The latest stage of the rescue operation began on a crisp morning last October, hours before sunrise. In the predawn darkness, a small army of biologists piled into pickup trucks and drove deep into central Arizona’s canyon country, halting finally at the lip of a rose-hued chasm deep enough to swallow the Empire State Building twice over. The crew clambered into a Bell 407 helicopter, which promptly rolled off the gorge’s lip, skimmed along its striated walls, and deposited the team, along with 10 days’ worth of gear and food, in a scrubby patch of mesquite alongside the Little Colorado River. The six-person group—scientists, seasoned volunteers, and one out-of-place journalist—was now alone in the desert, with little more than a week to complete its mission: to find, capture, and relocate 300 of the strangest-looking fish in the Southwest.

The Little Colorado River, or LCR, is one of the last strongholds of the humpback chub, a creature whose numbers have been decimated over the past half century by dams in the Colorado River Basin. The foot-long fish sports a Quasimodo-ish bulge that rises from its back like the prow of flesh between a bison’s shoulders. Though the protuberance resembles a body-length tumor, it’s actually an exquisite adaptation, a stabilizer that helped the fish navigate the roiling waters that once tore through the Colorado River Valley. Steadied by its hump, Gila cypha has traveled this watershed for up to five million years, roughly as long as the Grand Canyon has existed. One 19th-century prospector reported schools of chub “so thick that you can lean over the water’s edge and pull them out by the tail two at a time.”

Today, however, a paltry 10,000 adult chub persist in the canyon. Around three quarters of the survivors hang on in the Little Colorado, an undammed 340-mile tributary of the Colorado. For two decades, government scientists have monitored and nurtured this population in hopes that it will disperse throughout the watershed. “The LCR is the best of what’s left,” said Mike Pillow, a sandy-haired U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, as he sorted coolers of steaks and beers in the shallow cave that the team uses each year as a makeshift camp.

Though Pillow and his colleagues net and track chub several times a year, this trip had an additional purpose: relocating 300 baby chub upstream to prime habitat above a waterfall. Upstream of the falls, insect prey is abundant, while invasive predators like trout are scarce. Years of such translocations have incrementally expanded the species’s range, buffering it against extinction. “We want them to imprint on the water up there when they’re in these smaller life stages,” Pillow said. “If they get flushed out, they should go right back up.” (The stepwise falls aren’t too steep for the fish to climb.)

No sooner had the biologists landed, however, than they realized their task would be much harder than anticipated. Torrential rains had swollen the Little Colorado and churned the usually turquoise waters into chocolate milk. Pillow feared the fish would hunker down and be less likely to swim into the scientists’ nets. Sure enough, the first three days of the expedition were a bust: Each morning the crew waded into the sludgy flow, wrestled their cylindrical nets to the surface, and brought up only mud. At night they gloomily tossed sticks into the campfire.

Where, they wondered, were the chub?

* * *

The humpback chub’s decline began in 1963, when the newly completed Glen Canyon Dam began impounding the Colorado River. The 710-foot-high wall was controversial from the get-go. To proponents it represented a technological triumph that would supply power and water to western states. Detractors mourned the inundation of Glen Canyon, a sublime chasm submerged beneath the new reservoir of Lake Powell. “All dams are ugly,” claimed Edward Abbey, whose 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, revolves around eco-terrorists striving to blow up the despised concrete edifice. “But the Glen Canyon Dam is sinful ugly.”           

The structure also had grim consequences for the Colorado River’s native fish. Historically, some 60 million tons of sediment washed through the Colorado Basin each year, building sandbars and backwaters as it settled—ideal sheltering grounds for young fish. As Glen Canyon Dam prevented sediment from drifting downriver, that prime habitat soon degraded. Moreover, humpback chub require warm water—at least 61 degrees Fahrenheit—to spawn and grow. The dam, however, releases its pulses from Lake Powell’s frigid depths, where temperatures hover around 46 degrees. Under those conditions, the fish grow slowly—and smaller chub are easier prey for invasive predators. Deprived of habitat and warm water, humpback chub were listed as endangered in 1967. Two of their cousins, bonytail and roundtail chub, vanished from the lower river altogether.

Though humpback chub remain rare, it’s not for lack of experimentation. In 1996, 2004, and 2008, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation tried to replicate historical floods, releasing huge surges of water from the Glen Canyon Dam. The ersatz floods temporarily rebuilt some of the Colorado’s sandbars, yet the chub didn’t rebound. In fact, the 2008 event may have made things harder for chub: In the aftermath, exotic rainbow trout exploded, perhaps crowding out native fish. Since then, managers have tweaked the timing and volume of the man-made floods. Unleashing high flows in the fall, rather than the spring, has prevented further trout booms. And in 2012, the U.S. Department of the Interior announced that the dam would release high flows more frequently, a decision then-secretary Ken Salazar called “a milestone in the history of the Colorado River.”

