Kankakee River

The Des Plaines River () is a river that flows southward for 133 miles (214 km) through southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois in the United States Midwest, eventually meeting the Kankakee River west of Channahon to form the Illinois River, a tributary of the Mississippi River. Native Americans used the river as transportation route and portage. When French explorers and missionaries arrived in the 1600s, in what was then the Illinois Country of New France, they named the waterway La Rivière des Plaines (River of the Plane Tree) as they felt that trees on the river resembled the European plane tree. The local Native Americans showed these early European explorers how to traverse waterways of the Des Plaines watershed to travel from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River and its valley. Parts of the river are now part of the Illinois Waterway and the Chicago Area Waterway System.

Dresden Generating Station (also known as Dresden Nuclear Power Plant or Dresden Nuclear Power Station) is the first privately financed nuclear power plant built in the United States. Dresden 1 was activated in 1960 and retired in 1978. Operating since 1970 are Dresden units 2 and 3, two General Electric BWR-3 boiling water reactors. Dresden Station is located on a 953-acre (386 ha) site in Grundy County, Illinois, at the head of the Illinois River, near the city of Morris. It is immediately northeast of the Morris Operation—the only de facto high-level radioactive waste storage site in the United States. It serves Chicago and the northern quarter of the state of Illinois, capable of producing 867 megawatts of electricity from each of its two reactors, enough to power over one million average American homes. In 2004, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) renewed the operating licenses for both reactors, extending them from forty years to sixty.

The Morris Operation in Grundy County, Illinois, United States, is the location of the only permanent (the rest are temporary) de facto high-level radioactive waste storage site in the United States and holds 772 tons of spent nuclear fuel. It is owned by GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy and located near the city of Morris. The site is located immediately southwest of Dresden Generating Station. Spent nuclear fuel assemblies are stored at this away-from-reactor, Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation (ISFSI) in a spent fuel storage pool. The storage basins at the Morris Operation store spent high-level radioactive waste from Connecticut Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, Cooper Nuclear Station, Dresden Generating Station, Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant, and San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. The newest fuel currently in storage has been at the site since 1989, and the basins are essentially full. No new fuel will be received and storage is limited to the current inventory.

Minooka Community High School, or MCHS, is a public four-year high school located in Minooka, Illinois, a southwest suburb of Chicago, in the United States. It is part of Minooka Community High School District 111.

The Dresden Island Lock and Dam is a 23.4-acre (9.5 ha) Lock and Dam complex on the Illinois River in Morris, Illinois. The dam was completed in 1933 and designed by engineer Walter Mickle Smith. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004. The listing included one contributing building and three contributing structures.The lock and dam complex includes an arched gravity dam, a spillway, nine Tainter gates, 18 headgates, and a section of fill dirt connecting the headgates to the embankment of the Illinois & Michigan Canal. The lock and dam are 1,320 feet (400 m) long, and the lock has a maximum lift of 22 feet (6.7 m).The state of Illinois began constructing the dam in 1928. In 1930, the state had completed 35% of the dam but lacked the money to complete it, so the federal government built the remainder of the dam.The Dresden Island Lock and Dam is documented in a Historic American Engineering Record.

Channahon ( SHAN-ə-hon) is a village in Grundy and Will counties in the U.S. state of Illinois. The population was 13,383 at the 2020 census.Located in a rural area southwest of Joliet, Illinois, Channahon lies at the confluence of the Des Plaines, Kankakee, and DuPage rivers, where they form the Illinois River. The Illinois and Michigan Canal runs through the village, intersecting the DuPage at Channahon State Park. Most of the village is within Channahon Township in Will County. The current village president is Missey Moorman Schumacher.

Goose Lake Prairie State Natural Area is a 2,537-acre (1,027 ha) state park and listed state nature preserve. More than half of the state park is a tallgrass prairie maintained as a natural area of Illinois. It is located in Grundy County near the town of Morris, approximately 50 miles (80 km) southwest of Chicago.

Channahon State Park is an Illinois state park in Will County, Illinois, United States. The park was named after a Native American word meaning "the meeting of the waters". It lies adjacent to the confluence of the Dupage, Des Plaines, and Kankakee Rivers. The park is near the municipality of Channahon, Illinois. It is served by U.S. Highway 6.

The DuPage River is a 28.3-mile-long (45.5 km) tributary of the Des Plaines River in the U.S. state of Illinois.

The Briscoe Mounds, officially Illinois Archaeological Survey No. Wi-25, is an archaeological site in Channahon, Illinois. The mound site is located along the north edge of the Des Plaines River and is the largest mound site in northern Illinois. The site takes its name from the Briscoe family, who owned the property until selling it to the state. Briscoe Mounds is now owned by the Illinois State Museum, who plan on building a visitor center in the future. The two mounds on the site were built between 1200 and 1500 AD in the Mississippian Period. The first survey of the mounds was in 1938; a later survey in 1940 revealed nine distinctive pieces of pottery. The mounds were excavated in 1964, revealing sixteen bodies. The mounds were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.

The Kankakee Torrent was a catastrophic flood that occurred about 19,000 calibrated years ago in the Midwestern United States. It resulted from a breach of moraines forming a large glacial lake fed by the melting of the Late Wisconsin Laurentide Ice Sheet. The point of origin of the flood was Lake Chicago. The landscape south of Chicago still shows the effects of the torrent, particularly at Kankakee River State Park and on the Illinois River at Starved Rock State Park.

Lorenzo is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) in Will County, Illinois, United States. It is in the southwest part of the county, in the valley of the Kankakee River. Interstate 55 passes 1 mile (1.6 km) to the east, and the city of Wilmington is 6 miles (10 km) to the southeast. Lorenzo was first listed as a CDP prior to the 2020 census.