CHAPTER 1
CITIZEN ATOM AT THE PARK
By David E. Pesonen

There are public atoms and there are private atoms. Public atoms are used widely in therapy, research and bombs.
Until 1954 all atoms were public. In that year, however, at the urging of the Atomic Energy Commission, Congress passed the Atomic Energy Act. This was the official launching of the Government’s sponsorship of peaceful uses of the atom.
Its most pregnant provision was to stimulate development of nuclear-electric generation by the private utility industry.
A Head Start
The industry joined the AEC in lobbying for the bill and, anticipating its passage, enjoyed a running start the moment the bill became law. Among the front-runners was the Pacific Gas and Electric Company which, with four other utilities, began development work as early as 1951, under contract to the AEC.
PG&E is a multi-billion dollar corporation that in one way or another touches nearly every person in California. Like most utilities, it is a regulated monopoly. Its substations dot the landscape from Mount Shasta to the Mojave Desert. PG&E transmission lines are stitched the length and breadth of the state. To serve more than two million paying customers the company operates 76 generating plants, including hydroelectric dams on all of California’s major river systems, geothermal plants in the state’s principal geyser region, oil and gas fueled steam plants on the coast and in the delta, and increasingly, nuclear fueled generators - a small experimental one now operating at Vallecitos in the delta, and a larger one at Humboldt Bay near Eureka on the north coast, scheduled to start operation late in 1962. 
All this has gained PG&E a national reputation as an experienced and forward thinking utility. With some justification, the annual report to stockholders boast in 1961: “Our financial position is sound and we enjoy the confidence of the public.”
The company also enjoys the confidence of the Atomic Energy Commission which, despite company pronouncements to the contrary, has vigorously encouraged PG&E’s expansion in the nuclear field. If current plans go forward, California’s third nuclear generator will be the largest in the world - a 325 thousand kilowatt giant reactor at PG&E’s proposed “Bodega Bay Atomic Park.”
The utility turned its eye on the Bodega area soon after passage of the Atomic Energy Act. And the events surrounding its advance toward the Bodega headland give a fascinating glimpse into what the future of private nuclear power holds in store. They also paint a disturbing picture of corporate power at work when government puts the atom in its fist.
An Arm Against the Sea
Bodega Head is a stubby peninsula, several miles long, hooking sharply into the Pacific Ocean on the coast of Sonoma County, about 50 miles north of San Francisco. It lies a long shout north of Tomales Point on the Point Reyes Peninsula - a brooding, fog-bound newcomer to the National Park System.
The Bodega peninsula resembles an arm raised in defense against the sea. It terminates in a blunt fist of granite called Bodega Head. Curled inside the bend of its elbow is Bodega Harbor, an anchorage for several hundred commercial and sport fishing boats. Commercial seafood landings from this fleet exceed a million dollars a year - twice the value of the catch at San Francisco’s more publicized Fisherman’s Wharf. Bodega Harbor is considered the safest among only five harbors of refuge along the 300 miles of forbidding coast between San Francisco and Coos Bay, Oregon. Sometimes the winds blow in off the ocean relentlessly for weeks, whipping spindrift from miles out, sending breakers spuming a hundred feet up from the rocks on the seaward side of the head, while the fleet bobs securely in the harbor and the fishermen mend their gear, hoping for a letup.
Looking down on the harbor is the town of Bodega Bay. With nets drying on the wharves and the salty odor of steaming crabs, fresh cod and salmon, the town breathes an atmosphere of old world fishing ports, like those strung along the Mediterranean from Spain to Yugoslavia. In fact, most of the fishermen who sail from Bodega Harbor, the fish processors, the shipwrights, and the mechanics are immigrants or their [sic] descendants from the Mediterranean region. With names like Lazzio, Zankich, Gelardi, their heritage is stamped indelibly on Bodega Bay.
Everywhere are the auspices of nature. Here State Route 1 alternately skirts a procession of esteros, drifts through fine dairyland bounded by dark groves of Eucalyptus, then climbs to the lip of cliffs scanning the Pacific. It serves beauty more handily than commerce. In Spring it seems a thin gray wake through an ocean of wildflowers -blue lupines, golden poppies, mustard and daisies, splashing yellow over the hills rolling to the sea.
