In 1969, three Ohio utility companies announced plans to build a nuclear power plant in Moscow, Ohio.
From the first public hearing about the proposed plant in 1972, David Fankhauser, a local biology and chemistry professor, spoke out against it.
Over more than a decade, the William H. Zimmer nuclear power station was plagued by delays, cost overruns and safety concerns after whistleblowers reported faulty construction.
By 1984, when investors abandoned the nuclear station, Fankhauser was one of 20,000 people who had joined forces to oppose the project.
On Cincinnati Edition, we discuss the history of Zimmer and how a coalition of concerned citizens kept a nuclear power plant out of their backyard.
Full transcription below
Guests:
- Alyssa McClanahan, author, “Zimmer: The Movement that Defeated a Nuclear Power Plant”
- David Fankhauser, retired professor of biology and chemistry, University of Cincinnati Clermont College
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This episode was transcribed using a combination of AI speech recognition and human editors and has been lightly edited for clarity. It may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.
In 1969 three Ohio utility companies announced plans to build a nuclear power plant in Clermont County. Over the next 15 years, thousands of neighbors, whistleblowers and ratepayers fought the project until investors finally abandoned the nuclear station in 1984. This is Cincinnati Edition on WVXU, I'm Lucy May. Joining me now to discuss the history of the Zimmer nuclear power station and the movement that defeated it are Alyssa McClanahan, the author of "Zimmer, The Movement that Defeated a Nuclear Power Plant," and David Fankhauser, one of the activists who fought against Zimmer. He's a retired professor of biology and chemistry at University of Cincinnati Clermont College. Thank you both for being here today. Well, Alyssa, for listeners who aren't familiar, can you give us just a bit of background on the Zimmern nuclear power station? Why did these utilities come together to build it?
Alyssa McClanahan: Yes, so the three different utilities in Ohio, Cincinnati, Gas and Electric, CG&E and then one based in Dayton and Columbus came together in the mid to late 60s to build the nuclear power plant because they were after a high capacity power plant to really power the area. It was a time period across the US when lots of other power companies were also investing in nuclear power plants. For the very first time, the federal government had allowed its commercialization not long before that, in 1954 so it was this kind of unique, special moment where utilities were joining a bandwagon phase of we think this is a good idea, and so Cincinnati was one place amongst many that got on to this bandwagon and decided to do this.
And Alyssa was the belief at the time that the demand for electricity would just keep growing, that we just needed more and more power.
Alyssa McClanahan: Absolutely yes. And this is part of that kind of wonderful post war economic boon. And they just felt, like many Americans, that the economy would continue to keep getting better, that electricity and for residents, for commercial businesses, for industry, would continue to demand more and more utilities were confronted with unprecedented power loads, and so they were after in addition to coal, they were after other power sources, and Nuclear was to them advantageous, because it was you high capacity, lots of bang for your for your buck, in their minds, at least early on.
David, I know you and your wife moved to Claremont county right around the time the project was getting started. How did you learn about it, and what was your reaction when you did find out about it?
David Fankhauser: Jill and I moved to Clermont County in 1971 I had just had a freshly minted doctorate in genetics, and we were interested in moving. She was pregnant. We wanted to move someplace for a healthy lifestyle, raise an organic garden, maybe have some goats and chickens, and so we moved to Clermont County in 71 and it was shortly after then that our neighbor, Dr Elizabeth Seeberg, who was in her late 70s at that point, said you should take a look at what they're doing in Moscow, Ohio. They're building a nuclear power plant. I was first familiar with the problems with nuclear power through my thesis advisor at Johns Hopkins, Dr Philip Hartman was concerned about Calvert Cliffs, a nuclear power plant on Chesapeake Bay. And so he had alerted me to the problems with that as a graduate student in genetics, I worked with mutations in bacteria, and radiation is one of the ways that you use to induce those mutations. So I knew full well those dangers, and ultimately the main driving force for me is concern about new radiation as being a genetic toxin, and when it if it causes mutations in our germ line, in our eggs and our sperm, those are forever until, until the either it dies out. So I was very concerned about that, and so I immediately looked into it, and began to, frankly, raise an alarm about that the location of the plant was directly on the Ohio River, which is of necessity, because all power plants require cooling water. But of course, that same Ohio River, just 17 miles downstream, is the water intake for city of Cincinnati, right? And so any. Any release into the water would have necessity go into the drinking water
And you talked about how you started speaking out and sounding this alarm early on, you spoke at the first public hearing on the power plant. Can you just tell us briefly what was your message and how it was received at that public hearing?
