The Byron Clean Energy Center is a nuclear power plant located in Ogle County, Illinois, 2 miles (3.2 km) east of the Rock River.

[3] The firm of Sargent & Lundy acted as consulting engineer during construction and Babcock & Wilcox oversaw the completion of the reactor vessels.

[4] The League of Women Voters, DeKalb Area Alliance for Responsible Energy, and others were involved in the lawsuit over the safety of and need for the plant.

Ultimately, the board overturned its decision in October 1984 and permission was granted to operate after a re-inspection of over 200,000 items and components within the plant.

[10] In August 2021, Exelon stated a proposed $15/MWh federal production tax credit (PTC) would not be legislated in time to avoid closing Byron and Dresden.

[11] However, by September 13, 2021, the Illinois Senate approved a bill containing nearly $700 million in subsidies for the state's nuclear plants, including Byron, causing Exelon to reverse the shutdown order.

[15] The plant utilizes non-contact cooling water from the Rock River, situated 2 miles (3.2 km) to the west.

[20] The report coincided with ongoing tritium concerns at the Exelon-owned Braidwood Nuclear Generating Station near Braceville, Illinois.

[19] In September, elevated tritium levels were found at Byron in three monitoring wells adjacent to vacuum breaker vaults along the blowdown line.

[16] Tritium is a very low level beta emitter with an approximate half-life of 12.3 years and it cannot penetrate the outer dead layer of skin.

[16] On April 12, 2006 the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) issued a violation notice to Exelon concerning Byron Nuclear Generating Station.

[22] Due to the tritium contamination at Byron, Braidwood and Dresden nuclear power plants in Illinois, the state government passed a law requiring power plants to report the release of radioactive contaminants into the soil, surface water or ground water to the state within 24 hours.

[23] Before the law was passed, companies operating nuclear plants were only required to report such releases to the federal NRC.

[23] As of the second quarter of 2007, Byron Clean Energy Center scored in the "green" in every Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) inspection category but one.

Specifically, they violated rules that require the Emergency Core Cooling System (ECCS) pump casing and discharge piping high points be vented once every 31 days.

When operators discovered the loss of the single phase, they manually tripped the breaker feeding the startup transformers, allowing the emergency diesel generators to start and restore normal voltages to the safety buses.

Steam was vented from the non-radioactive, secondary side of the plant to aid in the cooling process while the turbines remained offline.

A small amount of radioactive tritium was released into the local environment during the initial venting procedure, but was deemed no threat to the public by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

In this case the breaker feeding the transformers tripped automatically and the emergency diesel generators immediately started up to restore power to the safety buses.

[41] The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's estimate of the risk each year of an earthquake intense enough to cause core damage to the reactor at Byron was 1 in 172,414, according to an NRC study published in August 2010.