By Elliott Brack, editor and publisher | Every now and then, in the course of routine matters, an event takes place that makes you catch your breath. That happened to me about 1970, when Georgia Power Company was building its nuclear Plant Hatch near Baxley.
The reactor vessel for the plant was built in Chattanooga, Tenn., then shipped by barge down the Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers to the Gulf of Mexico, across Florida, and eventually up the Altamaha River to Baxley.
The late Ed Jordan of Jesup and I and a few more people took a small motor boat down the Altamaha looking for the reactor being brought up the river on a massive barge. As we rounded a bend near Pennholloway Creek, there came the tall vessel into view.
Wow! Gasp! It was monstrous! It was so tall, at least 50 feet tall, that the railroad bridge near the Rayonier plant on the Seaboard railroad had to be swung open skyward. It was the first time in maybe 50 years that the bridge had been raised from its normal closed position. The clearance from rails to the river is 30 feet at most, and this was in March, in the high water season.
All this came to mind recently when hearing that the nuclear power plant at Indian Point, N.Y. would be closed by 2021, after more than 50 years of supplying nuclear power to the New York metro area. Gov. Andrew Cuomo feels the plant is a major risk, located so close to the New York metro area population. The power company that operates the plant also says that it has financial motives for closing the plant. How the New York metro area will be supplied with its needs of 2,200 megawatts of electrical power has not yet been determined.
Why did the Indian Point plant come to mind?
Plant Hatch
When Georgia Power announced that it would build the first nuclear plant in Georgia at Baxley, there was considerable concern, particularly in the immediate area of the plant, in Appling County, and across the river in Toombs County, about safety.
So Georgia Power decided to fly county commissioners from Toombs and Appling to the Indian Point plant as a public relations gesture, showing them how safely the plant operated. They also invited newspapermen of the area, and I was among that group.
We were to fly from the Waycross airport, in a prop plane, a two-engine Martin airliner. There were thunderstorms that summer’s day between Waycross and Atlanta. The airliner arrived about two hours late. During the wait, one county commissioner from Toombs County, who had never flown before, was being kidded about how unsettling and difficult flying could sometimes be. It made him more than a little nervous,
That one-hour flight to Atlanta was about as rough a flight as I have ever encountered, before or since. The clouds were heavy, the plane bucked and bounced like a bronco being broken, with lightening flashing outside the windows, and we were all a little unnerved when we finally landed.
The nervous county commissioner was just behind me getting out the rear-loading plane. “How was the flight?” someone asked him. “You know,” he said, “It was better than I thought it was going to be!”
The next day we boarded a jet to New York. At one time I looked up, seeing that same county commissioner walking down the jet’s aisle, smiling broadly as we cruised smoothly with no bouncing around whatsoever. That’s what I remember about going to the Indian Point nuclear plant.
By the way, the Hatch plant is jointly owned by Georgia Power (50.1 percent); Oglethorpe Power Corporation (30 percent); Municipal Electrical Authority of Georgia (17.7 percent); and Dalton Utilities (2.2 percent).
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
Follow Us