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Time Essay: The Irrational Fight Against Nuclear Power

Back in the benign 1950s, Americans looked on the atom as a friend, a cheerful Reddy Kilowatt that would provide cheap, abundant electricity to run their factories, power their TV sets and even chill the beer they drank while watching them. Today much of this enthusiasm has not only evaporated but turned into antipathy. Antinuclear activists have slowed construction of power plants from Seabrook, N.H., to Diablo Canyon, Calif. Angry people in Texas, New Mexico and Washington have packed public meetings to protest government plans to use their areas for nuclear-waste disposal and...

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RAY KELLY, New York City Police Commissioner, on the arrest of a New Jersey man in one of the nation's most baffling missing-children cases, the disappearance more than three decades ago of 6-year-old Etan Patz.
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