Where North Fork Nuclear Almost Was

Nuclear energy was one of many development prospects on the East End of Long Island 50 years ago that are little remembered there today because they didn’t happen.  This month’s print edition of the East End Beacon, a news site concentrating on environmental and land-use issues with particular interest in the island’s North Fork, features an article that should jog memories. It’s about “Hallockville” and the water reactors that could have come to that historic farming ground at the east end of Riverhead town. They were discussed at the time as the Jamesport plants, though they actually were to be located not in that hamlet but in the one just above, Northville, on Long Island Sound. These were to be among a potential 11 atomic generating sites in Suffolk County to be built by what was then the Long Island Lighting Co—LILCO.  The idea, growing out of an early 1960s conception of nuclear energy as clean and “too cheap to meter,” was to supply low-cost power for the surrounding region.  That dream ultimately came fully crashing down in the last and most famous instance, at Shoreham in mid-Suffolk, where a plant was finished by the time sustained protests led Gov. Mario Cuomo to kill it in the late 1980s. Objections there from citizen-advocates were similar to those at Northville: inadequate safety, especially given narrow evacuation routes. That cause swept the day against nuclear power on Long Island. But beneath it lay a foundational objection, much as there had been at Hallockville in 1963 to earlier plans for an industrial harbor: Communities didn’t want economic growth if it meant (as it usually does) disturbing the character of their place. Yet even if tradeoffs are made—Long Island pays high utility rates for its stretched power generation—the bargain is not fully kept:  The North Fork today fights off development pressures on its remaining (strong) agricultural base.  Just as on the South Fork, however, the desirability of residential property has attracted the rich and made limited housing scarce for everyone else, so keeping things “as they are” is never quite possible. But in the place of growth we get preservation zones, such as at Hallock State Park where the nukes were to be situated.  Occasionally a contemporary visitor will find a marker telling him what he missed.  –June 5, 2024

Hallockville at Fifty