When I moved to Bodega Bay, California over two years ago, it seemed its main claim to notoriety was that it was the setting for Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds. I soon found out a little-known and surprising fact: Bodega Bay sired grassroots environmental activism in America.
This year represents the 60th anniversary of the successful battle to stop the construction of one of the nation’s first fully commercial nuclear power plant at Bodega Head, a spot frequented by many to watch whales. The lessons this story holds today for those who champion distributed energy resources (DERs) are quite relevant. Why? Big Tech companies are forging alliances with a nuclear industry seeking to revitalize itself due to rising demand for electricity to supply hyper-scale data centers. Displacing armies of diesel generators with “clean” nuclear power can respond to the global climate change threat, they argue.
Since I first learned about electricity markets and nuclear power in Sacramento — the first city in the U.S. to ever shut down an operating nuclear reactor via a public ballot initiative in 1989 — I felt like I had landed in the right spot.
Yet one would never know this monumental fact about Bodega Bay’s role in stopping an ill-advised nuclear deployment when driving by Campbell Cove, a small bayside beach located just before one makes the ascent up the road to the Bodega Head cliffs. Nearly invisible to the public, this is where the so-called “Hole in the Head” is located. Today, all that remains is a spring-fed pond approximately 150 feet deep filled with wood and steel construction debris. Yes, there is a sign, but it is quite weathered and barely legible. Most people have no idea of its significance.
The story of how the funkiest of all grassroots coalitions defeated Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) is a story worth remembering and I dare say, celebrating. It is the classic David versus Goliath tale.
A waitress started the ball rolling
PG&E did not initially broadcast to the public that its proposed power plant would be a nuclear reactor. All that the utility revealed was that it would be a “steam–electric generating plant.” Initially, local citizens were concerned about the power lines to transmit electricity from the power plant into the California grid proposed along Doran Beach, a sandy U-shaped beach that looks like it could have been airlifted from sunny Southern California and plopped down among the rugged, craggy cliffs common on the Sonoma County coastline.
Luckily, a waitress at the Tides Wharf Restaurant overheard some PG&E employees talk about the nuclear reactor they planned on constructing in 1958. She Informed a reporter at a local newspaper about what she heard. When word got out that PG&E was surreptitiously planning on building a nuclear reactor in this rural enclave, a colorful collection of citizens rose up in opposition. Local ranchers, farmers, housewives, communists, libertarians — and even musicians — all started collaborating and showing up at public hearings.
Energy analyst and writer Peter Asmus at a site commemorating the grassroots effort that halted a nuclear power project 60 years ago in Bodega Bay, California, a community north of San Francisco. Photo by Elisa Wood.
Perhaps the most creative publicity stunt occurred on Memorial Day, 1963, when 1,500 yellow, helium-filled balloons were released from the proposed reactor site. Each balloon featured a tag warning the recipient: “This could represent a radioactive molecule of strontium–90 or iodine–131…Tell your local newspaper where you found this balloon.” These balloons traveled far and wide, some floating all the way into the Central Valley.
Most importantly, many of these balloons landed on the property of dairies and farms that pepper the west Sonoma and Marin County landscapes. A chief worry back then was contaminated milk due to radioactive particulates. These fears were stoked by the atom bombs that had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan and which had ended World War II. Data was coming out about the long-lasting impacts of radiation from these nuclear explosions.
Yet another novel form of public education was the writing and recording of a song entitled “Blues for Bodega,” which specifically references PG&E and was performed at a rally by the Lu Watters Yerba Buena Jazz Band. The jazz record featured a couple of the primary activists in the campaign. An album including the song was released in 1963.
Yet the key to the success of the anti-nuclear campaign rested with a scientist: Pierre Saint-Amand. Saint-Amand had just witnessed a major earthquake in Chile and the damage that had been rendered. He was driving to the China Lake U.S. Naval Ordinance Test Station in southern California in August 1962 when he heard a radio broadcast of a contentious public hearing regarding the proposed nuclear power plant. He became quite alarmed and offered his help to verify potential earthquake risks at the site.
Doris Sloan, a housewife turned community organizer from nearby Sebastopol, helped sneak the geophysicist into the site in April 1963. No government geophysicists were officially allowed to get involved with the anti-nuclear campaign because of government restrictions since the project was undergoing federal regulatory review. So, Sloan and Saint-Amand had to figure out a way to get into the proposed site, which was being closely monitored and surrounded by a security gate. How could they somehow document the earthquake risk there? As luck would have it, the day the two arrived at the scene, a guard was on a coffee break. He had left the gate open. Saint-Amand snuck in and was able to confirm by digging with a knife and taking photos that the reactor site rested within the San Andreas earthquake fault zone.
The rest is history. These revelations turned key high-ranking federal and state officials against the project. In the end, PG&E withdrew its application to construct just as it had been poised to pour the concrete for the reactor’s foundation.
Lessons learned from the “Hole in the Head” gang
Why go back to an archaic grid infrastructure model when DERs can fill in the gaps much more cheaply and quickly — and offer flexible solutions instead of monolithic centralized power stations
No matter what one’s opinions may be about the prospects for nuclear energy as a potential solution to respond to climate change, this tale offers important lessons about governance.
Perhaps the most incredible aspect of the story is the fact that the community was never notified that technology as potentially dangerous as a nuclear reactor built on an earthquake fault was rapidly moving forward in their own backyard with little, if any, public input. While many may argue that too many regulatory decisions at the California Public Utilities Commission in San Francisco are still cloaked in too much secrecy, new processes are now in place to foster public input. In fact, an entire new state agency – the California Energy Commission – was created to increase stakeholder engagement in power plant siting cases in California in 1974.
The “Hole in the Head” gang raised important issues relevant to all of California and the rest of the U.S. Without the efforts of these unsung heroes in Bodega Bay, an out-of-the-way rural landscape that attracts thousands of people annually to behold the wonders of nature would have been transformed into a high-security industrial facility fraught with catastrophic risk. They serve as an inspiration for how ordinary people can do extraordinary things. They inadvertently started the environmental movement. For this, we should honor them and be inspired by the example they set.
These citizens engaged in a novel campaign without the help of any professional environmental organization. They ultimately succeeded well before California gained its current reputation as a mecca for everything green. Hardly a liberal enclave, Bodega Bay, nonetheless, illustrated the power of collective political action and played a key role in opening local, state and federal government decision-making to public scrutiny and debate and, perhaps most importantly, scientific facts.
Trying to revive the nuclear industry to supply hungry data centers when other options such as solar photovoltaics and wind power have emerged as the lowest-cost power options seems foolhardy. Why go back to an archaic grid infrastructure model when DERs can fill in the gaps much more cheaply and quickly — and offer flexible solutions instead of monolithic centralized power stations fraught with economic and environmental risk?
Peter Asmus is co-author of Reinventing Electric Utilities: Competition, Citizen Action and Clean Power and has been reporting, analyzing and consulting on energy issues for over 35 years: www.peterasmus.com. A webinar about the “Hole in the Head” gang will take place at 7 pm PST on Nov. 11, 2024. Find out more at www.stewardscr.org/events.
