Let me take you back to 1979. I am working in Washington, DC in an environmental think-tank, trying to save the world via writing policy papers and promoting energy conservation concepts of the Carter administration. I am attending an event that mixes environmentalists with business types, and I am seated next to some senior executive of a major electric power company. In my early 20s, I am still somewhat new to the Washington power scene, and not very good at making small talk (not that I have gotten any better now). So he turns to me and asks me which of the electric power generation technologies is the most environmentally friendly. I promptly answer “nuclear power, of course” and that sort of shocks him. And we have a very nice conversation before the start of the event.

You could probably still make that argument today, even given the various accidents, decommissioning and long-term spent fuel storage issues that nuclear power has brought about.

But my purpose in writing this post isn’t to promote nuclear power, but to tell you a story that has an odd series of my own personal connections. I was reminded of this story after seeing reports in the news this week about the end of the Trojan nuclear plant outside of Portland, Oregon. The plant was finally decommissioned (meaning that its cooling tower and other major structures were intentionally blown up, and its core components removed from the site) after being out of service for the past 13 years. The event that got all the press play was the destruction of its cooling tower, perhaps the most memorable structure in the plant and an icon for nuclear plants around the world. (Some also say that mismanagement of Trojan was the inspiration for the nuclear plant in the Simpsons, but I can’t verify that.)

I actually visited the plant in 1977 on my way across country via bicycle to attend Stanford’s graduate engineering school. It is an odd choice for a tourist stop, but Trojan was one of the few — if not the only nuclear plant in the nation at the time — that you could actually see the control room on a public tour. And since I was quite literally riding right past the place (I was biking down the Pacific Coast on my way to Palo Alto), it was inevitable that I took the tour and got to see its facilities, including its soon-to-be famous control room.

This control room became famous through an odd series of circumstances. Back in the late 1970s, nuclear-generated electricity was controversial, which is why my comments to the electric utility executive were so out of place. Most environmentalists weren’t looking at the overall carbon budget and greenhouse gas issues, and were instead concerned with the spotty safety record of many of the plants. Storage of the spent fuel from the reactors was then — as now — a difficult issue. (Trojan’s fuel rods are still stored on the site, because they have no place to go.) Some utilities were spending huge sums of money to build plants that were never operated and that turned into white elephants, such as the reactor in Shoreham, Long Island.

Then Three Mile Island happened in 1979 and safety issues transformed the industry. Interestingly, while no new plants have been built for a decade, the percentage of nuclear-generated electricity has almost doubled to about a fifth of our overall electricity today.

What ties all of this history together for me is a movie called The China Syndrome that starred Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas. The movie became infamous because it portrays a nuclear accident that is similar to the one experienced at Three Mile Island, yet timing is everything: the movie was released just a few days prior to the accident. The actual events surrounding the ones portrayed in the movie did have historical antecedents at a research reactor at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory that is now operated by Boeing in the hills north of Calabasas, Calif. And in another twist of fate, I worked nearby at the offices of Tom’s Hardware — which is just a few miles away from this facility as the crow flies, although to drive there would take much longer.

While the movie was filmed on a set, the set was made to closely resemble the Trojan control room and much of the action in the film takes place there. You could say that it was the most famous control room for any nuclear plant given its role in the movie. Fonda plays a TV reporter who is doing a puff piece on the plant but gets involved in the events surrounding the accident, and Jack Lemmon has a wonderful role as one of the chief plant engineers.

Regardless what you personally think about nuclear power, I was a little sad about hearing that Trojan no longer exists. Here in LA we tend to dynamite various architectural icons as quickly as you can say tear down. And it is doubly ironic that the actual place that is the model for the movie no longer exists, while the research reactor that did have the problem (this was decades ago) is within a few miles of some very pricey real estate. And few people even know of its existence as one of the first nuclear reactors in California.