When Chris Williams stepped onto a Greyhound bus at a Long Island station in January 1980, he anticipated a three-week stay in Indiana. He was venturing into the heartland at the behest of some activists he had befriended at a workshop in Chicago. They were organizing a canvass for the fledgling Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana (CAC) in Indianapolis and sought his help with the cause.

Williams' three-week help session grew into a quarter century, the last 18 years of which he served as executive director of CAC, Indiana's largest and most successful citizen advocacy group. Today finds the 51-year-old back where his activist career began — fighting nuclear power in New England. He retired from CAC last month and moved to Vermont. Before leaving, Williams took time out from a going-away bash at a colleague's home in Indy to reminisce on tape about CAC and his life and times as a "naturalized Hoosier."

"I couldn't be prouder of what CAC is," Williams said, his booming, baritone voice rising above the party din as he gestured toward the multigenerational gathering of activists he has worked with over the past quarter century. "Look around CAC, and it's like, yeah, we knocked down these two nuclear plants. And we got these laws on the books, and there's grudging respect from all these institutions."

Indeed, during a 90-minute interview frequently interrupted by hand shakes, toasts and bear hugs from a flood of friends and former colleagues, Williams cited a litany of CAC accomplishments, including but not limited to:

Landmark legislation on long-term care for senior citizens and pollution prevention;

Thwarted legislative attempts by electric utility and telecommunications giants to shakedown consumers through schemes such as "construction work in progress" and "local measured service";

Longstanding alliances with organized labor;

Ongoing campaigns on behalf of family farmers; and

A canvass that, 25 years after he helped create it, still takes the citizens agenda directly to people in 30 Indiana communities and raises between $1.5 million and $2 million annually to support CAC's greater mission.

But down in Williams' belly, it's the nukes that have stoked the embers that burn therein. In a quote that surely had its genesis in New England three decades ago, Williams said: "I want to kick the shit out of the nuclear industry. I want to hit them where they live. I want them to go sleep pissed off. I want them to wake up nervous. Go back to sleep pissed off. Wake up nervous. I want to confront them."

When the call that would change Chris Williams' life came in the winter of 1980, he had already been involved in nuclear energy and been victimized by Indiana public policy.

As a student studying environmental science at New York State University at Plattsburgh in the early 1970s, Williams had gotten involved in the anti-nuclear movement. Joining with groups like the Shad Alliance, he had protested nuclear power at the Shoreham and Seabrook nuclear power plants on Long Island and in New Hampshire.

And as a post-graduate resident of the Adirondacks, he witnessed first-hand the damage that acid rain was having on his beloved mountains, much of it caused by pollution from coal burning power plants in Indiana.

"I was just wondering where I was going to apply this education and happened to be down visiting my family in New York, and there was an ad in the paper for activists," he said. "'Environmental activists' is what it said, and I looked at it and said, 'Wow, that's me.'"

The job was with the New York Public Interest Research Group, canvassing on Long Island against the Shoreham nuke. Williams had been on the job for three weeks when they sent him for the Chicago training that introduced him to "this great bunch of people from Indiana."

"I got to know these people, and I went back to New York," he said, "and while I was happy with the PIRG, you know, I really didn't want to be on Long Island. I had done my 18 years there. And so the call came out from the people I knew in Indiana."

In 1980, when Williams began "banging on doors" and talking with Hoosiers about a ban on wintertime utility disconnections for nonpayment of bills, Public Service Indiana (a/k/a PSI, n/ka Cinergy) was financially melting down from cost overruns on its Marble Hill Nuclear Power Plant on the Ohio River near Madison. The Northern Indiana Public Service Co.'s (NIPSCO) attempt to build a nuke on the shifting sands of Lake Michigan was likewise coming unraveled. And both were looking for ratepayers to bail them out.

PSI had proposed legislation that would allow the utility to charge customers for "construction work in progress" (CWIP), which Williams said "basically turns utility regulation on its head and allows them to get money from ratepayers before they produce anything of value for ratepayers." At his urging, CAC canvassed on the issue to great effect.

"We beat the hell out of CWIP," he said. "People got it. We had the rap down, and people got it. There were three CWIP proposals, and we beat them three years running, and really pissed a lot of legislators off. I remember Jack Guy, who was a senator from Monticello, standing up at the lectern in the State Senate saying, 'This is unfortunate. The Citizens Action Coalition is responsible for this. Let no one forget that. They're out banging on doors, they're talking to our constituents, and they're not going away.'"

NIPSCO abandoned its Bailly nuke in 1981 at the "hole-in-the-ground" stage and simply asked the Public Service Commission, now the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission, to have ratepayers pay for their nuclear misadventure.

"The then-Public Service Commission, when NIPSCO asked to get the money back, they said, 'Sure,'" Williams said. "And we got a temporary restraining order, which turned into an appeal, saying it's not used and useful, which isn't a really difficult concept to understand. If it's not used and useful, if it's just a hole in the ground, then you can't charge people for it."

CAC won, and NIPSCO appealed. "The appeals court said, 'Yeah, CAC's right, it's a hole in the ground.' So we said, 'Well, let's have a party,' which is what we do."

NIPSCO appealed to the Indiana Supreme Court. "The State Supreme Court said, 'CAC is right, it's a hole in the ground,' two years later. We have a big party."

