It’s just a massive concrete hole in the ground now. If you wander through the pine barrens of Ocean County, New Jersey, specifically near the site of the famous Oyster Creek station, you might stumble across the ghost of a giant. People talk about the Forked River nuclear power plant like it’s a functional piece of the grid, or maybe they confuse it with its neighbor. But honestly? It’s a multi-million dollar "oops" that serves as a tombstone for an era of unbridled nuclear optimism.
Jersey City Power & Light (JCP&L) had big dreams in the late 1960s. They wanted a behemoth.
While Oyster Creek was already humming along nearby—becoming the first "economically attractive" nuclear plant in the country—the Forked River nuclear power plant was supposed to be the sophisticated younger brother. It was designed to be a 1,070-megawatt pressurized water reactor. For context, that’s enough juice to power hundreds of thousands of homes without breaking a sweat. Construction actually started in the early 70s. Workers cleared the land. They poured massive amounts of concrete for the foundations. They were committed.
👉 See also: Installing a Kill Switch: Why Your High-Tech Car Needs a Low-Tech Secret
Then the world changed.
The $400 million hole in the dirt
You can’t talk about the failure of this project without talking about the 1970s economy. It was a mess. Inflation was skyrocketing, and the cost of borrowing money to build a massive nuclear island became eye-watering. JCP&L was staring at a price tag that kept ballooning every single time a contractor sneezed. By the time 1980 rolled around, the utility realized they were digging a financial grave.
They pulled the plug. Just like that.
But here’s the kicker: they had already spent roughly $400 million. In 1980 dollars, that is a staggering amount of wasted capital. Imagine spending nearly half a billion dollars and ending up with nothing but a circular concrete structure and a lot of disturbed sand. Because the Forked River nuclear power plant was never finished, it became one of the most expensive "never-weres" in American infrastructure history. It wasn't just a local failure; it was a symptom of a national cooling toward nuclear energy that was accelerated by the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. Even though Forked River was a different design, the regulatory environment became a suffocating blanket of new requirements that the project simply couldn't survive.
Why the site still looks like a sci-fi movie set
If you look at satellite imagery of the area today, you can see the footprint. It’s eerie. The circular foundation for the reactor building is still there, tucked away on the western portion of the Oyster Creek site. Nature is trying its best to reclaim it, but concrete that thick doesn't just go away.
It’s weirdly quiet back there.
There were some wild rumors over the years about what to do with the abandoned structures. Some folks suggested using the site for gas-fired generation. Others thought about solar. Eventually, the site did find a second life, but not as a nuclear powerhouse. Today, parts of that land house a massive 455-megawatt natural gas peaking plant. It’s a bit of a letdown if you’re a fan of atomic energy, but from a business perspective, it made sense. They used the existing transmission lines—which were already built out for the nuclear project—and plugged in a simpler, cheaper technology.
Basically, the "Forked River" name survived, but the nuclear heart was ripped out before it ever got to beat.
The regulatory ghost that haunts Ocean County
One thing people often get wrong is thinking the Forked River nuclear power plant was shut down because it was "dangerous." It wasn't. It never even had fuel on site. The death of the project was purely a collision of bad timing, high interest rates, and a massive shift in how the public viewed nuclear safety after 1979.
The NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) records for Forked River Unit 1 are essentially a giant stack of "what ifs." You can find the old dockets where engineers argued over cooling water intake structures and the impact on the local Barnegat Bay ecosystem. These debates were intense. Environmentalists were already worried about the "thermal pollution" from Oyster Creek—basically, the plant spitting out warm water that messed with the local fish and sea nettles. Adding a second, even larger plant right next door was a hard sell for the local community.
The fish might have actually won that round.
What we can learn from the Forked River failure
Today, as we talk about a "nuclear renaissance" and Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), the Forked River nuclear power plant serves as a cautionary tale. It teaches us that technical feasibility doesn't mean a thing if the macroeconomics don't align. You can have the best engineers in the world, but if the cost of capital doubles mid-construction, your project is a paperweight.
🔗 Read more: Who invented the led light bulb and why the answer isn't simple
It’s also a reminder of the "sunk cost fallacy." JCP&L was brave enough to walk away from $400 million rather than throwing another billion into a project that might never have been profitable. That’s a brutal business decision.
What you should do next if you're interested in this history:
- Check the archives: Visit the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) public electronic reading room. Search for Docket No. 50-363. That’s the official history of the Forked River project. It’s dry, but the technical drawings are fascinating.
- Explore the geography: Use Google Earth to find the coordinates (roughly 39.814°N, 74.214°W). You can clearly see the circular "ring" of the unfinished reactor foundation located just west of the main Oyster Creek buildings.
- Compare with Oyster Creek: Look into the decommissioning of Oyster Creek, which finally shut down for good in 2018. It puts the "abandonment" of Forked River into a new perspective—now the whole site is effectively a museum of 20th-century energy ambitions.
- Study the "Peaker" plant: If you live in the area, know that the current Forked River Power Station is a combustion turbine plant. It only runs when the grid is under extreme stress (like those 100-degree August days). It's the ghost of the nuclear plant doing its best to keep your AC on.
The Forked River nuclear power plant didn't fail because the technology was broken. It failed because the world moved faster than the concrete could dry. It remains a stark, gray reminder that in the world of energy, the biggest risks aren't always inside the reactor core—sometimes, they're on the balance sheet.