With your help, I can present a view inside the history and the wreckage of America's never-finished nuclear power stations.

In the years following the 1979 reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, more than 50 reactor projects were cancelled across the United States. While many of these reactors had yet to move beyond the planning stages, a number of units that were well into construction were cancelled and abandoned. Closer regulatory scrutiny after the accident combined with a difficult economy to make a host of half-completed projects unviable, and left their wreckage strewn across remote farmland and fog-choked coniferous forests from Tennessee to Washington state.

Top: The steam generation building at Marble Hill, Indiana, being stripped and readied for final demolition in 2010 ["Marble Hill #1"].

Above: The "A" reactor complex at Hartsville, Tennessee in 2011 ["Hartsville #1"].

We have recently seen the usual anonymity of nuclear power shattered again with the events at the Fukushima Daiichi facility in Japan. Few among us ever have the chance to see inside the generating stations that power our lives, and the distant, antiseptic view presented in utility-supplied photographs is as off-putting as the perimeter fencing and guardhouses that surround the active generating stations.

Cancelled projects, like the sites I am visiting, offer one of our best chances to gain a true sense of the scale, materials and feeling of nuclear power infrastructure. They also tell a powerful story about the failure of a technocratic engineering and planning culture---the cancellation of these projects didn't just result in tens of billions of dollars in write-offs, but also in the bankruptcy or near-bankruptcy of several of the utility companies that were building them.

My project presents an opportunity to improve the depth of our familiarity with the physical presence of nuclear power in our lives and landscapes, and with the frailty of the endeavour.

Above: The view from beneath the completed cooling tower at Hartsville, Tennessee. ["Hartsville #5"]

Below: Core structural components of the turbine building at Marble Hill ["Marble Hill #2"]

Marble Hill no. 2

Carcasses nucléaires

Carcasses nucléaires