None of its founders can remember the actual date of the Snake River Alliance's first meeting in 1979.

It was in the spring, soon after the Three Mile Island Reactor in Pennsylvania partially melted down, raising fears nationwide about nuclear power. A report by U.S. Geological Survey scientist Jack Barraclough had just been made public showing iodine 129 in concentrations more than 25 times the allowable standards for drinking water near a well at the Idaho National Laboratory in eastern Idaho.

Dorian Duffin, a Rupert farm boy and a student at Boise State University, was meeting on campus with other students to form a group to do something about the waste. Across the Boise River, other people, including pregnant mother Diane Jones, were meeting at the same time on a Julia Davis Park bench after answering a classified ad about forming an anti-nuclear group.

Jones had heard about the student meeting, so she ran over the Capitol Bridge to the campus and urged Duffin's group to join the others at the park bench. The Snake River Alliance was born.

"It was just a funny, quirky thing," said Jones, now an organic farmer in Boise with her husband, Michael. "I thought, 'This is in the stars. It is is meant to be.'"

The alliance grew into a coalition of anti-nuclear, peace, disarmament and alternative-energy activists that has helped reshape the attitudes of Idahoans on issues ranging from nuclear waste to wind power. It celebrates its 30th anniversary with a banquet at 6 p.m. Saturday at the Basque Center.

NUCLEAR WATCHDOG

The alliance's first role, and one that continues today, was as a watchdog over what is now known as the Idaho National Laboratory. Its first campaign focused on stopping the U.S. Department of Energy from injecting waste into the Eastern Snake River Plain Aquifer.

The department announced in 1984 that it would stop the injections after Gov. John Evans formed a task force that was critical of the practice. The alliance's next organized campaign came in 1986, fighting a federal plan to build a plant at the INL to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.

Led by a dynamic executive director, Liz Paul, a former window washer, the group filled hearings in Twin Falls and Boise with hundreds of opponents and made concerns over the INL's future a statewide issue. Then Republican Sen. James McClure called the alliance a "radical fringe" group, a feeling shared by people who worked at the lab.

"I think there was an attitude that these scientists and engineers are smarter than anyone else and that the average citizen didn't have the right to question the experts," said Lane Allgood, a former INL employee and now director of the Partnership for Science and Technology, an Idaho Falls-based pro-nuclear group. "But that attitude is gone, and the Snake River Alliance played a big role in that."

MORE VICTORIES

In the early 1990s the Cold War ended. With the government swimming in plutonium, the plutonium plant was scrapped. After prodding from the state and the alliance, the Federal Facilities Compliance Act required DOE hazardous-waste management to comply with environmental laws.

But nuclear waste continued to worry Idahoans. Gov. Cecil Andrus had stopped a nuclear waste shipment at the border in 1988. The Snake River Alliance shifted its focus to stopping the shipments of waste into the state.

Beatrice Brailsford of Pocatello, who started with the alliance as a volunteer and became its primary staff expert on the lab, remembers a woman stopping her in line in a grocery store in 1992 after one of the alliance's protests against waste shipments.

"She said, 'When you stand on that overpass you are standing for thousands,'" Brailsford said.

ON THE LOSING SIDE OF WASTE VOTE

In 1995 Gov. Phil Batt signed an agreement with the Department of Energy that set a schedule for removing low-level, long-lived nuclear waste stored at the INL. But the agreement allowed the U.S. Navy to continue delivering highly radioactive spent fuel rods to Idaho for reprocessing and storage.

Many members of the Snake River Alliance opposed the agreement and placed an initiative on the ballot in 1996 to overturn it. But Batt was able to garner support from across the state under the slogan "get the waste out." That was more popular than the initiative proponents' "stop the shipments" slogan, and Batt won big.

Brailsford didn't consider it a defeat for the alliance.

"Everyone who voted was voting their concern for nuclear waste," she said.

IN THE MAINSTREAM

The group has evolved over the years, and few consider it a part of the radical fringe today. The Energy Department appointed Brailsford to its Citizen Advisory Committee in the early 1990s. Allgood said he often confers with Brailsford in efforts to protect environmental cleanup funding for the INL.

"I'm glad they exist," Allgood said. "They play an important role."

But he adds: "The difference between us and the Snake River Alliance is they're an anti-nuclear organization and we're a pro-nuclear. If they make statements that are misleading and wrong, we'll challenge them on it."

Today, the alliance has an annual budget of $300,000, a staff of five and more than 1,000 members statewide, largely from the Treasure Valley and Ketchum. Most of its funding comes from Northwest foundations such as the Bullitt Foundation and the Edwards Mother Earth Foundation.

A DUAL MISSION

The group splits its efforts between advocating clean energy options like wind, solar and energy efficiency and its watchdog and anti-nuclear campaigns. It has led a campaign to stop a nuclear power plant in Elmore County and is gearing up to fight the French company Areva's construction of a uranium enrichment plant near Idaho Falls.

Allgood will be doing everything he can to bring the $2 billion plant and its thousands of construction and 250 permanent jobs to the state. And he'll have all four of Idaho's members of Congress and Gov. Butch Otter on his side.

The alliance, led by current Executive Director Andrea Shipley, will be doing everything it can to stop Areva.

"It's the biggest threat to Idaho in 30 years, and I've had more than one of our founders say that to me," Shipley said.

Rocky Barker: 377-6484