One Sunday afternoon in late 1967 or early ’68, my family went on an eventful outing to a spot just across the Keowee River from Pickens County.

“Someday,” my dad said, gazing prophetically across a graded red clay landscape, “they’ll be splitting atoms down there to make electricity.”

Duke Power had just broken ground on its first nuclear station. To my 14-year-old mind it seemed like an incredibly futuristic, fantastical undertaking.

Little did I know that I would someday go down inside one of the nuclear reactor buildings

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