Cancellation
Owing to increasing public pressure, in June 1967, United States Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall announced he was strongly opposed to the dam, citing economic and biological factors as well as the drastic impact on the area's native population. Though this effectively ended the project, planning continued to go ahead until the final Army Corps of Engineers report was released in 1971 and recommended the project "not be undertaken at this time". Alaska governor William Allen Egan protested the statement, saying the report was out of date due to population growth in Alaska and rising demand for electricity.
The report was duly reconsidered, but in 1978, the Army Corps of Engineers confirmed the project no longer was justified. The audited report was accepted by the U.S. Senate, and no further funding was allocated to study the issue. The final nail in the coffin came on December 1, 1978, when President Jimmy Carter authorized the creation of the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Monument, which became the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge in 1980. The refuge status eliminated any possibility of flooding the Yukon Flats, a process that would have been inevitable with the construction of the dam.
In summer 1985, the last remnants of the dam project were eliminated when the 8.96 million acres (36,300 km2) set aside for development of the dam were released by the Bureau of Land Management for other uses.
Read more about this topic: Rampart Dam