Qualla: Cherokee Nuclear Power Plant

Cherokee Nuclear Power Plant: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1987, James Cameron needed a swimming pool big enough to hold a deep-sea drilling rig. He found one in the South Carolina piedmont, abandoned by Duke Power and overgrown with kudzu: the unfinished containment vessel of the Cherokee Nuclear Power Plant, a cylinder 200 feet across and 55 feet deep, designed to hold a reactor that would never come. Cameron filled it with 7.5 million gallons of water instead, sank his submarine sets to the bottom, and made The Abyss. The cast suffered decompression sickness. The crew worked thirteen-hour days in the dark. The reactor that had cost Duke a billion 1970s dollars finally found a use - just not the one anyone had planned.

Cherokee Nuclear Power Plant: A Three-Reactor Dream

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

Cherokee Nuclear Power Plant: Earl Owensby's Studio

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 bec...

Cherokee Nuclear Power Plant: Underwater Cinema

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 millio...

Cherokee Nuclear Power Plant: The Second Plant That Never Was

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Willia...