Leftovers From Nuclear Project End Up in Handymen’s Workshops
Here’s an option for “Tool Time” fans bored with reruns: Hit the road to restock the basement workshop.
Head for the remote toolshed near the Columbia River and rummage through the half-price bins of tools left behind in 1982 when construction on a nuclear power plant was halted.
Buyers have come from as far away as Minnesota to fetch a bargain. Sometimes men who worked on the project come in looking for a bit of nostalgia. And there are the regulars who like to get together and talk.
“It’s like the old days when the men gathered outside the hardware store,” says Louise Peters, who calls herself an inventory-recovery specialist.
The store is open each Thursday morning and for one Saturday a month. Checks, MasterCard and Visa are accepted. No cash, please.
“We call it the toy store for men,” Peters notes, though “a few women come in and buy things too.”
The Unit 1 Tool Store is in a building that looks like government issue: gray and nondescript. Two years ago, the Washington Public Power Supply System--which changed its name to Energy Northwest in June--opened it as a clearinghouse for some $6.5 million in small tools purchased to build one of five nuclear units.
Unit 1 was two-thirds complete when the utility stopped the work, citing rising costs, high interest rates and an overestimated demand for electricity--problems that subsequently contributed to default on $2.25 billion in municipal bonds.
“It was a matter of running out of money,” says spokesman John Britton. “They were spending $1 million a day on construction.”
One project, Unit 2, was finished in 1984 and now produces electricity marketed by the Bonneville Power Administration.
The Unit 1 tools are stored in a dozen warehouses on property at the Hanford nuclear reservation in southeastern Washington. Big-ticket items are inventoried, but despite recent criticism by the state auditor’s office, the utility says it would be a waste of money to account annually for the small stuff.
Besides, they’re being sold off.
Be warned: Some of the tools are highly specialized, and a lot of them are enormous. But availability seems no object. There’s a seemingly unlimited supply of items, from used three-ring binders and tape dispensers to foot-long C-clamps and combination wrenches as long as one’s arm.
Peters, who worked for 13 years at the Fairchild Air Force Base exchange near Spokane, brings a certain retail flair to her work, with advertised specials and other promotions. On this day, taps, dies and punches are on sale. And there are volume discounts.
“The more you spend, the more you save,” she says encouragingly.
The C-clamps are $27.50 each; the combination wrenches--farmers like them for irrigation pipes--are $72. There are Huck riveters priced at $308, down from $410. Or how about a box of Dutch nipples, now $155?
There are boxes and boxes of welders’ gear and gauges, along with hand-held radiation counters. The walk-in refrigerator without a floor is $1,688. Toilet bowls are $80, plus $12 for the seats.
Since opening, the tool store has grossed about $1.5 million on sales of about half the inventory. But operating costs have run about $300,000, so Energy Northwest hopes to be out of the retail business within six months.
“This is a liquidation program, not an ongoing sales program,” Britton says.
All told, the utility has sold more than $13 million in assets from its unfinished reactor projects, with some equipment going as certified spare parts for other nuclear plants. A diesel generator big enough to run a small town was sold to one community as a backup power source.
Energy Northwest also would like to find new uses for WNP-1, as Unit 1 is officially known. Most of Unit 4 nearby, which was 20% complete, has been sold for scrap.
But for whatever’s left, the 13-utility consortium will have to undertake a first-of-its-kind demolition of the plants under state environmental restoration requirements. The cost could be $70 million or more.
The utility’s five-reactor project collapsed in the 1980s. Like the two units here, two were left unfinished at the Satsop site west of Olympia in western Washington.
Most of the Satsop site, notable for its twin cooling towers, has been turned over to Grays Harbor County for use as an industrial park.
Energy Northwest and other public agencies have put together plans to promote the Richland site as an industrial park. Other proposals include a tilapia fish farm for one of the huge spray ponds and a biomass, or garbage, digester at Unit 4.
The utility also has been talking with Lockheed Martin, which is building the next-generation space shuttle.
