The Atom: Rowe's Reactor

A few years ago, in Rowe, Mass, (pop. 260), a one-store mountain town on the Deerfield River not far from the old Mohawk Trail, they put up a brand-new nuclear reactor that turned out to be one of the U.S.'s largest. Owned by the Yankee Atomic Electric Co., a combine of a dozen New England utility firms, the reactor is worth $57 million; last year it hummed out more than a billion kilowatt-hours of electricity. It is by far Rowe's biggest industry, and Postmaster Wendell Bjork—who owns the town's general store—estimates that the...