Still, if the river isn’t warm enough to stimulate spawning and growth, the floods won’t provide much help. That’s where climate change might actually give humpback chub a boost. Years of drought have lowered Lake Powell’s surface and heated its depths, and the temperature of water passing through the dam has climbed two degrees in two decades. (Of course, warmer waters are projected to spell disaster for native fish just about everywhere else.)

But humpback chub aren’t the only fish that might thrive as conditions change—predators could benefit, too. Last summer surveyors found thousands of green sunfish, an eastern native stocked by anglers in the early 1900s, thriving below Glen Canyon Dam, where they’d never before been reported in significant numbers. In light of the discovery, the river’s managers elected to skip a planned flood for fear it would wash the invaders downriver.

Put it together, and there’s no easy path forward on the Colorado River: When the river runs cold, the fish don’t spawn; as it warms, new enemies gain a fin-hold. “The more we learn, the more complicated we realize it is,” said Ted Melis, deputy director of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Southwest Biological Science Center. “If you’re a resource manager, you’re left scratching your head.”

Conditions in the Little Colorado, by contrast, are far friendlier. In the searing desert summer, water temperatures in the undammed tributary can exceed 75 degrees: hot enough to deter trout, and just right for humpback chub. Any comeback for the odd-looking fish, therefore, likely has to begin in the muddy depths of the Little Colorado—which is why Mike Pillow and his team were so desperate to find their fish.

* * *

After three chub-free days, Pillow’s crew changed tactics. Instead of setting nets and waiting for chub to come to them, the scientists would go to the chub. The team pulled out seine nets—mesh curtains bookended by wooden poles, like giant scrolls — and dragged them over the muddy bottom, scooping up fish as they trudged along. Shoes were sucked into the mud. Knees collided with boulders. Even the vegetation seemed determined to hinder the chub chasers: Phragmites reeds sliced skin, prickly pear jabbed feet, tamarisk branches whacked faces.

The crew, now finally catching their quarry, hardly minded the hardships. The chub army awoke to the trills of canyon wrens, ate dinner beneath swarms of pinwheeling bats, slept under a moon luminous enough to read by. “Let’s just hit that spot over there,” Pillow said, time and again, his soaked khaki shirt clinging to his skin, as he nodded toward a promising pool. “They’ve got to be holed up somewhere.”

Slowly the makeshift aquarium—a garbage can standing upright in the river, perforated with small holes to allow circulation—filled with baby chub, silvery, finger-length fry that hadn’t yet developed their trademark humps. On the fifth afternoon of hauling the seines through the river, the biologists netted their 300th captive. The team exchanged a few tired handshakes, relieved to have completed their mission.

Moments later, however, nature once again threatened to sabotage their efforts. The sliver of sky visible through the canyon’s frame darkened with rain clouds, and the crew raced for shelter in a shallow cave. No sooner had they ducked inside than the storm exploded, hurling lightning at rock ramparts overhead and flinging thousand-foot waterfalls off cliffs. Boulders rolled from their perches and detonated in the sand. The scientists squatted in their refuge, agonizing over the 300 chub sloshing in the floating tank.

The fish survived (as did the biologists), and two days later the helicopter returned to transport the chub upriver. As the chopper whumped into the canyon, crew member Jim Walters, a Fish and Wildlife Service technician, assumed his role as translocation commander-in-chief.

“Fill this bucket!”

“Tie down that rope.”

“Buckle this strap!”

Under his capable instruction, the crew transferred the chub into the 55-gallon steel drum. Soon the chopper would airlift the drum and its precious cargo above the waterfall. Though the jury-rigged setup was a far cry from the engineering feat of the Glen Canyon Dam, both served as testaments to human ingenuity—and to the contradictions inherent in our interactions with the natural world. We destroy and we preserve, often in the same watershed.

“Go, go, go!” Walters called as the helicopter wobbled nearer, flattening the mesquite with its rotor wash. He hooked the dangling tow rope to the drum and flashed the pilot a thumbs-up. The aircraft rose, several hundred pounds of steel and water and fish and hope suspended beneath its belly, and 300 humpback chub disappeared into the sun rising up the canyon, bound for their new home.

onEarth provides reporting and analysis about environmental science, policy, and culture. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of NRDC. Learn more or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

My husband and I are following tusked woolly mammoths through Wisconsin’s Kettle Moraine State Forest. White elephantine markers direct us along the Ice Age National Scenic Trail where its southeastern leg dips close to the Illinois border. As I walk by boulders and along ridges, I think about how, if I had been here 20,000 years ago, I might have come across a real mammoth.