NIPSCO appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to accept transfer. "They didn't write a huge thing, but they let you know what they're thinking. And they basically said, 'It's a hole in the ground. The lower court ruling stands.' We had a party."

Williams chuckled when reminded that he has said he hired Grant Smith "because he wore a suit to his interview but kept him because he showed up for work every day." Smith succeeded Williams as CAC's executive director, and Williams recalled Smith's early days at CAC and his pivotal role in state legislation that created a pollution prevention institute at Purdue University.

"I hired Grant in 1982," he said. "I retrained him, which means I actually took him out on the doors his third night after he'd observed and showed him a different set of skills and raps. He and I were out in the fog in Brownsburg beating on PSI and CWIP, and he got it right off the bat."

Smith took over the Toxics Action Project (TAP) coordinator's position from Paul Bryan, who had worked with Jeff Stant on the Hoosier National Forest issue in the late 1970s. CAC had launched TAP in 1984.

"Grant collaborated with some folks out of Boston at a group called the National Toxics Campaign, which was designed to reauthorize Superfund," Williams said. "And he ran across a guy named Dave Allen, and the two of them started collaborating about the concept of pollution prevention, which is just a win-win situation where you can show people — businesses and industries — how to reduce pollution and increase their bottom line. And that ultimately ended up in the establishment of the Pollution Prevention and Safe Materials Handling Institute at Purdue, which I call the Grant Smith Institute."

Williams also noted the contributions of John Cardwell, another multi-decade CAC activist whose focus has been on long-term care for seniors and economic justice for Indiana family farmers, whose heritage he shares. Cardwell is leaving CAC to work full time on The Generations Project, a senior citizens advocacy project.

"John Cardwell, our legislative director who's been around a long time, too, was the primary author and advocate of the state's home care program known as CHOICE," Williams said. "And again, that's something we brought to the doors and told people. 'We can put seniors in warehouses and then bankrupt them and then just have the state take over and pay the bills every month, or we can look to alternatives that provide people with the option of staying in their homes, and save money."

As for family farmers, "We see them as an underpowered, certainly underrepresented, constituency that has natural affinity with consumers. ... We've gone door to door on a lot of farm issues that have that commonality."

After CAC won a "fat award" award from its legal campaign against Marble Hill and created an endowment, Williams said, "it created some chaos because suddenly this poor organization had money." But one issue that he insisted remain a priority was nuclear power.

"There's a lot of people that we need to work with around the country because the job is done in Indiana but it isn't done," he said. In the past six years, Williams has led Hoosier contingents to anti-nuclear events in several states, including Michigan, where the D.C. Cook Nuclear Plant provides power to some northwestern Indiana residents, and in Illinois, Ohio, and Vermont.

"When the debate started on mobile Chernobyl, which is the plan to move the spent fuel, or irradiated fuel from all reactors out to a seismically active mountain out in Nevada," Williams said, "we jumped in there and said, 'Look, we don't have any of those nuclear plants here, and they ain't coming through Indiana. We're going to barricade the roads. ... We did a great campaign on that, and we had the likes of Mark Souder voting against it. We had David McIntosh voting against it."

Indiana, he said, is somewhat legendary among national anti-nukes for beating the industry outright. "When they see the Suburbans pulling in, they say, 'Ooh, it's the Hoosiers. The Hoosiers are here.' They always held us in really high esteem because we beat them, you know? It's history."

As Chris Williams prepared for a return to his Vermont roots in a "fairly isolated, out-of-the-way place" near Middlebury, he said the plan is loose: "The idea is that we're going to get on the ground and figure it out. We lead a frugal lifestyle, and that's what we'll do. We got this old beat-up house outright, got our cars paid for."

But nukes will figure prominently in the calculation. Williams has already been asked to join the board of the Nuclear Information Research Center, which he calls "the premier anti-nuclear umbrella group in the country." He was planning to participate at a demonstration at the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant last week.

His vision: "I want to start something new, and maybe not do it exactly the same way. ... I want to educate and organize initially in the immediate communities around the reactors, which is where people are really getting the shit beat out of them health-wise. There's a constant flow of low-level radiation, which more and more studies have shown is worse than being exposed to a momentary flash of high levels. Cancer rates, miscarriages, childhood leukemias, premature births, it goes on and on and on."

The nuclear industry is planning a revival, Williams said, noting that one group has applied for a federal grant to prepare the first license application for a new nuke in the United States since Three Mile Island. But as anti-nuke activists strategize, they recognize that the landscape is dramatically post-9/11.

"Nuclear power plants, in the context of homeland security, have been given a new status," he said. "And the people guarding them, and the companies that own them, have new powers that derive from the Homeland Security Act. And I think we've taken a step back to figure out what that means.

"I'm not going to ask one of these kids -- if they want civil disobedience training, then I'll give it to them -- but I'm not going to ask them to cross a line at a nuclear power plant if it means they could possibly be incarcerated and have habeas corpus revoked and just go in this black hole.

"In Illinois they passed a state law making it a felony and punishable by three years in prison if you're arrested protesting on the grounds of a nuclear power plant. So we have to rethink this all."

Steven Higgs is editor of The Bloomington Alternative. He also works as a paid consultant for the Citizens Action Coalition Education Fund and is editor of Citizens Power, CAC's newsletter, in which a Q&A version of this story will appear in the Summer 2004 issue.