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Two enormous cooling towers rise over the valley just east of town — you’ve seen them from Highway 12. They were built for a nuclear power plant that never made a single watt of electricity. How does that happen? It’s one of the biggest what-were-they-thinking stories in Washington history.
In the 1970s, planners were sure the Northwest would soon need far more electricity. So a group of public utilities — the Washington Public Power Supply System — set out to build five nuclear plants at once. Two of them, called WNP-3 and WNP-5, went up right here at Satsop. Thousands of workers poured concrete for the towers and the dome-shaped reactor buildings you can still see today.
Building nuclear plants turned out to cost far more than promised. Across the whole program, estimates ballooned from a few billion dollars toward twenty-four billion.
People used electricity more carefully than expected, so all that new power simply wasn't needed. Two Satsop reactors were being built for a future that didn't arrive.
Construction stopped in the early 1980s — WNP-3 about 75% finished, WNP-5 barely begun. In 1983 the agency defaulted on $2.25 billion in bonds, the largest such default in U.S. history at the time. People started calling it “WHOOPS.”
Scrub the timeline: drag through the years and watch the cost climb and the story unfold.
Work starts on two nuclear reactors — WNP-3 and WNP-5 — at Satsop, part of a five-plant plan for the Northwest.
No nuclear fuel was ever loaded; the reactors never switched on. But the site didn’t just rot — it became the Satsop Business Park, a campus of offices, industry, and job training, with the towers standing over it as a one-of-a-kind landmark (and a favorite backdrop for filmmakers).
It’s a true story worth chewing on: how do you plan something huge when you can’t be sure what the future needs? When is a bold bet smart, and when is it too big to risk? Engineers, economists, and voters are still asking those questions — and the answer is standing right there on the skyline.
Follow a salmon from a gravel nest in the Satsop or Wynoochee all the way to the ocean and back.
Every spring, hundreds of thousands of shorebirds refuel on our mudflats on their way to the Arctic.
The Chehalis is one of Washington’s biggest flood corridors — here’s why, and what we do about it.
A fault offshore, a giant wave in the year 1700, and why we practice for the next one.
A logging mill pond right above town became one of Washington’s early state parks.
How a temperate rainforest works — and how it feeds the cold, clean streams salmon need.
North America’s largest elk, in herds around our valley and the Olympic Mountains.
Satsop, Wynoochee, Chehalis — our rivers carry Indigenous names and a deep salmon culture.
Real Montesano numbers to play with — salmon returns, rainfall, elk, floods, and towers.