This is the 11th in a series.

The events of 1974 in many ways explain why today Ocean County is not a center for the nation’s nuclear power industry.

As the year began, the county already had one operating reactor at Oyster Creek with a second nearby larger one on the drawing board awaiting construction. Two more floating reactors were planned for the waters off Long Beach Island, for which contracts had been signed on a yacht off Little Egg Harbor inlet.

But first a shipyard had to be built in Florida to set up an assembly line to produce the floating reactors.