The six-ton behemoths roamed this stretch of the Midwest when the habitat was decidedly different. This spot was once the border of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which stretched from Washington to New Jersey until the Wisconsin Glaciation ended some 20,000 to 11,000 years ago. As this massive expanse of ice advanced and retreated, it carved hills, lakes, potholes, caves, gravel ridges, and bluffs into the earth, giving the landscape north of this trail a complete makeover.  Where I stand is the southern edge of the glacier’s reach into Wisconsin.

Two lobes of the ice sheet met here. As they melted, braided streams ferried rocks and sediment farther south. When we take in the view atop Bald Bluff, we see mile after mile of flat farmland studded with barns to the west. The fields were once the bed of Lake Scuppernong, a body of water thought to be as big as two counties, now long gone.

Wisconsin is the best place in the country to get a sense of the earth-moving force of the last ice age, which also helped shape the terrain of other northern states from Montana to Pennsylvania. Some of the ice sheet’s impacts, however, have proved not so permanent. In the middle of the 20th century, as development, mining, and farming began covering up what the ice left behind, conservationists in Wisconsin began crystalizing a plan to protect the area’s unique geology along with the stories that it tells.

Kettle Moraine has had hiking trails since it became a state forest in 1937. But a mountain-climbing lawyer named Ray Zillmer, who grew up in nearby Milwaukee, thought the hiking paths could be a part of something much bigger—a linear preserve that would trace the glacier’s edge through the state. “Visionary is the only word you can use to describe him,” says Mike Wollmer, director of the Ice Age Trail Alliance, a nonprofit that helps protect and maintain the trail. In 1958 Zillmer created the Ice Age Park and Trail Foundation (now the Ice Age Trail Alliance) and penned a letter to the National Park Service. A few months later, the regional head of the NPS came out to see what Zillmer was raving about and spent several days there. In the following years, Wisconsin Representative Henry Reuss began proposing bills to designate a hiking path as a ribbon of national park.

Zillmer died of a heart attack before he could see the Park Service create nine Ice Age National Scientific Reserves in 1964. The reserves, which are scattered throughout the state, weren’t the 500-mile trek Zillmer had imagined, but it was the start of a conservation project that is still in the works more than half a century later.

Volunteers kept working to build a trail between the reserves, making agreements with private landowners when possible. In 1979, James Staudacher became the first hiker to walk the whole 1,200 miles along what had been the glacier’s terminal moraine. The next year, the federal government created the Ice Age National Scenic Trail.

Only a couple hundred miles long at the start, the trail has grown longer over the decades. While the pace of protection has been, well, glacial (only four thousand acres have been added since 1980), nearly every year the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources sets aside more land. Last February the trail grew by six miles, bringing the total to 653.

Starting in Interstate State Park to the west and ending in Potawatomi State Park to the east, the trail passes towns along the way, meandering through ice-etched wilderness and modern-day communities. A million people visit the trail every year. One minute a hiker could be pondering a lake, and the next minute staring down a racetrack.

The government and the Alliance plan to keep carving out parcels of earth, slowly and steadily, to preserve the area’s natural history. As Zillmer once said, “We spend millions to go fast. Let’s spend a little to go slow.” 

onEarth provides reporting and analysis about environmental science, policy, and culture. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of NRDC. Learn more or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

The black-tailed buck is doing what deer do, standing beside a rural road on a cool fall evening in northern California. The thrum of tires on pavement rises up in the silence and grows louder as a truck draws near. When the headlights catch the buck, he turns his head, ears twitching, and seems frozen in place by the bright beams. Moments later, a shot rings out.

The deer has nothing to fear. It’s been dead for months. The guy who illegally shot this deceased ruminant, on the other hand, is in trouble. He just took the bait—a robotic buck, made from the flesh of a real animal—in a poaching sting operation.

California Fish and Game warden A.J. Bolton takes part in a handful of these stings each year around Eureka, California. He and his colleagues set up decoys in areas where there have been reports of suspicious activity, such as shots fired in the night, or signs of trespassing. “We don’t go put them out just anywhere,” he says. Once officers have staged a lure, one hides in a nearby protected area and operates a remote control, while the others wait in vehicles parked out of sight.

The key to catching poachers, Bolton says, is a convincing decoy. “If we used a white-tailed deer, people in Eureka would say, ‘That doesn’t look right,’” he notes. The decoy is realistic partly because it is made from the skin and antlers of an animal killed on the highway. For this, Bolton and many other wildlife officers around the country have Brian Wolslegel to thank. Over the past two decades, Wolslegel, owner of Custom Robotic Wildlife, has transformed skin—and sometimes bone, as with the buck’s antlers—into lifelike lures.

“We do just about every animal you can imagine,” he says. “Every year probably about 100 deer, 20 to 30 turkeys, 15 or so elk.” There are also wolves, bears, moose, pheasants, squirrels, and more.

