RAINIER, Ore -- On a single day in the 1980s, Mark Loizeaux destroyed a blast furnace and steel mill in Buffalo, N.Y.; his brother flattened a slaughterhouse in Brisbane, Australia; and his father executed a coup de grace on industrial chimneys in Cape Town, South Africa.

Only one project is on the list for May 21, 2006, and it will be a don't-miss event for local residents whose Sunday morning won't be complete until they've seen what 2,500 sticks of dynamite can do to a 499-foot-tall nuclear plant cooling tower.

The Trojan Nuclear Plant, which began producing power in 1976, has been stilled for 13 years, and owner Portland General Electric has been decommissioning the site since 1996. Nuking the cooling tower will be the work of Loizeaux's Maryland-based company, Controlled Demolition Inc.

The tower, at a bend in the Columbia River northwest of Kalama, stands as a symbol of an idea that seemed good at the time but ultimately proved to be a white elephant herd. Trojan was Oregon's first nuclear plant, and there was no second. Its 16 years of commercial operation ended in January 1993 after PGE faced hundreds of millions of dollars in upgrading expenses to replace the facility's steam turbines.

PGE is now restoring the 634-acre site, with a future use yet unknown. To reintroduce the area to Loizeaux's work (CDI is best known for pulverizing the Kingdome in March 2000), PGE officials invited reporters to visit the cooling tower on Wednesday. "Today is your last chance to see Trojan and the Trojan tower up close," said spokesman Scott Simms. Few media events of any type in this area can draw even a dozen reporters, photographers, graphic artists and TV- truck operators from Washington and Oregon. Wednesday's show was an unqualified success, luring 30 camera- and notebook-toting visitors to the wind-swept site.

While not denying the appeal of watching the tower yield to explosives-assisted gravity, PGE officials have already begun begging would-be spectators to resist the temptation to see what they can see by dawn's early light on May 21. Officials want people to glue themselves to TVs instead of binoculars. "We'd really like folks to watch us on TV," said Simms.

Traffic on U.S Highway 30 in Oregon, Interstate 5 and the Columbia River will be stopped. The air space near the tower will be closed, with specifics yet to come from the Federal Aviation Administration. While the time is not yet set, it will be in the neighborhood of 7 a.m. Wind and rain won't delay the show, but lightning or heavy fog would.

Loizeaux, who dethroned the Kingdome without harming a hair on a century-old building 90 feet away, predicts noise amounting to the rumble of thunder, imperceptible vibration and no more than a light dusting of the Trojan area as the tower's concrete is obliterated.

CDI has ruined bridges, buildings and towers on every continent except Antarctica. The count to date, going back to the late 1940s when Loizeaux's father began by rupturing chimneys, now runs to 7,000. (Loizeaux admits that the figure is somewhat inflated due to the industry habit of tallying each bridge abutment, for example, as a "structure.")

Even though CDI has collapsed dozens of nuclear plant cooling towers in Europe, Africa and the United States, Trojan's is unique, "orders of magnitude" larger and stronger than any other, said Loizeaux.

The tower is one huge lampshade, a corsetted tube that is 385 feet wide at the base and 250 feet across at the top. Its 41,000 tons of concrete are equivalent to the weight of 1,000 loaded semis a 15-mile-long queue.

Bolstered to withstand the region's earthquake hazard, the tower is a "double mat" construction, reinforced with two concentric layers of steel reinforcing bar inside the concrete.

The tower sits on 88 concrete columns, each one 40 inches in diameter. CDI workers will be Swiss-cheesing those columns and strategic locations throughout the tower body, known as a veil, in order to place 1,500 to 2,000 pounds of dynamite.

Like chain-sawing the legs on Grandma's antique dinner table just to watch it fall, the CDI plan is to knock the tower off its feet. "It's going to do what it wants to do," said Loizeaux. "The tower wants to sit down. We're going to cajole it."

The goal is to make the tower fall slightly off-axis, as far to the southeast as possible. Doing so, said Loizeaux, will enhance the destruction of the 41,000 tons of concrete. CDI has the contract to pulverize the tower's remains and recycle its reinforcing steel, so the more it breaks up on the morning of May 21, the less work will be needed in the aftermath.

Each stick of dynamite, an inch and a half thick and eight inches long, will be slid into a slightly larger hole and wired with blasting cap and cord. The cooling tower veil varies in thickness from 10 inches (the middle) to 18 inches (top) to 45 inches (the bottom), so the dynamite holes will vary in depth. Expanding foam the same type used to weatherize homes, dispensed from aerosol cans will hold each stick in place.

Even though there isn't much for any errant blown debris to damage, mats of chain-link fence and geotextile fabric will be laid over the dynamite-loaded holes to contain the shattered concrete.

In its day the Trojan plant was a bustling facility with 1,200 employees. Now there are 20. At peak capacity the plant produced nearly one megawatt of electricity for each and every worker. Those megawatts 1,130 would have been more than enough to handle Clark County's greatest power demand, 1,063 megawatts on a winter day some years ago.

Now the facility looks more like an understaffed and barely maintained minimum-security prison, weather-beaten and mossy. Even the toilets in the spacious restrooms of the site's newest structure, the 1980s "central building," which is not slated for demolition, have been decommissioned. They are lined up, upside- down, along one wall.

"When this plant was running you could eat off the floor in this room," said PGE's Jon Vingerud, showing reporters a dark, dank and dingy space in the pipe-stuffed turbine building. Now he's the demolition project manager, but during the plant's heyday he was in the maintenance department.

On Wednesday, media visitors lined up at a security station to sign documents promising, among other things, that they would not photograph the Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation, 34 concrete casks that house the only radioactive material still at the Trojan site. Minutes later, reporters were promptly handed press packets with a crisp color photo showing the casks and the two barbed-wire-topped chain-link fences surrounding them.

The spent fuel is not expected to be entirely moved off the site until 2024, and likely longer than that. But the casks reside hundreds of feet north of the tower, no part of which ever came into contact with radioactive materials. "I couldn't hit them if I wanted to," said Loizeaux.

He described the Kingdome as "part of the social fabric" of Seattle, and said its demolition signified a beginning.

As for the cooling tower, it marks an ending. "This is like a huge, silent sentinel. It has done its job," he said. The ultimate destruction "is a quiet sigh: 'OK, we're not going to look at me anymore.' "

To that end, he said, "We don't blow up buildings, we euthanize them. We put them out of their misery."

As for what he does on the weekend, "Flowers. I love flowers. I planted 2,000 bulbs last year."