Visited Places
The Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex, Nekoma, North Dakota (2017)
The Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex was a 430-acre Cold War-era anti-ballistic missile base located 178 miles northwest of Fargo and 30 miles south of the Canadian border. [Essay continues below…] Construction began in 1970 but the site did not reach full operational capacity until October of 1975—the same month that Congress voted to decommission it. Today, the site’s former missile fields and…
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Juraguá Nuclear Power Plant, Cienfuegos Province, Cuba (2019)
Along Cuba’s sparkling southern Caribbean coast, our taxi wound its way through seemingly endless sugarcane fields, the abandoned partially-completed Juraguá nuclear Power Plant just a prospect on the horizon. [Essay continues below…] William, a resident of Havana, had agreed to drive Becca and me the 238km, undeterred by the fact that the plant did not appear on most maps and that we had no GPS to guide us. I expected…
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Vance Alan Puchalski 