This story is from Texas Monthly’s archives. We have left the text as it was originally published to maintain a clear historical record. Read more here about our archive digitization project. So there she was, sitting at her kitchen table in a polyester pantsuit, drinking a glass of Ovaltine, and waiting for the Comanche Peak nuclear power plant to go “critical.” Meanwhile, eighty miles away in Glen Rose, technicians at the plant were fiddling with boron levels in the coolant water. Then, at 5:43 p.m. on April 3, 1990, the first neutron particle slammed into a lone atom of uranium 235, splitting off other neutrons to collide with more uranium atoms and create a chain reaction. Minutes later Juanita Ellis got a phone call from…The post Power Switch appeared first on Texas Monthly.