Because north-south traffic runs mainly on US 101, thirty miles inland from Bodega Bay, the town, the harbor and their beautiful peninsula are little known to most Californians. The headland is more subtle than Yosemite, the town more remote than Carmel. And the headland is little used except by grazing cattle and wandering hikers.
But in 1957 a whiff of rumor suggested that the world’s largest gas and electric company had found an industrial use for Bodega Head - involving a use for the private atom.
Preliminary Plans
Both the University of California and the State Division of Beaches and Parks had been acting to acquire parts of the headland - since 1956 and ’55, respectively - for a marine biological laboratory and for addition to the state park system. Their aims were consistent with a National Park Service survey of the Pacific Coast, made in 1955, that recommended public acquisition of Bodega Head to preserve its beauty, history, remarkable geology and unduplicated marine environment.
But in the Summer of 1957 the park agency abruptly withdrew its interest in Bodega Head and the University followed in the Fall. At this time, no public evidence of the company’s plans existed; but tenacious rumors persisted in Sonoma County. And in the Spring of 1958 the company confirmed them.
On May 23, PG&E President N.R. Sutherland issued a brief statement to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Sonoma County’s largest newspaper, that “preliminary purchasing negotiations” for a site to build a “steam-electric generating plant” were underway. In July, 1958, a year after first abandoning its interest in the head, the Division of Beaches and Parks “confirmed” that it had been negotiating with PG&E to purchase whatever was left, after PG&E’s acquisition, for the park system.
The total area of three properties on the head was 947 acres; PG&E, according to the Division of Beaches and Parks, intended to buy 635 acres in a wide strip across the waist of the head. A piece near the foot of the peninsula, north of PG&E, would go to the Division.
The area of acquisition was to assume greater importance when the full plans of the company were revealed three years later. But a number of other questions triggered by rumor, in which the word “atomic” popped up with disturbing frequency, had begun to puzzle a few of the local citizens. Just where on the head would the plant be built? When would it be built? And especially would it be a nuclear plant?
In September Kenneth J. Diercks, the company’s land agent in the county, firmly nailed his plans in the County Supervisors’ chambers: “No decision can be made as to when actual construction of this facility will commence, or as to the type of plant to be constructed, whether conventional or nuclear, until the time of installation is much nearer at hand.”
The Little Guy
Experience elsewhere in setting up nuclear plants has shown that unless the public is adequately prepared, there is likely to be opposition from those who must live out their lives within fallout distance.
A nuclear fuel processing facility was kicked off Cape Cod in 1960 by a group of citizens who had not enjoyed the fruits of a campaign for what the industry has termed “consumer acceptance of radioactivity.” One official at Cape Cod lamented that “there was no opposition until the last second. We felt there was no need to educate the Cape about precautions, safety objectives, or any preliminary explanations…then the roof crashed in.” (Boston Globe 5/15/60).
Unlike officialdom at Cape Cod, PG&E had been forwarned [sic] - both by General Electric, its partner in the nuclear business, and by the AEC, its benefactor.
In 1956 the Opinion Research Corporation polled a sample of the population with the question: “Do you think that it would be a good thing or a bad thing to build an atomic energy plant in this vicinity.” And although an encouraging 51% said it would be a “good thing,” a truculent 27% said it would be a “bad thing,” while 22% said something that sounded like a door slamming on the pollster’s toe. That 27% was not the biggest portion, but there was a good chance it would be the loudest.
These findings were no real surprise to the industry. Harold A. Beaudoin, Manager of Sales Promotion and Public Relations of GE’s Atomic Division, mapped the intricate route for industry to follow if it were to reach the pot of gold at the end of the nuclear-electric rainbow:
It is far easier to borrow money from a friend if he knows from past experience that you won’t play the horses with it. Likewise, if the mind is strongly conditioned on a continuing basis, then the public problem of a particular moment - locating a reactor in a populated area, for example - can be superimposed with a far better chance of understanding. (Nucleonics, Oct. ’60, p.23)
Mr. Stanley B. Barton, PG&E’s land development manager, was very candid on this subject when he wrote in 1961: “If the Bodega Bay plant is nuclear fueled, wastes will be disposed of in compliance with the laws and regulations of established governmental agencies…. From a public relations’ standpoint, we are fully aware of our obligation to protect the environment fromobjectionable pollution and contamination.”