"Door cracks open to U.S. nuclear waste storage in Great Lakes basin"

A 2009 photo of the Wolf River, a tributary of the Fox River, near Lily, Wis. at a military park along Wisconsin Highway 55. The river is designated a National Wild and Scenic River. (Wikimedia Commons | Royalbroil) As reported by Garret Ellison at MLive, the State of Wisconsin House of Representatives' passage by voice vote (meaning how individual members voted was not recorded) of Assembly Bill 384 would open up the state to not only new atomic reactors, but also a radioative waste dump.

The legislation -- which has not yet cleared the State of Wisconsin Senate -- would repeal a 33-year old ban on new reactors in the state. As reported by Al Gedicks, executive secretary of the Wisconsin Resources Protection Council, the ban was enacted in the first place, to protect Wisconsin from being targeted for a national high-level radioactive waste dump.

In the 1980s, Wisconsin was at the very top of the list for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in its "Eastern site search" for a commercial irradiated nuclear fuel and nuclear weapons complex high-level radioactive waste dump-site.

DOE specifically targeted a granite formation in northern WI named the Wolf River Batholith (see photo, above left). Another granite formation under consideration in northern WI by DOE was the Puritan Pluton.

But the Eastern site search was indefinitely suspended in 1986, and the sole focus for a national dump-site became Yucca Mountain with the "Screw Nevada bill" of 1987 (officially entited the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act). A clause in the "Screw Nevada bill" prohibited granite formations from being further considered, but a 2008 DOE report revealed that the agency was still interested in the potential for a granite repository in any of a large number of states, including WI. And current DOE experimentation with deep borehole disposal is specifically focused on granite geology.

As Gedicks warned, Assembly Bill 384's passage by voice vote in the WI State House of Representatives has moved the state one step closer to placing itself back on DOE's target list for an Eastern high-level radioactive waste dump. Let's hope the WI State Senate has more wisdom, than to get rid of such basic protections.