Wolslegel works out of a shop behind his house in Mosinee, Wisconsin. He’s a trained firefighter, but when no positions were available, he got a job in a taxidermy shop instead. Wolslegel isn’t a hunter himself, but he took to the work, and after a few years he started his own company, collaborating with an engineer to make robotic animals.

The company is a small operation, and Wolslegel’s three kids all pitch in. His 14-year-old son “loves to skin.” His 11-year-old daughter is skilled at pouring the molds that give the animals shape. His younger daughter, 8, who Wolslegel describes as “a little princess who likes dresses and pink,” prefers to “flesh.” “She’ll put on an apron and remove meat and fat,” says her father proudly.

Many of the deer Wolslegel works with come from local hunters (he estimates that he’s got about 300 hides in a 12-by-12-foot freezer). If he doesn’t have what officers are looking for, they’ll send the raw materials to him, as Bolton did with his roadkill. A grant paid for the transformation of Bolton’s black-tailed buck, but not all officers are able to drum up the $2,000 or so a robotic deer costs.

Luckily, there are programs that help fill that gap. The Humane Society Wildlife Land Trust, for instance, has facilitated the donation of 30 decoys to federal and state agencies since 2004. The faux wildlife include black bears, grizzlies, white-tailed deer, antelope, and coyotes, says Jim Reed, who heads the nonprofit’s decoy program. While the group has worked with several taxidermists, Reed says that whenever a new project surfaces, “Brian’s name normally pops up. He does a great job.”

Not all of Wolslegel’s creations end up in sting operations. He once did an African lion for the lobby of a real estate development company, adding motion sensors along the base so its head would follow visitors as they walked to the reception desk (an interesting business strategy, to say the least). And last month a woman requested a red fox—the favorite animal of her son, who has autism—with a moving head and tail. “They both loved it,” says Wolslegel. “It was really something special.”

One of Wolslegel’s current projects is a white-tailed deer, with a twist. For a long time he’s been making ersatz animals that, via remote control, twitch their ears, turn their head, lift a leg, or switch their tail. But an officer from the National Park Service has requested that her deer do something more: poop.

So Wolslegel and the engineer he works with figured out how to make the robot drop a load with a lift of its tail. After some trial and error, he hit on brown M&Ms as the best stand-in for feces. “My kids are having a blast eating all the other colors,” he says.

And the pooping ruminant might be more than a one-off. Wolslegel and the engineer are considering starting a side company that makes unique candy dispensers. He envisions selling only the back half of a whitetail: Pull the tail, get a treat. Gimmicks aside, the real treat is how these robots can help protect their still-kicking kin.

onEarth provides reporting and analysis about environmental science, policy, and culture. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of NRDC. Learn more or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

The Tennessee Valley Authority held a nice little ceremony late last year to celebrate its shiny-new, fueled-up-and-almost-ready-to-go nuclear reactor near Spring City, Tennessee. Touted as the first new reactor of the 21st century, Watts Bar Unit 2 had finally received its operating license. The ribbon-cutting was supposed to suggest a rebirth of the American nuclear industry. The truth is far less rosy.

If the industry were a patient, doctors would privately refer to what’s happening to it as “circling the drain.” People don’t typically descend from perfect health to death in a smooth glide path. They rally, then they crater, then the cycle repeats. The good days become less frequent and less encouraging as days pass. If you’ve watched a hospital patient die, the pattern is unmistakable.

The U.S. nuclear industry is circling the drain. It’s suffering from a large number of problems—public disenchantment, risk of meltdown, fuel disposal issues—but its primary illness is simple economics. Nuclear cannot compete financially with other forms of electricity production. It hasn’t been able to do so for four decades, and there’s no reason to believe it ever will. That the obtainment of an operating license for a long-delayed and over-budget reactor qualifies as a good day is an indication that the end is near.

The Glory Days

Nuclear’s heyday came in the 1970s. Utilities broke ground on dozens of reactors around the country, including two units at Tennessee’s Watts Bar facility in 1973. During this time of rude health, though, problems were already developing. By the time President Richard Nixon called for a thousand reactors by the end of the century, the seemingly flourishing industry was riddled with economic challenges.

Start with a seemingly simple question: How much does it cost to build a nuclear reactor? Your guess is about as good as any expert’s. The constantly changing construction cost has made accurate budgeting for a reactor impossible. In the early 1970s, a utility could build a reactor for only $170 million. Cheap. Too cheap, in fact. The industry cut corners on safety back then to keep prices low.

“People were in such a hurry to get going that the engineering design was only 10 percent complete when construction was started,” says Victor Gilinsky, who sat on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission between 1975 and 1984. “Design and construction were running a three-legged race.”

