I guess I shouldn’t be shocked at the amount of stupid that
I stumble into on the Internet – but as this little pile of stupid is so close
to home, I feel like I need to say something about it.
Atomic City had a population in the “hundreds”? Really? What
census information I can find showed a top population of 141 in 1960. That’s
“hundred,” not “hundreds.”
And I have to look at Google maps of the place and wonder if
even that 141 population number is accurate. This place doesn’t look like it
was ever home to more than a hundred people, unless they were housed in
temporary structures that are no longer there (a good possibility, given the
amazing mobile home technology popular in the 1960s and before.
But to use this city as a symbol for the decline of the
nuclear industry? That hardly works in my book.
If I were a new worker at the Idaho National Laboratory,
even in the 1950s or 1960s, and had the choice of living this close to work but
not having services such as grocery stores, schools, etc., or living further
away – between 20 to 60 miles – and having access to much more in the way of
services, schools, libraries, greenery, etc., I’d skip right over Atomic City
and settle further afield in Arco, Blackfoot, Idaho Falls, or the like. Calling
Atomic City a boomtown is to give far too much credit to the overzealous real
estate speculators who figured a town right on the edge of the laboratory
perimeter sans anything resembling commercial or civic development would be a
magnet to workers.
The story of Atomic City is much more a story of a real
estate boondoggle gone bad than anything else, given the prosperity of other
towns in the area that play home to workers at the Idaho National Laboratory –
myself included. Riding the bus to and from work every day, an hour and a half
each way, isn’t all that fun, but it makes more sense than living in Atomic
City.
Hundreds. Yup. Right there.
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