Nuclear Power Plant Outage T-Shirts.
As of 2007, the United States had 104 operating nuclear generating plants, which together supply about 20% of the country’s electricity. When a plant suspends operation, generally for refueling, maintenance, or more rarely, decommissioning, large numbers of highly-specialized workers converge on the site and join the regular crew to undertake work that can last up to a full year or longer. Presumably, these workers are geographically dispersed but know one another well, since there are only so many plants, and only a few outages occurring at any one time.
Most visibly in the 1980s, a tradition of making t-shirts to commemorate outages arose among the technicians or their employers, and after figuring out what the first few I came across were, I began to collect them. Aside from having an amateur’s interest in nuclear physics, I thought this was one of the oddest and most obscure genres of t-shirt I had ever come across, though the t-shirt being the ubiquitous but bewilderingly diverse garment it is, I am sure there are many other even stranger varieties.
Every plant has its own usually quite complex history, and by all appearances, its own unique institutional culture. The designs are very diverse, and range from staid and corporate to idiosyncratic and wacky, with more than a few excursions into weird nuke-worker humor. One of the reasons I like them has to do with my own struggles to understand where the first few I found came from: few besides the initiated can make sense of the graphics or figure out what the shirt is referring to. Which is also part of their charm.
Most I’ve been able to find seem to come from the 1980s, but that might just have more to do with the lag that occurs between the creation of the shirt and someone’s decision to get rid of theirs (or of the overstock). I’ll periodically post the pieces of my collection individually, maybe with a few words about them or the plant in question, as well as some of the generally less interesting non-outage shirts produced by the plants. The images will be collected as I post them in, the gallery below.
Posts on the shirts:
Shoreham (NY) Nuclear Power Plant Decommissioning
