You really have everything here on Long Island, good restaurants, still a lot of wide open

spaces, beautiful beaches, auntie sports teams to root for, and access to New York City.

That's Michael Duidziak or Mike D. Mike's a political pollster who's worked prominently

in the area of environmental protection. He's also a Long Islander for life, but there's

one place on Long Island that he doesn't love.

When you drive up there, you will see the plant, and it's sort of eerie-looking. I always

thought the building was scary looking to begin with the images, with the concerns about

nuclear power, it became almost a scary kind of image to people's minds. Now that it's

deserted and just sitting there, you know, it really is kind of an eerie, you know, almost

an image when you see it.

I'm Dylan Therese, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible

and wondrous places. Today, we venture out to Long Island, not for the beautiful beaches

or the islanders game or to visit Billy Joel, but to explore a gigantic, ominous, seafoam

green nuclear power plant, $5 billion in the making, and to learn the story of how it became

Mike D's, the least favorite place on Long Island. That's after this.

The mid-20th century was this time of enormous optimism and excitement. World War II was

over, the economy was booming, babies were booming, science was booming, and in 1958,

America's first nuclear power plant was opened in Shippingport, Pennsylvania.

In his address, dedicating the Shipping Port Atomic Power Station on May 26, 1958, the

president of the United States said, Michael DeWidziak remembers the excitement around

nuclear power, or atomic power, as it was called back then.

By the 1960s, there were already dozens of nuclear power plants being planned and built,

...