“Those dudes are coming down,” proclaimed William Counsil on January 13, 1995. Counsil, Managing Director of the Washington Public Power Supply System, was announcing the demolition of Projects 1 and 3, the two reactors it had been preserving for eventual completion since the early 1980s. On May 13, 1994, the Supply System's Board of Directors voted nine to four to terminate the projects. Following a flurry of efforts to find buyers for the major components, Counsil offered to sell individual items from the projects' inventory. This “garage sale” approach continued on the organization's web site and in a store that the agency operated in Kennewick for several years. Since the Supply System was not organized to manage a retail operation, in late 1999 it switched from selling individual pieces to offering “a whole warehouse at a time” for scrap at a few cents on the dollar.

The Supply System remained in the utility business, however. WNP-2 produced, at full capacity, about 1,200 megawatts of energy and the system also still managed the Packwood Lake hydroelectric station. The turbine generators that WPPSS had used to produce electricity from the Hanford Reservation's N-Reactor no longer operated, since the weapons plutonium production reactor had been shut down in 1987 for safety reasons. The closure progressed to termination of the reactor in 1992.