Road Trip: Trojan Park

Trojan Park, just south of Ranier, Oregon, is a quiet, peaceful spot. A series of ponds surrounded by grass and trees are home to ducks and geese (I counted three different kinds.) I saw a tree that had been nearly gnawed through by a beaver and several blue herons. I didn’t see any people.

It was too cold for a picnic. The trees all around were turning yellow, red and orange. But it’s a nice place to walk, and I wonder if visitors are put off by the possibility of radioactive exposure.

The tell-tale reactor tower is gone. It was imploded in 2006, as part of a decommissioning process that began in 1992. Trojan operated for only 17 years, shut down by construction errors. Its original lease would have been up in 2011. The reactor core was shipped off to the Hanford Reservation, but, as far as I can determine from web research, a lot of spent fuel rods (aka “high-level radioactive waste”) are still buried on site.

I walked around on some foot paths, and then up onto a road so disused that it was slippery with moss. There’s a big picnic area with covered tables, and even a horseshoe pit, that looks pretty old. They look like they were there while the plant was operating.

At the end of the main road there’s an abandoned office building with an enormous parking lot. There’s a transfer station, and a huge sweep of high tension wires that cross the highway and loop up to the top of ridge.

Walking around, I almost start to feel sorry for the plant. Twelve hundred people worked here. Cheap, reliable power was being pumped into the grid. You could see how someone could get excited about the possibilities. How it might be pretty easy to brush off the down side. You know, the nuclear waste that remains lethal for thousands of years. It’s like not wanting to admit that your miraculous new medicine has terrible side effects.

What I really can’t figure out is why they named it Trojan. The condom jokes were inevitable, and even worse is the association with the Trojan Horse. Looks like a gift, turns out to be a killing machine. What were they thinking?