Gilinsky rattles off a disturbing list of inadequacies at the dozens of nuclear reactors in operation or under construction in the late 1970s. The electrical cables that ran the main system and the “fail-safe” sat next to each other, so a single fire could knock them both out. The emergency equipment wasn’t rated to withstand the high temperatures associated with a nuclear accident. Obvious mistakes in the seismic calculations at some sites rendered plants vulnerable to earthquakes and other natural disasters.

Since each plant was individually designed, the NRC had to fix the nation’s nuclear reactors one at a time. The commission’s initial prescription was concrete—lots and lots of concrete. The NRC tightened safety regulations, and the amount of concrete, steel, and piping required for new reactors increased substantially. The NRC also introduced stricter emergency preparedness requirements, which forced redesigns of many plants already in the pipeline.

Spikes in the cost of materials, labor, and borrowing laid the industry low. By the early 1980s, the average price for building a reactor had risen to $1.7 billion—a tenfold increase in a decade. Reactors coming on line in the late 1980s carried $5 billion price tags, 30 times the prevailing 1970s rate.The industry’s failing health burst into the public conscience on March 28, 1979. Although the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island wasn’t strictly an economic issue, the accident convinced an already suspicious public that the reactors couldn’t be controlled at any cost. Support for nuclear power fell precipitously.

More explicit financial catastrophe followed. In 1982, after issuing more than $2.25 billion in municipal bonds to build two new reactors, the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS) canceled both projects. Investors lost billions in what remains, to this day, one of the largest municipal bond defaults in history. The incident was dubbed “Whoops,” a clever play on the initials of the reactor builder.

Utilities suddenly faced an awkward problem: What do you do with an unfinished reactor that will never cover its costs? Imagine pouring the basement, building the frame, and putting a roof on your dream home—then abandoning it. It’s what happened at nuclear plant sites around the country as projects were axed or suspended, including the Unit 2 reactor under construction at TVA’s Watts Bar.

Energy analyst Irvin C. Bupp told The New York Times in 1985, “Any plant which is less than 50 percent complete today should definitely be canceled. Plants in the 50 to 80 percent range probably should be canceled.” As for plants more than 80 percent complete, Bupp said, “Some kind of case can probably be made to finish them, but my personal opinion is that none of those cases are very good.''

New reactor construction stalled. None of the reactors still in operation in the United States today had a groundbreaking after the 1979 Three Mile Island meltdown. Construction companies stopped training their employees in nuclear-grade fabrication. Students stopped pursuing nuclear engineering, and academic programs shrank. The contraction became a self-feeding cycle. Still, nuclear supporters weren’t ready to call hospice quite yet.

A False Recovery

The nuclear industry showed some green shoots of recovery during its vegetative state, as drain-circling patients typically do. Between the 1980s and 2000s, reactor efficiency increased by nearly 50 percent. In addition, growing concerns about climate change began beckoning a few wary environmentalists into the carbon-free nuclear camp, with such notables as Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand and renowned climatologist James Hansen endorsing a nuclear expansion. In 1999, Mark Yost of the Wall Street Journal predicted a “nuclear renaissance.”

Politics gave the industry its biggest booster shot, though. The lobbying staff of the Nuclear Energy Institute, which represents the industry, included (and still includes) former members of Congress and congressional staff. The group gave nearly $5 million in campaign contributions between 1989 and 2010. Utilities that operate nuclear plants, including Southern Company and Exelon, tossed in millions more.

They found a friendly ear on Pennsylvania Avenue. In 2005, George W. Bush became the first sitting president since Jimmy Carter to visit a nuclear plant. A year later, Bush was described as the industry’s best friend in the White House since Dwight Eisenhower.

Washington did everything in its power to incentivize reactor construction. The 2005 Energy Policy Act offered billions of dollars in nuclear research subsidies, construction funds, and energy production credits. Congress granted the U.S. Department of Energy broad authority to guarantee the necessary loans. The NRC streamlined the licensing process, speeding approval procedures for design, siting, and operation.

Their eyes alight with dollar signs, utilities applied to build dozens of reactors. Among those applications were TVA’s proposals to restart the long-suspended construction of Watts Bar Unit 2, which would become one of the beneficiaries of federal largesse.

Like a ward full of amnesiacs, our political leaders seem to have forgotten entirely what halted reactor construction in the 1980s: cost. Astonishingly few legislators bothered to ask whether the nuclear industry had ever solved its construction challenges.

Fortunately, financial analysts did ask. They recognized that the industry could be viable only if (1) the country instituted a carbon tax to increase the cost of fossil fuels, and (2) prices for coal and natural gas stayed high. Neither condition panned out. After climbing steadily for years, natural gas prices dropped almost 80 percent between 2008 and 2012. The push for a cap-and-trade system faltered in 2010, and utilities that owned nuclear plants were partially responsible.

