nuclear teahole (vertical)...

Trojan, near Rainier, Oregon. March 2006.

Last in this series, and possibly the last teahole of Trojan forever? The cooling tower is scheduled for demolition in a few weeks.

It seems a waste to spend the money on blowing it up, just compounding the waste of money building the plant in the first place.

Nuclear cooling towers like these are iconographic, their visual impact loaded with an era of meaning. Somehow now when you know a plant like this has been shut down and benign for decades, such structures seem picturesque, even quaint. They evoke a nostalgia for times past, times of atomic innocence, times when we naively believed in the power of science and technology to chart a safe path for us into the future.

Teahole, Efke R100.