You mean there's actually a building at Thomas Edison? I thought I just sent my $ to a PO Box!
I drove through Trenton, New Jersey at three in the morning coming from the last oyster creek outage. The surprisingly attractive downtown area was totally deserted.
As I slowly passed the clock that serves as the Thomas Edison State College logo and turned at the corner that the single large brick campus building is located on, I saw a commemorative plaque in front of an antique metal fence.
In reading the plaque I remembered the vivid description of the icy night of December 25, 1776, given by David McCullough in his recent national best seller, "1776".
Standing in front of the plaque, the fence, and the small and well preserved wooden building that had been the barracks for the Hessian troops that the desperate General George Washington had overwhelmed on that frozen Christmas Night...I looked right at the loading dock at the back of the Thomas Edison State College building, then left, across the street, at the sidewalked banks of the Delaware River.
The Oyster Creek outage had gone well and the concensus among the permanent employees at the oldest operating nuclear power plant in America was that the soon to expire forty year license would be extended for another twenty years.
It was November 6, 2008, and as I left Trenton, driving west on the three thousand mile long, New York to San Francisco, Interstate 80, I wondered what George Washington would have thought about this new and transformational leader that we had just elected as the forty fourth president of the country that he created on that last chance moment in the ice, in the dark.
Bill Runge, Bachelor of Science Degree, Applied Science and Technology, Radiation Protection, Thomas Edison State College, 1994