Washington's Abandoned Nuclear Power Plant Is Now A Park With A Haunting History And Unique Architecture

An abandoned nuclear power plant may not appeal to the masses. But if you're a photographer, urban explorer, or just plain curious, you might find the Satsop Nuclear Power Plant one of the most compelling destinations out there. Sitting on the outskirts of Elma, Washington, it lies in Grays Harbor County, about an hour and a half from Seattle and 45 minutes from Olympia, Washington's capital city of art and culture.

Your chances of being irradiated are zero because the power plant never actually opened or housed any radioactive materials. However, the Satsop Nuclear Power Plant was part of the largest nuclear energy project in the U.S back in the 1970s. It included two reactors at Satsop as well as three in Hanford. Like many ambitious infrastructure endeavors, costs skyrocketed, and the project ran out of money. By the early 1980s, the Satsop projects were dead in the water, and the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS) couldn't pay back $2.25 billion in municipal bonds. 

While Satsop's demise may not be as haunting as Chernobyl's, it was financially devastating. To this day, it represents one of the largest defaults of municipal bonds in U.S. history. Ordinary people and local groups invested in these municipal bonds because they were considered safe, so the impact on the local community was extraordinary. "I mean everybody—the Girl Scouts in Olympia invested all of their money in WPPSS bonds and it literally destroyed them," explained Nancy Cuyle of Friends of the Aberdeen Museum to The Spectator. "It hurt the people here ... badly."

Today, the Satsop Nuclear Power Plant has reinvented itself as a park, but not in the traditional sense. It's now home to the Satsop Business Park, whose 1,700 acres house around 50 tenants. Surrounded by evergreen forests, the defunct silhouettes of two gargantuan cooling towers (WNP-3 and WNP-5) and hulking concrete structures dwarf sedans in the parking lots. 

The plant looks so post-apocalyptic that it even served as the backdrop for an epic robot showdown in "Transformers 4: Age of Extinction." The inside of the plant is closed to the public, but even from a distance, the cooling towers are utterly imposing. You can see the plant all the way from Highway 8, and you're allowed to drive until you encounter signs warning against trespassing. This is as far as you can go on your own.

In previous years, the business park offered walking tours of the plant, but they're no longer available. Instead, curious visitors can take a virtual tour of the space via a five-part video series courtesy of Port of Grays Harbor. Running 20 minutes, the videos take you into the reactor and turbine buildings. If you're interested in touring a working nuclear reactor for free, make an appointment with Washington State University's Nuclear Science Center. It's located in Pullman, an artsy college town tucked away in Washington's hills. Or, visit this historic nuclear reactor situated between Portland and Seattle.