“The nuclear industry’s talking points lead with climate change today, but their support for a price on carbon has historically been weak,” says Matthew McKinzie, director of NRDC’s nuclear program (disclosure). “Many of these companies also own electricity plants powered by fossil fuels.”

By the time President Obama called for an “all of the above” energy strategy in his 2012 State of the Union address, the nuclear renaissance was already beginning to look like a hallucination brought on by an unreasonably enthusiastic Congress.

As cost estimates went up, all but five of the dozens of reactors proposed during the Bush administration were abandoned. In addition to TVA’s restarting of construction at Watts Bar, Southern Company went ahead with plans to add two new reactors to the Vogtle plant in Georgia, and SCANA Corporation broke ground on two reactors at the Summer plant in South Carolina. The latter two companies chose the new Westinghouse AP1000 reactor.

The AP1000 was supposed to be the industry’s savior by reforming reactor construction, which historically involved massive crews of expert engineers fabricating reactors on-site. The new model required less cable, piping, and concrete and contained fewer pumps, valves, and other parts. Westinghouse’s marketing materials boasted of “modular construction” that would allow for a “reduced construction schedule.” Former Southern Company CEO David Ratcliffe said the system would ensure that “critical components are available for multiple projects.” He spoke of developing a “supply chain” for making new reactors.

The economics of modular construction, though, were also controversial from the start.

“The concept is like an iPhone—you can churn them out in factories and make lots of them,” says Greg Jaczko, the NRC’s chairman from 2009 to 2012. “But at best you’re making hundreds, not thousands with a massive economy of scale. There’s never going to be a factory-built reactor.”

Jaczko’s view has been vindicated. The AP1000 quickly ran into problems similar to those of its predecessors. The Georgia site received the first parts of the new reactors in 2010. By May 2011, the project was two months behind schedule. By the end of 2011, it was five months behind schedule. In 2013 the projected opening date was pushed back from 2016 to 2017. The opening has since been delayed again, to 2019.

Cost overruns accompanied the delays. In 2015 the company said the overruns had crossed the $1 billion mark, and it had to seek approval to pass costs on to consumers. Southern’s president of nuclear development sheepishly argued that the original projection of $14 billion “was never a budget—it was a forecast.” It’s hard to imagine, though, a major corporation asking a government agency to approve a multibillion-dollar project without a budget. Moreover, since the reactors are still far from complete, there could be yet more delays and expenses. The reactors in South Carolina are likewise running behind schedule and over budget.

The construction challenges also reinforced public concerns about safety; the issues can’t really be separated. The situation is startlingly similar to the one the NRC faced in the 1970s, when safety and cost effectiveness first became incompatible.

“The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it didn’t matter that the AP1000 shielding was weak in places, because in those spots it didn’t have to be strong,” says Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “But that was assuming nuclear-grade welding. The quality problems they’re facing during construction raise questions about the safety of the entire concept.”

Over in Tennessee, the Watts Bar project hit its own speed bumps. Initially slated to open in 2014, the project is now two years behind schedule. TVA has also admitted the project would cost at least $1.5 billion more than anticipated—a 60 percent overrun on its $2.5 billion budget. And that doesn’t include the $1.7 billion the company spent in the 1970s and ’80s.

Watts Bar Unit 2 has one thing going for it: It’s almost certain to open. You can’t say that about the AP1000s in Georgia and South Carolina, which are still years from their updated completion dates. It’s possible that Watts Bar Unit 2 will be not only “the first new U.S. nuclear reactor of the 21st century,” but also the last.

Conducting an Autopsy

As the finishing touches were being put on the new Watts Bar reactor in January 2015, an energy analyst asked an Associated Press reporter, “Who in their right mind would want to build a nuclear plant?” To think, only six years earlier, U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander proposed building a hundred of them.

The U.S. nuclear industry isn’t dead yet. Many existing reactors have had their original 40-year licenses extended within the past decade, and many of them will continue to operate. But, if they do survive, they will be monuments to financial foolishness.

The problem is, and always has been, the economics. The 30-year hiatus is partly to blame. “Whatever the industry learned about construction and large-project planning in the 1970s and 1980s has disappeared,” says Paul Joskow, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and author of numerous analyses of the nuclear industry. “The people involved in those projects have gone on to other things.”

Construction capacity is also an issue. Since we didn’t build nuclear reactors for decades, contractors had no reason to keep up their training and certification in nuclear-grade fabrication. They had to get up to speed before they could build new reactors.

Those are only partial excuses, though. “Everyone knew that finding qualified contractors would be a problem,” says Lyman. Westinghouse and the utilities “didn’t say anything about these delays at the beginning. It’s only an excuse after the fact.”

Former NRC head Jaczko offers a one-word diagnosis. “A billion-dollar cost overrun isn’t a growing pain. It’s incompetence,” he insists. “The majority of the work is concrete and steel construction. We know how to do that. For whatever reason, the industry has a terrible record. There’s no excuse.”

