"Bill would invite radioactive waste dump to Wisconsin"

Al GedicksAl Gedicks, of La Crosse, WI (photo, left) is executive secretary of the Wisconsin Resources Protection Council, and an emeritus professor of sociology at UW-La Crosse. He has written an op-ed in the Wisconsin State Journal warning against current state legislative efforts to repeal a long-standing, common sense moratorium on new reactors in Wisconsin.

His op-ed begins:

Under current law, the state cannot approve another nuclear power plant unless there is a federally licensed repository for high-level nuclear waste, and the plant wouldn’t burden ratepayers. The nuclear industry can’t meet these common-sense conditions that have protected Wisconsin citizens for 33 years, so it wants to repeal the law.

If Wisconsin’s moratorium on building nuclear power plants is repealed, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) will have all the more reason to reconsider the granite bedrock of Wisconsin’s Wolf River Batholith as a permanent nuclear waste repository. The DOE is desperate to find a host for a permanent geologic repository for nuclear waste because of the failed attempt to site such a repository on the lands of the Western Shoshone Indians in Nevada.

In December 2015, the DOE launched a so-called “consent-based process” to site an underground repository for high-level nuclear waste from commercial reactors.

The legislative sponsors of the repeal seem to be unaware that the moratorium was enacted to protect Wisconsin citizens from becoming the host to a permanent geologic nuclear waste repository.

More.