The Verge: It’s kind of impossible to grasp the enormity of a cooling tower until it’s suddenly right next to you. Never used for their intended purpose, the cooling towers of Washington Nuclear Projects 3 and 5 (WNP-3 and WNP-5) loom over treetops as I drive up to Satsop Business Park, about an hour and a half outside of Seattle. This abandoned nuclear power plant — a strange mix of massive concrete structures in various states of completion — has been repurposed as an advanced acoustics testing facility.
3 comments:
So much information in this article. Power plants are huge. This is a crazy thing that they’ve created, especially in an unused reactor. Reading about the science behind how this works was so incredibly interesting, especially how breathing raises the sound by 1000 times and especially how they test machines that we use everyday to test how much sound they create. Before this article, I didn’t know that that’s something that needs to be labeled for consumers. It’s cool that there are people that do this work, it’s a very niche thing. And it’s really cool that they’ve taken something that was built to not be broken down for quite a while and are putting it to use. The analogy to a mountain that was referenced multiple times in this article is really inspiring. The idea that you have to work around what’s been given is really interesting, especially for something that has to be so precise.
I found this article incredibly interesting in several ways - from the reutilization of a nuclear facility that was never used or truly completed, the highly advanced sound testing facility inside and the technical specifications mentioned in the article, to also learning about how a facility like this is being used to help companies determine how much noise their product makes (or how much noise their product prevents someone from hearing) that then have to fall into a particular set of standards in order to be acceptable by ANSI standards for example. Additionally, while reading the article I also realized that the Verge made a tiktok about this facility in addition to writing this article. While I knew that companies have been expanding their reach into social media platforms for years, seeing it at this level for an article that isn’t highly topical was interesting and unexpected.
I absolutely love when old buildings get renovated and changed to have a new function, and this is a great example of that. It's a fantastic use of the resources that were already used and spent on the creation of the build itself, and it's helping all that time, money, and materials not rot away until the building collapses. It really does make sense though, because it's a nuclear power plant that was obviously built to be extremely strong and secure in the event of a reactor meltdown. At the same time, the thickness of the walls helps make the location more soundproof. The location is even better because of how remote it is. Nuclear power plants typically aren’t built right next to major cities or towns, so the level of noise that would be caused by cars or just people living their lives is much more limited as well.
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