If you've been following my videos for the last couple of weeks you will know that I am at
Disney World.
It's not that they've sponsored me or anything, it is just where I happen to be on holiday.
Now, I've been avoiding Disney trivia
because, you know, it's a little bit boring after a while but
there's something that my cameraman for the week, Dan W,
-- Hello! -- told me that I didn't really believe at first,
but he assures me it's true, I've looked it up, which is, well...
Dan, where are we currently standing? DAN: We're at the Reedy Creek Improvement District. It's
Walt Disney World's own private municipality.
TOM: Yeah. Essentially, Disney World has private cities
granted to them by the state of Florida because they lobbied a long time ago when
they were buying all the land here and buying the space.
They have all sorts of powers: they apply for planning permission
from themselves, they have the ability to build all sorts of things, to
be immune from laws of the neighboring areas that they would otherwise
be beholden to. Not only that, they have eminent domain,
as well, which means that they can seize small amounts of land from around their borders
for their own municipality if they need it for the public good.
And the startling thing is this: Dan, what they technically have permission to build?
DAN: They have planning permission from themselves to build their own nuclear
power station. It's in the legislation from the 1960s still.
TOM: Now, that's because way back when they were actually planning to build a proper city here.
And, while they've never actually built that nuke plant – they have a small
oil-fired plant somewhere on property – they had their own
runway briefly, they had all sorts of things. There was gonna be a massive city here and then
Walt Disney died, and what we are left with is the Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow,
or EPCOT. But you never know, one day there might well be a nuclear power plant here
That is something
you might not have known.
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