NIPSCO announced last year that it will shut down its Bailly Generating Station near Burns Harbor next year. It's a coal-fired plant, but there could have been a nuclear plant there.
The coal-fired plant is at the end of its life expectancy. It was built in 1962 and has been expanded since.
Skipping through microfilm of The Vidette-Messenger from Jan. 17, 1967, I ran across the first story in a controversy that roiled Northwest Indiana for about 15 years. NIPSCO proposed to build Indiana's first nuclear power plant.
NIPSCO said the plant would be "one of the largest privately owned single nuclear power plants in the world," according to the story published 70 years ago today.
As proposed, construction would have begun in 1968, with operation to begin in 1972.
NIPSCO officials now know that building a nuclear power plant takes much longer to accomplish. The last time I asked, there were no plans to build a nuclear plant. NIPSCO is too small a utility to operate a nuclear power plant, I was told.
-
{{title}}
{{start_at_rate}}{{format_dollars}} {{start_price}} {{format_cents}}{{term}}{{promotional_format_dollars}}{{promotional_price}}{{promotional_format_cents}} {{term}} - {{html}}
Thanks for being a subscriber.
Sorry, your subscription does not include this content.
Please call 800-589-3331 to upgrade your subscription.
You have free articles remaining.
And as we know from recent events in Illinois, nuclear power plants come with a built-in expiration date. It took the Illinois General Assembly to extend the lives of nuclear plants operating there.
Opponents of the Bailly Nuclear One plant had many concerns, including the close proximity to a major population center and the environmentally sensitive Indiana Dunes. Disposal of nuclear waste was still very much an issue then, too. And while Northwest Indiana hasn't seen an earthquake of any consequence in recorded history, that was also a fear, even before the Fukushima disaster in Japan.
The March 28, 1979, partial nuclear meltdown at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Pennsylvania confirmed nuclear power opponents' fears that accidents could be catastrophic.
Another disaster happened on April 26, 1986, at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, then a part of the now-defunct USSR.
But before Chernobyl happened, NIPSCO pulled the plug on its nuclear option in 1981.
The following year, in January 1982, the opposition coalition, the Bailly Alliance, disbanded. Its records are now housed at the Calumet Regional Archives at Indiana University Northwest.
