before the fall

This silhouette is unmistakable wherever you see it, whether near Three Mile Island or, as in this case, Fall River, Mass. And every time I see it, I can't help wondering whether Jane Fonda did us an enormous disservice. Yes, we haven't had a Chernoble, but our air is filled with emissions and our war zones with oil wells. Europe runs on nuclear power. And, in a great big ironic loop,  in the U.S. so-called "clean energy" can't get off the ground on account of environmentalists talking about view sheds and noise pollution and fish. I wonder how much of the aversion we feel for these towers is that they look slightly sinister. Or do they only look sinister because we know what they betoken?