He has a point, but there must be more to this than simple incompetence. What about the reactor delays and cost overruns in the 1970s and 1980s? Were those engineers and construction workers also incompetent? And what about the people working on reactors around the world? Those projects are also mired in delays and cost overruns. China’s AP1000 reactors have been delayed twice. France’s new reactor in Flamanville was originally scheduled to produce its first kilowatts in 2012. The date of completion is now set for 2017, and its budget has more than doubled to more than $11 billion. The start date for Finland’s largest nuclear reactor has been pushed back more than a decade, to 2018, and its costs will also likely double. These global failures suggest the problems run deeper than a few incompetents in the U.S. nuclear industry.

“Building nuclear plants is hard. If you do it right, you can’t get cost savings,” says Lyman. “There’s too much self-delusion in the nuclear industry.” Human ingenuity has so far proved insufficient at managing the fine margins of safety and profitability when building a nuclear reactor.

Yes, nuclear reactors are steel and concrete, but few steel-and-concrete projects cause so much trouble when they go wrong. The accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima fueled opposition to the industry. The lack of a credible, long-term storage facility for radioactive waste is a major worry. The specter of nuclear war will always hang over nuclear power as well. But opposing nuclear power for safety reasons invites a complicated and needless argument about probabilities. Money has already delivered the fatal blow. Nuclear was never competitive with fossil fuels, and it has no hope in an era of ever cheaper renewable energy.

“Energy efficiency gains, wind, and solar are now proven to be smarter, cheaper, faster ways to address climate change without the burdens of nuclear waste, the risk of severe nuclear accidents, or the nuclear weapons proliferation problem,” notes McKinzie.

At Watts Bar, TVA has just unveiled a shiny new mausoleum to this very fact. Its Unit 2 was born during a period of irrational nuclear exuberance, and then mothballed when reality struck. There was never a good reason to complete it, as demonstrated by a cost overrun of more than $1 billion.

The drain beckons, nuclear industry. Please go quietly.

onEarth provides reporting and analysis about environmental science, policy, and culture. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of NRDC. Learn more or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Scott Bauer is way into weed—professionally, that is. An environmental scientist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, he got into the stuff around 2009, when he and other wildlife officials began stumbling upon large marijuana farms destroying natural habitat in northern California. The more they looked, the more destruction they found.

“Trespass grows” on public land or private timberland are especially “horrible,” Bauer says. The worst guerilla growers bulldoze redwoods to clear space for illegal crops, carve out poorly constructed roads that shed sediment into waterways, and siphon enormous quantities of water from streams to feed hundreds or thousands of thirsty pot plants. The forest, he says, is often eerily silent—the wildlife wiped out by poaching and excessive rodenticide that kills vermin that might snack on the valuable plants, along with those animals that might snack on the rodents.

“We hadn’t seen this kind of damage since the old logging era,” says Bauer. “It seemed like it was getting out of hand.”

The scientist found himself doing something he never expected to do: going along on police raids of illicit grows. Bauer has now taken part in “dozens and dozens” of searches, which always follow the same protocol. First, local enforcement officers go in and secure the site. “People run, people get caught. It’s not uncommon to find weapons,” he says. Once the area is clear, it’s time for Bauer to document the violations, from diesel spills to dead animals to water diversions.

California legalized marijuana for medical use in 1996, and cannabis cultivation is allowed in the state, though subject to myriad restrictions. Since then, weed has become a multibillion-dollar industry in the Golden State, which has an estimated 50,000 pot farms. Californians may have the option of voting to legalize recreational use come November, as Alaska, Colorado, Washington, and Oregon have all already done.

Over the years, as Bauer and colleagues investigated more and more grows, they found that nearly all of them—from small medicinal plots of two dozen plants on private land to illegal operations growing thousands of plants for recreational use—diverted water without obtaining the appropriate state permit. By some estimates, a single marijuana plant grown outdoors requires six gallons of water per day.

“It’s all flavors,” says Bauer, referring to the types of diversion. People dig ponds where there’s a natural spring, or they tap streams, running pipes downhill for hundreds or even thousands of feet. And in 2015, after several years of drought, some growers were found to be trucking in water that was likely stolen from fire hydrants or other off-limits sources.

Diverting surface water could prove deadly for aquatic species. In a study published in PLOS One last year, Bauer and colleagues demonstrated that under drought conditions, water demand for marijuana cultivation in three of the four northern California watersheds they examined could reduce flow so much that it would likely kill federally protected salmon and steelhead trout. “You get three years of a stream going dry, you’ve lost coho salmon,” says Bauer. Sensitive amphibians, such as the coastal tailed frog and torrent salamander, would also probably suffer.

