This newscast aired at 4:33pm on 6-5-2025 on WGLT.
From the WGLT Newsroom, I'm Ben Howell. Canadian wildfire smoke has caused unhealthy air quality in Bloomington Normal. The Ecology Action Center in NORMA says people should stay indoors whenever possible. Sensitive groups will feel health effects right away, and healthy groups will feel difficulty breathing and throat irritation. The unhealthy air quality reading came from a monitor on the southwest side of Bloomington. The air quality index is expected to return to healthy levels at midnight.
A central Illinois lawmaker is celebrating the passage of a bill to expand the Twin Cities' access to recycled wastewater. The bill will allow the Bloomington Normal Water Reclamation District to accept wastewater and sell treated wastewater to companies within a 50 mile radius. State Senator Dave Kahler says the measure will help power data centers in the region.
Without depleting the supply of drinking
water,
there's no, no good reason at all for taking water out of the Muhammed aquifer, good clean drinking water and trying to use it just to to cool down computers that are using it for, for data
processing.
The bill heads to Governor JB Pritzker's desk for signature.
Opponents of new nuclear power plants in Illinois point to huge cost overruns at a reactor built recently in Georgia, which could make it too expensive to compete with other energy sources. Constellation Policy vice president Mason Emnett says costs will fall on future plants because until the one in Georgia, the nation hadn't built commercial reactors in decades. The systems in place, the people power.
The engineering, the construction facilities, they're highly specialized for the nuclear industry, and so that had to be stood up. For example, MIT says the second reactor in Georgia costs 30% less than the first, and the latest instance of bids for government work far exceeding municipal staff estimates involves a cracked concrete floor repair at the town of Normal water department.
Mayor Chris Kos of Normal says it's not a case of hope obscuring reality, it's a reality that keeps shifting. And things are in such a flux right now. The prices moved so radically, so fast. It's, it's really hard to do. The bid to the town came in 54% above the estimate, and that was the low bid. The town council swallowed hard and approved the bid this week. I'm Ben.