Credit: Chuck Berman/TNS
Exelon says that it will close the Byron Nuclear Generating Station near Rockford, pictured, and another in Grundy County unless Illinois lawmakers grant subsidies.
Years ago, opposing nuclear power was cool.
A partial meltdown at Three Mile Island lit a nationwide fire in 1979, when an estimated 200,000 anti-nuke protesters flocked to New York for a demonstration six months after what remains the nation's closest brush with nuclear energy catastrophe. Tens of thousands marched elsewhere.
"If they can open one on an earthquake fault, they can put one anywhere," musician Jackson Browne told the Associated Press in 1981, when he and nearly 2,000 other demonstrators were arrested for attempting to blockade a plant under construction in California, where the governor two years earlier had been among more than 60,000 anti-nuke protestors who marched on Washington. "We believe all of us against nuclear energy have to think of ourselves as Paul Reveres and Pauline Reveres, going through our country town by town, city by city warning the people about the dangers," Jane Fonda told