David Fankhauser: Excuse me for laughing, the reception was not all that great. I, you know, as a as a geneticist, I was talking about the dangers of nuclear power. I knew at that point that there was no means at all for disposal of the waste that was agreed upon. I came to learn shortly thereafter that nuclear power plants are not insurable according to the insurance company, and so the US government provides a corporate subsidy through the Price Anderson Act. So it's the government is actually providing insurance from nuclear power plants. And so I tried to lay that out, but the dogma from CG&E literally said it's going to be too cheap to meter. They thought this was they were completely off base, but of course, but the issues with nuclear plants versus coal fired plants is that nuclear require a much higher level of safety and quality of construction. And it's really that high quality of safety and construction that's, I think, of all things, that's where, that's where Zimmer fell down.
And we will get into some of those details. We're talking about, the Zimmer nuclear power station that was planned for Clermont County, but never completed, and the activists who fought against it. Alyssa, the Zimmer plant was being built outside the city limits of Cincinnati, of course, on the Ohio River, as David mentioned, but some and some city council members in Cincinnati kind of took up the cause. Can you talk about how that happened and why they were so interested?
Alyssa McClanahan: Yes, there were several different city councilors and mayors. Ted Berry, Bobby Stern, Jerry Springer is probably the most famous name there among others that raised very similar flags as David has already mentioned in the early 1970s Jerry in particular, was concerned about the fact that Zimmer was going to be just up river and upwind from The city of Cincinnati, its population, its water as David has clarified, and essentially was asking, we need for much more information that this thing is going to be safe. There was high level descent among scientists and people like David over whether or not low level, casual radiation emitted by those things was even safe. And so that dissent trickles down to everyday city councilors and everyday citizens who were very uncomfortable with that dissent amongst top people. And so Jerry and some of the others went to the public hearings and began to express, yes, we know this is outside of our jurisdiction, but it still matters. One of the things that I found really interesting about studying that generation of city officials is that they were very different from earlier generations. In Cincinnati, there was a new wave of younger counselors, female counselors, counselors that were African American and they cared about the environment and civil rights and feminism public health. I think all of them agreed that democracy needs to be messy to be functioning, and we need to have those access points where everyday people can ask those hard questions. And so I think with that as their banner, they began to press back on the nuclear power plant, wanting more information about safety. They also began to get interested in CG and E's continual asks for rate increases that later Zimmer gets implicated in. So they kind of came at it from, is this thing for sure safe and it seems kind of expensive, it seems more expensive, and on and on. And they, they went after both tactics, or both kind of questions.
Yeah, well, and the safety question became a more intense question I know for a lot of people after the accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania. David, can you talk to us a little bit about that accident, the impact that had on on the Zimmer plant and the fight against Zimmer?
David Fankhauser: Yes, that that was a major watershed moment. The dogma among the nuclear industry was that accidents were impossible because there were multiple layers of safety, and no matter what happened, that it would never there'd never be a meltdown, which most people know at this point means that the. Reder loses coolant and it overheats. It gets hot enough that the nuclear fuel actually melts itself. And so they said that was impossible, but in Three Mile Island, 1978 they had a meltdown, and it was not as bad as it could have been but it was a meltdown, and there was radiation released to the outside, and at that point, construction for nuclear power plants was stopped around the nation while they tried to reassess the safety measures that were clearly inadequate for those plants.
Did that give new fuel? Not to try to use a pun, but new fuel to the fight against Zimmer.
David Fankhauser: Absolutely, I remember, you know, how we had these moments in our life when we hear news and it's just carved into our memory. And I was on my way to a class at the college, I was going down the hill into Batavia, when that came on, and I thought, oh my goodness, this is going to be, it's going to be much easier now to talk to people and get them to see that because they were believed. I mean, there was an era, believe it or not, at this point, that people had faith in their government and believed that they would never do anything untoward or lie to them. But clearly there was something wrong here, where the government was saying it's absolutely safe, but it wasn't so, yes, that was that began. I began to get more positive reactions among the public. I did. I spoke probably 75 or 100 different times over those 567, years. Oh, my goodness. And including I have to tell one anecdote they, as they asked me to speak to at a firehouse in Northern Kentucky, right across the river from Zimmer. This was before the Big Mac bridge was finished. Not the Big Mac, but the the the one before the 275. Rich. Okay, okay. So I said, Well, I will come, but you have to send a boat across the river to pick me up. So shortcut, you know, that's kind of exciting. So, so they came. They picked me up at the frontier restaurant and went across the river. I gave the talk. Very interested group. Then coming back, we were halfway across the river when a thunderstorm hit. Oh no. And I thought, isn't this ironic? I'm talking about the dangers of nuclear power, and I'm going to get struck by lightning. Some will say that's a good purpose of lightning.