To stem such destruction, last year the state created a new joint task force between the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the State Water Resources Control Board. The CDFW’s watershed enforcement team (it’s acronym is, fittingly, WET), which Bauer is a part of, now has the authority to directly issue citations to growers and fine them up to $8,000 per day for violating water quality regulations. Previously, charges had to be brought by district attorneys.

But Bauer’s group does more than hand out fines. It’s also working to help growers obtain the permits they need to operate legally. This involves ensuring they capture enough water in storage tanks during the rainy season to sustain crops throughout the summer, and that they repair degraded riparian habitat through tree planting or other measures.

Some farms already have such practices in place, but even then it’s unlikely that they’re operating legally. Bauer estimates that only 1 percent of the roughly 5,000 growers in Humboldt County alone have permits. But more and more pot farmers are starting the application process. “Oh, yeah, we have been incredibly busy,” he says. So busy, in fact, that several more staff are being added to WET.

“The increase in the number of water tanks stored up here in just the past year is astronomical,” he says, noting one sign of possible progress. Whether people will actually use them, especially in a year that has swollen streams to more than 100 percent of their usual flow, is yet to be seen.

The legal pot industry is relatively young in California, and regulation is still in its infancy, but Bauer is hopeful that growers will, if not necessarily embrace, at least abide by practices that protect watersheds and the wildlife that inhabit them.

And those who don’t? “They’ll be dealt with,” he says.

onEarth provides reporting and analysis about environmental science, policy, and culture. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of NRDC. Learn more or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

After yet another huge winter storm blew through northern California in March, Rafael Rodriguez headed out to Steelhead Creek, just outside Sacramento, to measure its flow. An environmental consultant for the regional flood control agency, he wasn’t surprised to find the muddy torrent two feet higher than normal. Strong El Niño storms have drenched the drought-plagued state, particularly in the north. But as Rodriguez hiked out, something strange caught his eye: a red and gold snake, five feet long, suspended in branches overhanging the creek.

“It was the first time I’d ever seen a snake in that channel,” he says. “I didn’t recognize it.”

Rodriguez snapped a photo, which quickly made its way to the Invasive Species Program of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, where it caused quite a stir. “There’s been a flurry of e-mails,” says Martha Volkoff, a member of the program. That’s because the serpent is a northern water snake, Nerodia sipedon, an invasive species never before seen in the area. The reptile was more than 12 miles from the only known location of the slitherers in the state.

First documented in California in 2007, Nerodia are native to the eastern United States. They may make for intriguing pets, but when threatened the snakes strike repeatedly and release a nasty-smelling musk mixed with poop. Wonderful traits like those, officials assume, may have led to their abandonment in the wild, where they prey on native amphibians and fish, including juvenile salmon, and compete with the giant garter snake, a threatened species. California’s five-year drought was actually helping the state’s efforts to eradicate the snakes, which began last year. “It shrank their habitat, which increased our chances of getting them all,” Volkoff says. “Now it looks like they haven’t been contained to that area. We don’t know whether the snake traveled on the high flows, but the timing was spot-on.”

Despite the increased precipitation, there is no end in sight for the drought. The statewide snowpack average is currently at 87 percent of normal—a significant improvement from last year’s scary-low 5 percent, but nowhere near the 150 percent level that water officials say would be needed by tomorrow to declare the drought over.

Nerodia snakes are just one invasive species that might be getting a boost from El Niño, even as the system fades. “It is likely a lot of weeds that are in the deserts and foothills will have an explosive spring as the water activates the large seed banks,” says entomologist Mark Hoddle, head of the Center for Invasive Species Research at the University of California, Riverside. He expects to see the effects of the rains extend through the spring and beyond. One species of particular concern is Sahara mustard, a rapid-growing invader that can choke out native plants.

Exotic plants might also gain footholds in mudslide scars, given their ability to recolonize more quickly than natives. Yellow starthistle, for instance, moves in, creates dense formations, and sucks up soil moisture, making it difficult, if not impossible, for native plants to take root. The weed, introduced to the state in 1850, now covers an estimated 10 to 15 million acres.

And then there are the skeeters. Pools of standing water from rains and snowmelt make ideal breeding grounds for mosquitoes—both non-native Aedes, which can transmit Zika, dengue, and other exotic diseases, and native Culex mosquitoes, which carry the invasive West Nile Virus.

Wildlife officials are tracking the invaders’ spread, but CDFW’s Volkoff says the public can do several things to help, including not planting pests and reporting any invasives they see. And for those boaters out there looking forward to enjoying full lakes and rushing rivers this year, make sure no quagga or zebra mussels have hitched a ride on your craft. We westerners welcome the water but need to be careful about what it washes in. 

onEarth provides reporting and analysis about environmental science, policy, and culture. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of NRDC. Learn more or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.