On October 6th, I had the privilege to join a few other sound designers (James Nixon, Kristoffer Larson, Pete Comley and Andy Martin) on a trip to the Satsop Nuclear Power Plant out in Elma, Washington about a half hour west of Olympia. While we bore a ridiculous number of radioactive jokes afterwards, the plant was never finished and thus never had any actual nuclear material near it. Construction began in the 70s during the energy crisis and in 1983, after falling $60 million over budget, they canned it. It was apparently about 75% complete. The county of Grays Harbor has now turned the complex into a business park, so there’s a handful of businesses out there and various films, music videos and performance groups also rent it out from time to time. James Nixon had wanted to record some large glass breaks, and when he opened up to the group to see if anyone would be interested in breaking shit at a nuclear power plant, the sentiment was “I would be completely insane to say no!”
We had the run of the place from 8am until 4pm on a gray, overcast Tuesday. I’ve seen the cooling towers from the freeway on the way to the Olympic Peninsula, but it was a completely different thing to be standing right under one. They were huge! We signed releases to climb up the stairs along the outside all the way to the top, but alas, we didn’t have time. We did walk around though, scouted out a space to do our glass breaking and also scouted some areas to capture impulse responses and the like. The picture below shows one of these spaces: what was meant to be a cap to an unfinished containment unit is now a parking garage with some insane reverbs inside.
We burned the morning trying to figure out how to rig the glass. James wanted the break sound isolated from the debris that would come with just throwing the panes on the ground. While he was working on figuring that out, Andy and I did a little exploration into a side alley which had some amazing reflections that changed radically from the entrance to the back of the alley. In the back of the alley were some 15 foot long pieces of rebar that we started playing with. Andy grabbed one and started dragging it along the floor and the sound was insane! So we recorded a bunch of that and some other rebar in the alley fun.
By then, we had gotten the maintenance crew to bring a man basket lift (a silly, sexist name if there ever were one) and we began figuring out how to get the glass set up so it could be broken safely with a few milliseconds between the impact and the shard fall. The plan was to have 2 people on the roof of the moving van we rented, but the roof was fiberglass with a few metal support ribs. Good thing Andy is a small human! He was volunteered to be the man on the truck breaking the glass. The rig called for a rope running from the truck with 2 suction cups attached to it, going up through the man basket and back down to the back of my car where we tied off so we could easily hoist new panes of glass up for each break. Andy would break each piece with a hammer or crowbar and await the next one to be hauled up.
We set up a ton of mics through Kristoffer’s Nomad recorder, 4 Sound Devices 702’s and a couple other field recorders. I think in the end we had a Sennheiser MKH8040 stereo pair on the truck pointing toward the impact. James and Pete and I each had 8060s pointed at the impact areas. We had Pete’s Neumann binaural head (aka Fritz) near the impact area as well as a few other close mics. I had a Shure KSM141 stereo pair pointed at a concrete wall just off from the impact zone to capture the reflections and Andy had his Omni M/S rig in the alley we were playing in. We also had a couple contact mics set up in interesting places (attached to a small satellite dish and one to the rental truck) which actually got some pretty decent recordings. Kristoffer ran the main recording area, capturing 8 tracks from around the impact site into his Nomad. Pete and James were both operating their booms, Andy was destroying, and I was tucked into the cab of the truck recording with my 8060 and monitoring Pete’s rig. In between breaks we all ran whatever tasks were needed: Pete would sweep out the existing glass, James would prep the next pane, Kristoffer logged the recordings and helped me with stopping some of the remote recorders, and I would stop the remaining remote recorders, get in my car to lower the rope and raise a new pane, then run around in a tizzy turning the recorders back on and hopping in the cab to do it again. Chaotic sonic fun!
Satsop is a business park and there’s some other industrial areas nearby including a power plant, so it is not a completely quiet place. We were plagued throughout the day by truck backup beeps, riding lawn mowers, strange radio squawks, wind, etc. But we got some surprisingly clean and diverse recordings of a broad range of glass from mirrors to plate glass to bottles to wine goblets (which made an awesome whooshing sound as they traveled through the air) and lightbulbs which sounded way more powerful and percussive than their size betrays).
It was a super successful day, but unfortunately we had no time left after breaking all the glass and cleaning up to record anything else. We’re planning another trip soon hopefully to capture impulse responses of various rooms, buildings and spaces (1000 foot tunnels!) and whatever else suits our fancy. Here’s a compilation of some of the breaks I captured with my Sony RX100 camera. The recordings via our Rycotes sound much cleaner (no wind) and as far as those truck beeps, well that’s what RX is for!