Oh goodness. Well, we have a caller on the line. Hi, Carol, thanks so much for listening. What's your question or comment?
Caller: I was with the League of Women Voters in the 1970s and we studied particular subjects in great depth. And at some point we went down to Zimmer to tour. It was not finished. And I know that they had said that, oh, it's going to make all these jobs, because, you know, we're going to have this great plant there. Well, it turns out that anybody that's working at one of those power plants. He has to be very, very educated. Even the construction workers are specific. And they go from job to job. They don't hire local people. So that was something that, you know, was misleading when they were saying that was a good thing for the area. Yeah.
Well, that's an interesting point. Carol, did it create the number of jobs that were promised?
Alyssa McClanahan: No, it did not. I think Carol raises the important point about thinking about the largely at that time, men that were actually employed. One of the things that I write at length about in the book is that a lot of the plumbers and the welders that were hired were deeply unqualified. And this was something that different legal teams, particularly Tom Devine, who was the legal counsel for the whistleblowers that came forward, figured out in painstaking detail that these people had to retake exams over and over and over again. And so I think thinking about, you know, the justification for nuclear power that starts to come crashing down, or at least become highly questionable, when you think about Carol's point, you know, who, who is actually qualified for those jobs? And then, because maybe that qualified base doesn't live in that area, then you're hiring folks that are unqualified and not doing a good job. And then you also have to think about the inspectors and the quality assurance folks and the engineers that are okaying those people to be hired in the first place, and the people choosing to not have any kind of paper trail for that entire thing. So I think I. Are questionable on many fronts, and I an important thing to study about Zimmer. Understand about Zimmer is that, as one of the activists told me, it's not an aberration, and I think that's a really important thing when we study Cincinnati history, is that in for many reasons, but including for nuclear power, the problems that were at Zimmer, while profound, were not unique, and they existed in every other nuclear power plant, including these issues with workers that Carol is bringing up in California, along the coast, in the south, all the places near water, as David mentioned, where we have nuclear power plants, there's these deep quality assurance issues, and that were not that long ago, really?
Yeah, well, thank you for that call Carol. We sure appreciate it.
We mentioned before the break that there were these whistleblowers who started to emerge. What concerns did they raise and what did that really mean for the movement?
Alyssa McClanahan: Yes, whistleblowers, I think, like Three Mile Island, were another key part in transforming the Zimmer movement, from a smaller collection of people into a bigger collection and a bigger and bigger and bigger collection. Very much an evolving protest movement. Whistleblowers started to emerge in the mid 70s, but very much so by the late 70s and early 80s, kind of a trickle of men, and then later, dozens and dozens were coming out. They came from different professions, welders, plumbers. Some of them, yeah, some of them were also quality assurance inspectors or engineers. These men expressed different kinds of issues. Some of them saying this part was wrong. This part was installed incorrectly. I know the welder next to me had to retake his test 100 times before actually getting qualified. I know that they intentionally didn't file any paperwork on that. I know that they threw that part out into the mud and we cannot find it. Others came forward with I'm seeing drugs or alcohol or firearms on site. So the problems ranged, but they were all very severe. I think one of the things that's very important, as David mentioned, about nuclear power plants, is there just has to be such an intense level of quality assurance to guarantee their safety. And I think, as I learned from studying Zimmer, yes, a. The parts obviously have to be correct. The people have to be well trained. They have to be honest in their work. But I think the biggest thing is there has to be this insanely important very, very detailed paper trail so that all the different folks involved can understand what happened. So much of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's regulation at that time was deferred regulation, so they were not capable of going to or they chose not to go to all the different nuclear power plants being built. But rather, they checked the paper trail emerging from these different utilities. And so if there's a missing Paper Trail, which happened at most of the nuclear power plants being built in this era, you have a really, really big problem, because you don't know what's wrong. You have no way of really going about and fixing it. When all those whistleblowers started emerging at Zimmer, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's response was a big fine on CG and E, redo this, redo that. But if there's no paper trail to know where to start with that, you're just going further and further down this bad vortex of lots of money, lots of wasted time and and like being sympathetic to the to the men trying to build this thing, not having any clue really how to fix it.
We did get a call from Bill. He didn't stay on the line, but he said his father had worked at a nuclear power plant, and one of the things he brought up in talking to our producer was that the nuclear power plant did not pollute the river. Of course, Zimmer never became a nuclear plant. But have there been other cases in this country where nuclear power has polluted rivers? Or is that a concern that hasn't been realized at this point?
