretary of the Interior from 1961 to 1969, unde ...

, said he was "gravely concerned" about the Bodega site.Wolfgang Rudig (1990). ''Anti-nuclear Movements: A World Survey of Opposition to Nuclear Energy'', Longman, pp. 110–111. The Northern California Association to Preserve Bodega Head (NCAPBH) was formed and released press statements and submitted appeals to various state and federal bodies. In June 1963, NCAPBH organized a public meeting and 1,500 helium balloons were released into the air. They carried the message: "This balloon could represent a radioactive molecule of

strontium 90 Strontium-90 () is a radioactive isotope of strontium produced by nuclear fission, with a half-life of 28.8 years. It undergoes β− decay into yttrium-90, with a decay energy of 0.546 MeV. Strontium-90 has applications in medicine and i ...

iodine 131 Iodine-131 (131I, I-131) is an important radioisotope of iodine discovered by Glenn Seaborg and John Livingood in 1938 at the University of California, Berkeley. It has a radioactive decay half-life of about eight days. It is associated with nuc ...

." These two substances had reached public prominence in the debate about fallout from

nuclear weapons testing Nuclear weapons tests are experiments carried out to determine nuclear weapons' effectiveness, Nuclear weapon yield, yield, and explosive capability. Testing nuclear weapons offers practical information about how the weapons function, how detona ...

.Jim Falk (1982). ''Global Fission: The Battle Over Nuclear Power'', Oxford University Press, p. 94. The conflict ended in 1964, when, following a negative review by the Atomic Energy Commission, Pacific Gas & Electric withdrew its application and canceled plans for the plant. By this point, a pit had been dug for the foundation, near the tip of

Bodega Head Bodega Head is a small promontory on the Pacific coast of northern California in the United States. It is located in Sonoma County at , approximately northwest of San Francisco and approximately west of Santa Rosa. The peninsula, which is ap ...

; since the abandonment of the site, the pit has partially filled with water and become a pond, informally called the "Hole in the Head."

Thomas Wellock Thomas Wellock (born 1959) is the American historian for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Trained as both an engineer and a historian, he writes scholarly histories of the regulation of commercial nuclear energy. His most recent book is ' ...

traces the birth of the

anti-nuclear movement The anti-nuclear movement is a social movement that opposes various nuclear technologies. Some direct action groups, environmental movements, and professional organisations have identified themselves with the movement at the local, nationa ...

to the controversy over Bodega Bay. An attempt by the

Los Angeles Department of Water and Power The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) is the largest municipal utility in the United States with 8,100 megawatts of electric generating capacity (2021-2022) and delivering an average of 435 million gallons of water per day to more ...

to build a nuclear power plant in Corral Canyon near Malibu, similar to that at Bodega Bay, was abandoned in 1970.

References

External links

Cancelled Nuclear Units Ordered in the United States
{{coord, 38.30519, -123.05881, region:US-CA_type:landmark, display=title Cancelled nuclear power stations in the United States Nuclear power plants in California History of Sonoma County, California Pacific Gas and Electric Company Bodega Bay, California Energy in the San Francisco Bay Area

History

See also

References

External links