Prairie Alliance and the Clinton Power Plant

Overview

Prairie Alliance was a grassroots political and educational organization which originated in June 1977 from a group of UIUC students who were concerned about the construction of a nuclear reactor power plant in Clinton, Illinois.



According to their constitution, the Prairie Alliance "existed to promote the development and implication of safe, economical, and environmentally beneficial sources of energy." They organized to oppose the continued development of nuclear power in general and, specifically the constructon of the Clinton nuclear power plants. They felt that the construction of nuclear reactors in central Illinois biologically, economically and socially endangered local residents.

The plant is located on what was once 15,000 or 22 square miles of farmland, prairies, and forests. 4,900 of these acres were flooded from water of the Sangamon River to create a cooling lake for the reactor plant. According to the Prairie Alliance, the cooling lake's water is polluted with Calcium and Magnesium from the plant at a rate of 8,000 lbs per day. It is also located on what was once 1/4 of DeWitt county's forested areas. The demolition of 25% of the forested area of the county, was sure to have had a detrimental effect on wildlife that relies on forested areas for survival.

They felt that the residents were economically endangered because the Clinton Power plant would result in fewer jobs as compared to the coal mining industry. However, they did not show statistics of job loss in the Illinois coal industry with the development of the Clinton nuclear plant. The majority of coal mining in Illinois is in the southern part of the state, with the closest coal mine to clinton being 50 miles away. The Clinton Power plant employs over 2000 local people. I wish they would have included more numerical statistics about the number of coal jobs lost when the power plant was built to give a better idea of what exact effects on the job market the power plant had.



I thought it was interesting that an enviromentalist group advocated the burning fossil fuels over nuclear power because coal employed more people while simulaneously arguing for clean (emission free) alternative energy. Isn't the consensus that nuclear power is much cleaner on the environment than coal? Today, the Department of Energy recognizes nuclear power as a practical, inexpensive, and clean source of energy. Today's nuclear plants save 2.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide as compared to burning fossil fuels, making it far less damaging to the environment.

Prairie Alliance and Community Activism

The Prairie Alliance held regular meetings, speeches and talks both in person and on the radio. They wrote to the Illinois government about the negative implications of nuclear power in central Illinois. They published and distributed several fliers about clean energy, the negative effects nuclear power, and what the community could do to help during the time of the Clinton power plant's construction. One of their major goals was to educate the community about the issue in hopes of gaining a large enough base that collectively had the power to shut down the nuclear plant's construction.

Balloon Release

Research Collected from UIUC Archives

As part of their anti-nuclear power demonstrations, the Prairie Alliance organized an event to release 1000 ballons near the site of the Clinton reactor construction. The balloons were intended to represent the far reaching radiation hazards of nuclear power if the plant were to malfunction.

This public balloon release was held on April 1st, 1978. They ended up releasing 900 balloons witht he help of dozens of environmental activists supporting their cause. Each balloon carried a post card on its string that explained the purpose of the demonstration. Whoever found the balloons were aksed to write down their location and mail the postcard back to the Prairie Alliance student organization in Champaign. Below are some of the cards that were returned.

They ended up recieving 38 postcards back, and used them to create a map representing the area that could be affected if the Clinton nuclear reactor went terribly wrong. The farthest recorded balloon was found in South Carolina, which is over 700 miles away from Clinton Illinois.

While this map is interesting, I don't consider it an accurate representation of the "nuclear fallout" of a Clinton nuclear power plant explosion. Less than 5% of the 900 balloons were returned and used to create this map, which is so few it is hard to deem it accurate. Also, because the balloon's travel was entirely dependent on wind, they all blew east together, which did not account for the detremental effects that would happen around Clinton to the north, south, and west in the case of a nuclear accident.

Similar to the advocacy of coal over nuclear power, I found it odd that an environmentalist group saw no issues releasing 900 balloons into the atmosphere. They wrote about the effects of a nuclear accident on the air and oceans. What about the far-reaching effects of balloons on aquatic and avian wildlife? What about the waste of helium, a limtied natural resource?