Skip to content
TopicTracker
From HackerNewsView original
TranslationTranslation

Long Island's Decommissioned Nuclear Power Plant

Nick Carr explores the decommissioned Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island, a facility completed but never commercially operated. The plant is being dismantled, with its reactor removed and the site undergoing environmental cleanup.

Background

- The article visits the **Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant** on Long Island, NY — built at a cost of ~$6 billion, fully fueled and finished in 1986, but **never allowed to operate commercially** due to public opposition post-Three Mile Island. It was decommissioned by 1992 without generating a single watt. - **Nick Carr** is a prominent tech writer (author of *The Shallows*, *Utopia Is Creepy*) known for exploring infrastructure, obsolescence, and technology's cultural impact. - The decommissioning removed the reactor and fuel but left the containment dome and turbine hall standing. The site is now used by utility PSEG Long Island for emergency training drills. - Shoreham is a landmark 'white elephant' — it crystallizes America's troubled relationship with nuclear power, where political activism and utility mismanagement killed a plant before it could run, leaving a strange industrial monument to a future that never arrived.

Related stories