Eight oh five, ninety five kr CD Talk stationing. Very Happy Friday to you by the Timas. Please to welcome my next guest, local author, and I enjoy having local
authors on the program, Alyssa McClanahan. She is described as a writer scholar specializing in historic preservation and public urban as well as environmental history, as a PhD from my alma mater, PhD in History from the University of Cincinnati, and she's also the author of a book that we'll not be talking about today, Findley Market is Cincinnati, which uses Findley Market as a vehicle to explore the larger
history of US cities. Welcome to the program, Alyssa. It's a pleasure to have you on today.
Hello, thank you for having me. Good morning.
It's my pleasure. And the name of the book we're talking about today, Zimmer, the movement that defeated a nuclear power plant. I remember the saga Zimmer to a certain degree. It goes back quite a few years. But the original Zimmer nuclear power plant, as I understand it was announcer, proposed back in nineteen sixty nine.
Yes, correct, Yeah, it goes back quite a bit.
And so when did the first shovel hit the ground. When did the construction begin on Zimmer.
Very soon after that? They got a construction permit to start significant amount of work in nineteen seventy two, but they were allowed to do kind of like raising and prepping the site prior to that construction permit. And then when they canceled the project in nineteen eighty four converting it to a coal plant, it was then ninety nine percent built, So the majority of it was built from seventy two to eighty.
Four, So it took about fifteen years to get it ninety nine percent done and then they pulled a plug on it.
Correct. Yeah, so the book explores this saga, this drama.
Well, let's talk about the saga and drama, because I mean, I'm a fan of the concept of nuclear power. I'm not a global warming believer. I'm not a climate change believer, but you know, if getting carbon out of the air is in important and the best way to do that and provided abundance of cheap, pollution free electricity is a nuclear power plant. They produce a lot of electricity and
comparatively small footprint nowadays. But this was your more traditional old school cooling tower nuclear plant.
Correct, Yes, Yes, yes. So the big thing the book is up to is taking the story of Zimmer, which is one can test a nuclear power plants, and exploring the larger history of nuclear power as it took off and then kind of faltered in the US in the
sixties and seventies into the early eighties. One of the things that I want to do for readers is, as we're thinking about reinvesting in nuclear power now for a variety of reasons, as you mentioned, I think we just need to understand this very recent history in the sixties and seventies and eighties. You know, we heavily tried to invest in it in those decades, and the industry faltered significantly at significant costs to utility companies, many of which
went bankrupt to utility customers. And so I think I would I want to share the hang ups of that industry by looking at one interesting story, one local story, to give readers some you know, some good knowledge, some good information to think about it today. Because because you're right, they produce enormous amounts of energy compared to a coal plant, for instance, they are still incredibly expensive to build, which was one of the issues back then. They still you know,
have other hang ups too. They still produce significant numbers of whistle blowing workers who say this isn't safe, this was installed correctly, That was an issue back then. As the book explores, they still have issues with quality control and assurance. We still have no safe way to actually dispose of the waste, so they're not you know, really renewable. So there's significant issues with them that we just need
to think through today. And I'm hoping that by exploring, you know, very recent history through a good story, that readers can get some of that good knowledge so they can better think about nuclear power today. Well that's what I'm up to.
That's great, and I think it's an outstanding effort that you've engaged in here, because you know, small modular small modular reactors these days are nowhere anything like the Zimmer Power Plan or those old school nuclear reactors. They're completely different technologies, much smaller, easier to operate, and much less
a waste coming out of them, if any. I've heard many people say that there really isn't any at all, but ignoring the realities of modern nuclear actors when it comes to the whistleblowers that were that were coming out, and I even remember hearing news stories about that that it was unsafe whistle blowers coming out the construction concerns. Were those legitimate complaints by legitimate people, or were those motivated by political activism.
Yeah, that's a great question the former. Actually, So what I found was Zimmer. The vast majority of whistleblowers came out in the late seventies early eighties, so this is years into the plant going under construction. These are pretty much exclusively men who work at the plant or inspect the plant, and they are very, very hesitant to come forward. Many of them described their life thereafter were just wrecked. They were made paries in their communities, they lost their job,
their family felt unsafe. They were incredibly hesitant to come forward. But these were men who ultimately felt like they wanted to point out some serious safety issues. Not all of them had serious safety issues they were pointing out some of them were not in safety related things that they just felt like, I'm a quality control inspector, this isn't how you do this kind of a thing, you know,
the procedural things, which I respect. Others were pointing out thousands of very serious safety issues with Zimmer, to the point that they ended up having to tire lawyers to
represent them. And so there's a law firm actually out a DC that came in just this one guy who was very young at the time, and he represented them, and I talked to him quite a lot because he himself, like you, you know, isn't opposed a nuclear power on principle by any means, but he was just very struck by how all of these men were so fearful and
felt like, I need to come forward. And when they would give public testimony, these would you they would use voice distortion machines, they would cover themselves in drapes, looking like ghosts. Essentially, they didn't want to have any of their names released. As a historian, looking at my sources, very few of their names are actually out there. So these are people who were threatened with physical violence. Many of them lost their jobs, and so it's it was
it felt very very real to me, you know. The popular protest movement that emerged across the Cincinnati area was this gradual evolution of some folks that were opposed to it on principle. They were kind of the early activists, and later more and more folks signed on because they were listening to whistleblowers. They were paying for Zimmer even though it wasn't producing power. And I think, you know, the whistle blowers, you know, the vast majority of them
liked nuclear power. It gave them a really high paying, good job, and so they were really, really hesitant to come forward. And when I talked to the men and women that worked with them that got them to kind of come forward, those people just said, you know, we
need to understand Zimmer is not unique in this. It's not an aberration that the nuclear power industry, nuclear weapons production facilities produced a huge numbers of whistleblowers in the seventies and eight, and so we I think we need to dig into that whi is quality control and assurance missing in that industry, and the book explores that. You know, we we've got a rather hands off regulatory system with
that industry at large. And so again, if we're thinking about it today, we need to make sure that that is that that's not the issue anymore, because we want people working at these plans to feel safe, and we definitely want the families living around them to feel like, you know, as a mom myself, you can raise your kid in the shadow of one of these and know
that it's safe. So yeah, I enjoyed researching this because the protests that emerged over it came from all these different angles where some people question, you know, well what if there is an accident, and other people question just the regular radiation that comes from it at low levels, you know, is that safe for my farm or my kids.
