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 journalist: 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 “f