It was a Christmas miracle that would electrify a generation.

Twenty years ago, at 6:57 a.m. on Christmas Day -- with financial ruin and turmoil all around them -- a crew of 20 workers lowered the first nuclear fuel assembly into Plant No. 2's reactor vessel.

It was a symbolic event that all but guaranteed the Washington Public Power Supply System's woeful nuclear construction campaign would produce at least one operating power plant.

For workers, who had little time to be distracted by the dark clouds looming above them, the milestone brought great relief.

"It was really an exciting time," said John Arbuckle, whose family spent Christmas Day waiting for him in Yakima while he watched fuel bundles descend into the vessel at the rate of two per hour. "We were so focused on making this a success."

Until then it wasn't clear the supply system, now known as Energy Northwest, ever would finish a single plant among the five it started building in the 1970s. Construction had stopped at four of the projects amid a series of cost overruns, regulatory changes and power shortages that never materialized.

The $2.25 billion municipal bond default on two of the projects was only 6 months old and would be the largest in the country's history for the next 11 years. The very governance of the public power consortium had been changed by the Legislature, diluting the influence of its member utilities.

Voters a year earlier approved an initiative that effectively would prevent public utilities from ever attempting to build large power plants again without a public vote, a hurdle no one has yet attempted to scale.

And environmental protesters were weighing in, too, opposing the startup of the nuclear facility.

By December 1983, Plant No. 2 was long overdue, way over budget and its construction account was out of money. Originally pegged to come online in 1977 at a cost of $407 million, the plant now figured to cost $3.2 billion. The region's tolerance for further delays and costs had run out.

Time was money, and there wasn't enough of either to allow for a holiday break.

"We had to lasso that steer to keep it from running," said Dusty Rhoads, who at the time was responsible for leading a crew of workers charged with ensuring the plant's equipment would operate during an extreme earthquake. "That may have been our last chance. I know if there had been an extended period of time, we would have been caught in the snowball of the default."

But on Dec. 20, 11 years and four months after the plant's groundbreaking ceremony, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued an operating license that would allow the supply system to begin the process of bringing the plant online for the first time.

Final preparations were wrapped up late Christmas Eve. Within hours, the control room announced to the rest of the plant that the first of 764 fuel bundles was being loaded.

Though the point of no return wouldn't truly come until the first sustained chain reaction was achieved a month later, getting the fuel loaded was viewed to be the political end zone.

"For the people who went through that, it was really significant," said Gary Miller, an Energy Northwest spokesman and author of a book chronicling the history of the former supply system.

At the time, workers hoped finishing the plant would prove their mettle and lead to the completion of two of the other projects. That never happened. But Plant No. 2, now known as the Columbia Generating Station, has been Bonneville's largest baseload resource since it commenced operation in 1984 and could be relicensed to run through 2044.

But for many, the plant's future wasn't cemented until Christmas Day 1983.

"We saw a path forward not only for WNP-2, but for the company," Arbuckle said.