Marble Hill Nuclear Power Plant is unfinished nuclear power plant in Marble Hill, Indiana. In 1973, Public Service Indiana (PSI), now owned by Cinergy, proposed a nuclear power generating plant at Marble Hill. In 1978, construction was underway after plans were announced for a nuclear power plant near Madison, Indiana three years earlier.
The suggested plant was to be designed to house two Westinghouse 1,130 megawatt light-water reactors, each capable of generating 3,425 thermal megawatts. The steam turbines could convert the reactors’ heat into 2,360 megawatts of generated power.
The project in Marble Hill quickly drew pushback with local anti-nuclear groups staging demonstrations near the site. Costs multiplied then skyrocketed from $700 million to $2.8 billion in 1984, when Governor Robert Orr recommended the plant’s construction be cancelled. A further $4 billion was needed to finish the plant’s construction, an amount the plant’s owners could not pay and Indiana would not subsidize.
By 1984 the project was abandoned after $2.5 billion dollars was spent on the project. This was the most expensive nuclear construction project ever abandoned. In 1987, the hollowed Marble Hill plant supported only 50 workers, hired to keep the plant safe from trespassers. Since then, the Marble Hill Power Plant has been sold and sold again, with most of the structures torn down, leaving holes where buildings were uprooted like rotted teeth. To this day, the thousand acres along the Ohio River that once promised to power Indiana homes is now an abandoned scrub plain of sand and concrete dust.
