This is the second in a series.

As you stand on any Long Beach Island beach watching the sunrise, your view has changed little since the founding of the country. If you turn around, however, nothing is the same.

The events that took place during the late 1960s and early 1970s did preserve one of those views that had been threatened by development. By 1969, plans for the proposed Pinelands Jetport had bogged down, but a spinoff of the project was the construction of the state’s first commercial nuclear reactor, in Lacey…