In the 1980s, a power company almost built a floating nuclear power plant off New Jersey
It may not be as crazy as it sounds
Nobody wants a nuclear power plant near where they live. They’re up there with toxic waste dumps and strip joints as NIMBY boogeymen. In 1969, a utility company engineer named Richard Eckert was struggling to address just that issue when an audacious and absurd idea came to him in the shower: Why not put a nuclear power plant in the middle of the ocean? Well, not the middle exactly. It would actually float 11 miles northeast of Atlantic City, in international waters.
Eckert, who worked for the Public Service Electric & Gas Company (PSE&G) of New Jersey, sought to keep up with the growing power demands of the state. But the construction of a new nuclear reactor would face widespread public opposition, even if it were feasible to build one in the densely populated state which lacked, among other resources, an abundance of river water to keep it cool.
There were some, albeit limited, precedents for portable and sea-going nuclear reactors. Beginning in the 1950s, the United States led the charge in the construction of nuclear-powered submarines, which unlike their diesel-powered counterparts did not need to go to the surface for fuel. But the closest thing to Eckert’s idea was MH-1A, known as the Sturgis, a ship outfitted with a nuclear reactor that was used to power the lock system of the Panama Canal during a water shortage.
The Atlantic Generating Station was to include two reactors (in case one required shutdown during maintenance or refueling), and produce 2,300 megawatts of power, a comparative leap from the 10-megawatt output of the Sturgis. A new company, Offshore Power Systems, was established for the purpose of constructing floating power plants, made from a joint venture between the Westinghouse Corporation and Tenneco, a conglomerate that owned Newport News, the largest shipbuilder in the world.
Building a nuclear power plant the traditional way was inefficient. It required skilled labor in the form of engineers, welders, and technicians, who would have to lead a peripatetic existence moving from one plant site to another, sometimes separated by thousands of miles. But if a power plant could be built and situated on a barge, however, and shipped just as easily to Newfoundland as to New Jersey, a sort of assembly line could be established in a single location — keeping the talent in one place, while at the same time reinforcing safety standards.
But how does one protect a floating plant from the ocean? Nuclear meltdowns are a very real fear. Engineers decided on a breakwater shaped in two main sections — one being a thick straight wall facing the coastline, and the other a semicircle, with enough space between them for ships to transport parts, personnel, and fresh nuclear fuel.
The breakwater itself was to consist of a staggering 18,000 80-ton cement objects called dolosse, piled high atop each other like a pyramid. Shaped like children’s jacks, dolosse formed a collective, porous barrier that dissipated oncoming waves, instead of sending them up in forceful bursts and eruptions as a regular embankment or collection of boulders would do. Construction of this breakwater, however, would take an estimated four years and four million hours of labor, according to a 1975 New Yorker article by John McPhee.
Offshore Power Systems chose Blount Island in Jacksonville, Florida, as their manufacturing base. The company dug a canal for use as an assembly line, and bought the world’s largest bridge crane for $13 million. The cost of a single reactor was slated at $375 million. Westinghouse, anticipating the purchase of a second double-reactor power plant, saw a billion-dollar project on the horizon, making it “the largest single equipment contract in the history of the electrical utility industry.”
Meanwhile, the Atlantic Generating Station spurred “a bonanza for the scientific community,” with corporate and government funds pouring into research to discern the environmental implications and risks of the floating reactors. Suddenly oceanographers, meteorologists, and marine biologists had both the resources and latitude for projects otherwise denied to them. A scientific and environment organization called Ichthyological Associates studied the impact of thermal plumes on ecosystems, as well as what impact the cooling system — sucking in over two million gallons of water per minute — would have on wildlife. Meanwhile the Army Corps of Engineers and the University of Florida constructed models of the plant and the breakwater to test their durability in the face of rough seas.
Naturally, there were protests, with organizations like Save Our Seas rallying against the project. Petitions and hearings also complicated the project’s advance. The Atlantic County Citizens’ Council on the Environment and the Florida-based advocacy group People Outraged With Electric Rates threw their weight against the project.
Yet, what really sank the project was not concern over contamination or malfunction — but the unforeseen economic impact of the 1973 oil embargo. New Jersey produced an abundance of its electricity from oil. One would expect that the higher cost of fossil fuels would be a good thing for a competitor like nuclear power, but utilities are not like other industries. As electricity became more expensive, PSE&G’s customers, many of them part of the petroleum industry around Newark, bought less of it. But lower demand, as people who pay for electricity know, does not mean a lower price. This ongoing cycle diminished the energy demands over the long term, effectively wiping away the incentive to invest in the nuclear facility.
After putting the purchase on hold for two years, PSE&G eventually reneged on the deal, seeing no change in statewide demand. Offshore Power Systems, depending on the northeast as its customer base, officially folded in the mid 80s. The company’s world-class crane was sold to China in 1990, for the diminished price of $3 million.
For decades, it seemed like the Offshore Power’s rise and fall signaled what was to be a blip, a curiosity, in the field of nuclear power production. Yet the technology is experiencing a renaissance. In 2000, Russia took its first serious strides in mass-producing floating nuclear power plants, and is currently at work on Akademik Lomonosov, which will be the first functioning high-output reactor put to sea. China, meanwhile, plans to build its own floating nuclear power plants by 2020.
