Ruling on procedural motions in Chemical Bank's effort to force the participating utilities to pay bondholders for their loans to the terminated WNP-4 and 5, the Washington State Supreme Court commented in December 1983 that this was “by any measure, a massive case with enormous stakes.” Tens of thousands of bondholders were facing the loss of billions on what had looked like investments with ironclad guarantees of payment. On the other hand, more than a million ratepayers across six Northwest states had to contemplate the prospect of paying an additional $7 billion on their electric bills for projects that would never be completed. Carl Halvorson, a Portland construction executive who chaired the Supply System's Executive Board, told reporters early in 1983 that WPPSS itself was on the brink of “Armageddon.” But the WPPSS crisis was more than a simple tug-of-war between implacable lenders and obdurate borrowers. The crisis affected the Northwest's broader economy and polity and had ramifications for the nation's energy policy and municipal finance. First, was the Pacific Northwest's energy future still based on assumptions embedded in Glenn Seaborg's vision of a “Nuplex” of clean, cheap nuclear energy production, the 1968 Hydro-Thermal Power Program, and Donald Hodel's apocalyptic warnings against the “prophets of shortage”? Would the 1980 Northwest Power Act and the Northwest Power Council it established enshrine these supply-oriented policies?