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Higher Power: An American Town's Story of Faith, Hope, and Nuclear Energy
An in-depth, timely examination of one town’s nuclear power plant, the scandal that plagued it, and the reporter who was allowed inside.
Nuclear power once promised to be the solution to the world’s energy crisis, but that all changed in the late twentieth century after multiple high-profile accidents and meltdowns. Power plant workers, finding themselves the subject of public opposition, became leery of reporters. But one plant in Zion, Illinois, just forty miles north of Chicago, allowed unrestricted access to one the Chicago Tribune ’s Casey Bukro, one of the first environment reporters in the country. Bukro spent two years inside the Zion nuclear plant, interviewing employees, witnessing high-risk maintenance procedures, and watching the radiation exposure counter on his own dosimeter tick up and up. In Higher Power , Bukro’s reporting from the plant is prefaced by a compelling history of the city of Zion, including a tell-all of John Alexander Dowie, a nineteenth-century “faith healer” who founded Zion, and whose evangelism left a mark on the city well into the modern era, even as a new “higher” power—nuclear energy—moved into town. With the acceleration of climate change, the questions and challenges surrounding nuclear power have never been more relevant. How did the promise of nuclear energy stumble? Should we try to address the mistakes made in the past? What part could nuclear power play in our energy future? Higher Power explores these questions and examines one American town’s attempts to build a better society as a bellwether for national policy and decision making.
Nuclear power once promised to be the solution to the world’s energy crisis, but that all changed in the late twentieth century after multiple high-profile accidents and meltdowns. Power plant workers, finding themselves the subject of public opposition, became leery of reporters. But one plant in Zion, Illinois, just forty miles north of Chicago, allowed unrestricted access to one the Chicago Tribune ’s Casey Bukro, one of the first environment reporters in the country. Bukro spent two years inside the Zion nuclear plant, interviewing employees, witnessing high-risk maintenance procedures, and watching the radiation exposure counter on his own dosimeter tick up and up. In Higher Power , Bukro’s reporting from the plant is prefaced by a compelling history of the city of Zion, including a tell-all of John Alexander Dowie, a nineteenth-century “faith healer” who founded Zion, and whose evangelism left a mark on the city well into the modern era, even as a new “higher” power—nuclear energy—moved into town. With the acceleration of climate change, the questions and challenges surrounding nuclear power have never been more relevant. How did the promise of nuclear energy stumble? Should we try to address the mistakes made in the past? What part could nuclear power play in our energy future? Higher Power explores these questions and examines one American town’s attempts to build a better society as a bellwether for national policy and decision making.
448 pages, Hardcover
Published June 27, 2023
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July 30, 2024Casey Bukro, the first environmental reporter for a major newspaper, witnessed the entire lifespan of a nuclear power plant, the troubled Zion reactor site between Chicago and Milwaukee, with unusual access to the facility and its workers. As a generation of new nukes offer a response to climate change and Ukraine’s nuclear plants stand in the line of missile fire, Bukro presents a clear vision of nuclear power generation, like the religious foundation of Zion, Illinois, as a hopeful yet fallible human endeavor.
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