Other people were really concerned about the cost. Ohio has to have state provision that once you completed a new power plant seventy five percent complete, you could include its costs on utility customers bills, and so towards the end of the zimmer Saga, utility customers were paying for a very expensive, very overbudget plant that wasn't yet producing power, and so customers, particularly working class and low income folks, got very upset because they're paying for something that they're
not even benefiting from. And so it's this really kind of weird, beautiful story of this protest movement that's not really a movement, but like twelve movements combined. And it was very interesting to study because it's like a lot of different perspectives, liberals, conservatives, all sorts of people that had something to say about it. And I very much enjoyed that.
Oh, I imagine, and I can see how this coalition would build with all the stories coming out. And you had the initial protesters, the environmentalists, which just I think stood on, well, it's nuclear airG it has to be bad. Because this protest started before Three Mile Island hit and CO through my line, fueled the fire of that activism. They thought every single one of these plants represented an existential threat to the general community, if not you know,
the state, or the geographic area. We're the large geographic area. But you mentioned government regulations, and it seems to me that in modern times, governmental regulations are the ones that stand in the way of progress. And I thought maybe that was one of the reasons why it took so long to at least from the start of the project to nineteen eighty four when they pulled the plug on it, that maybe the regulatory environment was part of the problem. But you suggested it, No, it wasn't.
So it's a little bit of both. What's so interesting about why nuclear power in this country takes off and then kind of to be a bit dramatic like crashes and burns is a host of factors, and so I try to explore this in a really hopefully readable way in the Zimmer book. So protest is one aspect of it, but honestly, they're not really the one thinking the project. It's actually the money. And I think protests, you know, raises people's awareness of the money in a very important way.
But it's the money that really really drives utility companies to cancel these projects. And to your point, part of the enormity of costs in that era was because there's this growing governmental review process, in part because of the environmental movement, and a lot of that was frankly very good. We want to make sure that these things are built safely.
But on the other hand, if you're you know, sympathetic to these utility companies, which I try to be in the book, you're just holding costs or growing and growing and growing as you have to go from one public hearing to the next, and then you need twelve different agencies to review this thing. That is a lot, and
so you feel for them. In addition to that growing governmental review, there's also the issue that the one government agency that's tasked with trying to get these things on air safely, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and took an incredibly hands off approach to that regulation in a way that ultimately drug out the process instead of made it more efficient. They deferred pretty much all of the quality control to utilities, and utilities had no experience building nuclear power plants in
the sixties and seventies because no one did. It was very new technology good, so they, you know, they kind of went at it with a lot of the attitude of well, I know how to build a coal plant, and they did, they were very good at that, but no one knew how to build a nuclear power plant.
And as you mentioned earlier, they were huge back then, physically huge, and they required redundant, redundant, redundant quality control to make sure that they were built well and that the men building them were safe and the families nearby were safe. And we just didn't understand that at large, that that's the way you got got to do it.
And so because of that kind of lack of quality regulation and deferred regulation to utility, then they were built pretty poorly, and so then they had to go back and fix themselves over and over again, which is what happens was Zimmer. They get fined by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission babying c Genie for not building it. Well, they got to go back and fix it. They get another fine,
they got to go back and fix it. So you do feel bad for the Cincinati Gas and Electric officials at different points because they just seem like they're trying and they're not succeeding. They certainly were a group of rather arrogant officials. They thought they knew what they were doing. They were very uninterested in outside input. But you also feel sympathetic to them because you know, I'm married to
a man that runs a construction based business. Those are really hard businesses to run, and utilities building massive power plants. I mean, it's one of the most capital intensive industries in the US. And we also have to understand that another factor that sunk nuclear power was that they're building these things in the set seventies. That was when the post war economic boom ended and it was yeah, yeah, and so that meant that whatever you thought your construction
costs are going to be, they suddenly skyrocket. And that is not their fault. You know, they could have maybe projected, okay, what if we do have a recession. They could have done a better job with that but some of that
was out of their control. And so what's so interesting about nuclear power is that it's kind of like six different, big, chunky factors that converge to think the industry instead of just one singular thing, and that so it's a really layered, nuanced story, and I'm trying to use just one singular place to help readers understand those different factors. And then again think about, Okay, well, what can we do today?
Amen offering suggestions and solutions for problems from real life experience. Zimmer The Movement that Defeated a Nuclear Power Plant by my guest today, local author. I'll listen mcclanahand listen. This has been a fascinating conversation. I'm sure my listeners will be thrilled about getting a copy of the book since we have such a close connection with it here locally. I will have my producer put it on my blog page fifty five cars dot com. But folks, if you're interested,
it is available on Amazon. Zimmer of the Movement that Defeated a Nuclear Power Plant. My regular producers out today, so I don't know that Danny is how to update my page, but it'll Oh, Danny, you can do it wonderful, then we'll add the link. ALYSSA real pleasure to day. Thanks for documenting this in this wonderful book.
Thank you so much for having me my pleasure,