Reviewed by: Nearly Nuclear: A Mismanaged Energy Transition by LeRoy Smith Dale Moler LeRoy Smith. Nearly Nuclear: A Mismanaged Energy Transition. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2021. Pp. 274. Appendices. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Paper: $29.95. Nearly Nuclear is largely the story of a failed project. What started as an exciting proposal to supply incredible amounts of power to the Midland [End Page 156] region and generate profits for several companies became a long struggle to keep the project viable. Budgets ballooned, construction problems plagued the work site, and in the end, the nuclear power generation project was never completed, even after Consumers Power spent over $2 billion and risked failing as a business. However, author LeRoy Smith concludes his history by focusing on the ability of these different actors to eventually work together and come up with a reasonable solution to salvage some of the investment and repurpose the partly finished nuclear site as a uniquely designed natural gas power plant. More broadly, he uses the project to examine the challenges facing our own modern transition to alternative forms of energy production. The author does an excellent job exploring the complex relationship that develops between local communities, corporate economies, and federal regulators when a project such as a nuclear power plant is proposed and constructed. The Midland community had its own hopes and fears about nuclear power, which were fundamentally shaped by the industrial and corporate presence of the Midland-based Dow Chemical Company. Consumers Power, the regional utility looking to expand during an unprecedented 1960s surge in power generation, struggled to meet existing federal regulations and found it even more difficult to keep up with an evolving regulatory structure. The Bechtel Corporation struggled to manage the actual construction of the site, contributing to cost overruns and raising new questions about the viability of the project. And all of these groups had to navigate increasingly complex political and legal expectations that continued to evolve during the 1960s and 1970s. Smith's history is full of interesting characters who influenced the course of the project. Management of Consumers Power, Dow Chemical, and the Bechtel Corporation all figure heavily. Local activists, often standing up to intense corporate pressure and local scrutiny, are given plenty of attention, as their stories are intimately intertwined with the project itself. And the workforce responsible for building and maintaining the site provides amusing stories and valuable insight into how these interactions shaped the construction of the project. Smith even includes a few opening chapters on the geological history of the region, and although this information could have been more thoroughly incorporated into the larger narrative, it does offer some interesting and valuable context for the story. After the Second World War, nuclear power promised to meet the demands of a modern, industrial world cheaply and reliably. Smith argues that the history of the unfinished Midland project serves as a case study [End Page 157] in the kinds of unexpected and shifting problems that can arise when new technologies are introduced, especially in the case of energy production. But the conversion of the partly constructed plant offers an optimistic conclusion to the book and an example of the kind of cooperation and flexibility that will be a necessary component of energy planning, production, and management in the future. Dale Moler Northwood University Copyright © 2022 Historical Society of Michigan