David Fankhauser: Well, there have been pollutions. Luckily, they've been relatively low level. But the almost any nuclear power plant will release small quantities in into the water, and you can debate whether those are significant or not. The general acceptance these days that all radiation carries a proportional risk to your genetic well being. But he is correct that the major concern, from my standpoint, was the potential for catastrophic accident, because, for instance, Zimmer, in one year, produces the equivalent radiation to 800 Hiroshima bombs. Now, because, as I mentioned before, there's no acceptable means of permanent storage, and we're talking about hundreds and 1000s of years for radioactive waste to decay. All that spent fuel is being housed on site in spent fuel pools that's and spent fuel is the most intensive radiation step in the entire process, and those spent fuel pools must be constantly cooled, and if you lose cooling water in those you risk an absolutely catastrophic accident. But those spent fuel pools also, they constantly have to run the water through deionizers to remove it. And so, on paper, there's there's nothing leaks out. In reality, there are small quantities that are almost invariably leaked out.
We also got an email from Steve from Oakley, he says, now decades removed from the start of the Zimmer plant and with the experience and learning curve of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear accidents. Now there in the rear view mirror is nuclear power potentially safer. What do you all think?
David Fankhauser: I would say, yes, it's relatively safer, but it's not safe. And again, we go back, if it were really safe, insurance companies would be willing to insure it. If it's really safe, then we're we have to have a way to safely dispose of the waste, and in spite of intense efforts over many decades, we still have not reached a satisfactory way for that safe storage. Now, I'm particularly concerned at this point because of the recent increase in hysteria over AI and the data centers necessary to run it we see now big tech telling us, oh, well, nuclear power is fine, and now they're going to reopen Three Mile Island. I mean, that should tell us if we're resorting to Three Mile Island to satisfy that additional drain on our electrical grid that we need to rethink about whether that expense of electricity is worth starting up Nuclear Power Price again.
There's so much more we have to talk about here, and we are limited on time, but Alyssa ultimately, how big was the coalition that came together to fight Zimmer?
Alyssa McClanahan: Yes, it reached its peak in the early 1980s at about 20,000 individuals and organizations signing their name to a very open, open, broad based coalition that opposed Zimmer, not as a nuclear power plant, but. As a power plant that was, in their minds, too unsafe and too expensive to continue. Many of them expressed to me and at the time that we really don't want to deal with another coal plant, but that we felt like That was a better risk to take than a nuclear power plant that had an incredibly extensive paper trail created by lawyers defending those whistleblowers that this is very unsafe, this is very poorly built. An accident is increasingly likely. It's also became, like many nuclear power plants across the US. So, so, so expensive, and that burden, beginning in 1980 was filtered into rate payers everyday monthly bills. So people were paying for an unfinished, incredibly expensive power plant that they weren't sure was ever going to actually get finished. So that coalition coalesced around cost concerns and safety concerns, and they let people, individually and in organizations, join it for any, really, any reason that they had a question about it. So it was very intentionally open ended and inclusive in that way and temporary.
And it was something like 20,000 people ultimately, wow. And in just about a minute, what was the final straw? Alyssa, why did investors finally decide to abandon the Zimmer as a nuclear station in 1984.
Alyssa McClanahan: As one activist put it to me, it was the money that sank the project when they got another the federal government required them to get a third party audit and hire a new general contractor. The budgets that came down from both were incredibly expensive to fix, like truly fix the plant, and that was just the final straw for CG&E and their investors in the Dayton and Columbus utility companies. But to finish that quote from the activist Phil Amidon, he said it was money that sank the project, but without popular pressure, that outcome wasn't guaranteed. And I think that's an incredibly important part of the Zimmer story and these other, you know, contested nuclear power plants. We just need to to make sure that those stories are told, because I think that they are important.
And there are so many activists who were involved in this who went on to big things. David, I only have 30 seconds for this, but you've got a reunion coming up of those activists. Why is it important to you to get together with all of them to celebrate or mark this occasion?
David Fankhauser: Well, it's been 50 years. It's hard to believe, but one of the things so we're going to be having a reunion Saturday, the 22nd at okay, I'm going to wrap it up, but it's open to the public, and it's going to be at the First Unitarian Church, and starting at one o'clock.
Okay, well, I have been talking with Alyssa McClanahan, author of Zimmer, the movement that defeated a nuclear power plant. And David Fankhauser, one of the activists who fought against Zimmer. He's a retired professor from the University of Cincinnati, Claremont College. Thank you both so much for your time today.