Duke Power broke ground on Cherokee in the early 1970s, when American utilities still believed the future would be electric and atomic. Three reactors were planned for the site outside Gaffney, each a Combustion Engineering pressurized-water unit producing roughly 1,300 megawatts. Construction began on Unit 1 first; Units 2 and 3 would follow as demand justified them. Then everything went wrong at once. Three Mile Island in 1979 shook public confidence. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission tightened standards. Inflation drove construction costs into the stratosphere. Electricity demand, after decades of doubling every ten years, abruptly flattened. By 1982 Duke was suspending work on Unit 1. By 1983, after spending what would today be billions, the company walked away. Reactor 1 was partially complete. Reactors 2 and 3 had been scrapped. The cooling pond was full. The reactor vessel sat empty on a hillside above the Broad River, waiting for someone to come up with a better idea.

The better idea arrived in the person of Earl Owensby, a Shelby, North Carolina businessman who had spent the 1970s producing drive-in action movies on shoestring budgets. By 1988, Owensby had bought the failed Cherokee site and converted it into a film studio. The warehouses became sound stages. The unfinished cooling tower became background scenery. And the two largest engineering features of a never-finished nuclear plant - the turbine pit and the containment vessel - became, in industry shorthand, A Tank and B Tank. They were the largest indoor bodies of water in the United States.

James Cameron was writing The Abyss in 1987 and had ruled out filming in the open ocean. He needed something controllable, lightless, and enormous. Cameron's cinematographer Al Giddings visited Cherokee, looked at the turbine pit - the original B Tank, modified to hold 2.2 million gallons - and pronounced it too small for the exterior sequences. Cameron then walked the cylindrical containment vessel: 200 feet across, 55 feet deep, lined with concrete and steel. With modifications, it would hold 7.5 million gallons. He had his A Tank. Through 1988, Cameron sank an entire pretend deep-sea drilling rig called Deepcore to the bottom of A Tank and filmed for months. The actors descended on weighted lines and worked at depths that required decompression treatments. Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and the crew came up the way real divers come up, slowly, breathing carefully. In December 1988 production moved to Los Angeles for the surface work. The tanks were drained. The sets were left in place behind warning signs reading PROPERTY OF 20TH CENTURY FOX.

The Abyss sets sat in the empty containment vessel for nearly twenty years, slowly weathering. In September 2007 they were finally demolished - and just three months later, on December 13, 2007, Duke filed a new application with the NRC. This time the plant would be called William States Lee III Nuclear Generating Station, after Duke's longtime chief engineer. Two Westinghouse AP1000 reactors, 1,117 megawatts each, on the same 2,022-acre Broad River site. The old infrastructure would be cleared away to make room. By 2017, with Westinghouse in bankruptcy, Duke had quietly let the William States Lee project lapse. Cherokee remains what it has always been since 1983: a piece of cleared land beside a cooling pond, where two large industries - American nuclear power and American moviemaking - both came to do something extraordinary, and neither quite finished.