Beside Lake Erie, one 516 foot concrete tower at the Perry nuclear plant has never cooled a single watt of power, and its idle twin still stands finished
Drive along the Lake Erie shoreline in North Perry, Ohio, and two concrete towers rise together over the trees, identical down to the rivet lines.
One breathes.
A thick white plume rolls off its lip all day, every day, rain or shine.
A cooling tower carries no fuel, no radioactive water and no safety function of its own, so an idle one is essentially an enormous, inert concrete chimney.
The other has never done that, not once, not for a single shift, in nearly forty years of standing there.
It was finished, and then it was simply never turned on.
So how does a plant end up with a spare tower it never needs?
How does a nuclear plant end up with a spare tower it never needs?
The answer sits in the economics of the 1970s, when utilities routinely built two reactors on one site because the second one was supposed to be cheaper, sharing roads, control staff and a switchyard with the first. A regional utility and a group of partner companies ordered Perry as exactly that kind of record setting twin plant, with a large boiling water reactor and a matching 516 foot cooling tower assigned to each unit.
Both units rose together for years, concrete and steel going up side by side on the same construction schedule. Then the demand forecasts that justified a second reactor simply stopped holding up.
Work on the second unit stalled, and construction crews eventually walked off a job that was already most of the way to a working reactor. The cancelled second unit left behind a structure with no purpose attached to it.
What does a tower like that actually do, and why does the second one sit empty?
A cooling tower has one job: it takes the leftover heat a reactor cannot turn into electricity and dumps it into the sky instead of the lake. Warm water from the turbine condenser falls through the base of the shell, rising air strips the heat away as vapor, and the cooled water heads back inside for another lap through the system.
Perry’s working tower does that for a reactor pushing out serious numbers. The reactor it serves produces 1,268 megawatts at full power, making it among the largest boiling water reactors in the country, following a power bump regulators approved years after startup.
Its twin was built to do the identical job for a second reactor that was supposed to stand right next to it. But that reactor never got fuel, never got a turbine spun up, never produced a kilowatt hour.
At the time construction was halted, all of the major buildings and structures for the second unit were completed, including the 500 foot tall tower. The shell simply never had any heat to carry away.
How was that gap between a finished shell and a cancelled reactor confirmed?
Utility filings and licensing records from the plant’s construction years lay out the timeline plainly. Ground broke in 1974, and work on Unit 2 stalled in the mid 1980s before the project was formally cancelled, with the second unit sitting roughly 45 percent complete overall even as its tower stood fully finished.
The numbers behind that decision are stark. When the twin reactor plant was announced, it carried a projected cost far below what the finished single unit eventually required, and the final bill ran into the billions once inflation, delays and redesigns were added in.
Against that kind of overrun, a finished but idle concrete shell was the least of anyone’s financial problems. Tearing it down would have cost real money for no operational benefit, so the crews simply moved on.
How unusual is a finished nuclear structure that just never gets used?
Cancelled reactors are not rare in American nuclear history, but a fully finished tower with no job attached to it is a different animal. Most cancelled units stopped as a hole in the ground or a half built containment dome, the kind of site that gets demolished because the structure was never going to serve any purpose.
Perry’s case went the other way. The second tower was close enough to done, and cheap enough to simply leave standing, that nobody ever drew up a serious demolition plan. There is no safety reason it cannot stand indefinitely, either.
A cooling tower carries no fuel, no radioactive water and no safety function of its own, so an idle one is essentially an enormous, inert concrete chimney. That is also why nobody at the site treats it as urgent, since it simply occupies part of a lakefront site the working reactor shares with marsh and certified wildlife habitat.
As one longtime plant employee once put it to local reporters, the tower is just “part of the skyline now.”
What does the second tower mean for the plant’s future?
Perry’s single working reactor is now approved to run at higher output than its original design, and operators elsewhere are chasing the same math, squeezing more megawatts out of existing steel rather than building new reactors from scratch. That strategy echoes recent moves like a plant’s relicensing and broader federal plans for new reactors that still lean on proven designs. The plant’s owner has already locked in buyers for that extra output, confirming in a corporate announcement that a tech company will purchase power from an uprated Perry alongside two other nuclear stations.
The empty tower is a lasting reminder of how differently that bet can turn out once the forecast underneath it changes. Even so, it has cost nothing to simply let it stand.
For now the second tower keeps doing the only thing it has ever done, which is stand there, dry and silent, while its twin keeps breathing steam into the Ohio sky a few hundred feet away.
Hugo is an engineer with strong technical expertise. Multilingual from an early age, his writing combines technical clarity with a strong interest in science and energy.
