I still remember the party that night in 1983 when Wisconsin voters passed a statewide referendum banning construction of new nuclear power plants until the nation created someplace to safely store deadly, radioactive nuclear waste.
It was a victory for ordinary citizens over just about every powerful force in government and industry united in condemning us as totally unreasonable and irresponsible.
All the reasonable, responsible people agreed: It would simply be impossible to supply the energy to run this nation unless we continued building nuclear plants.
Three decades later, we now know that was an outrageous lie.
Wisconsin was one of the first of 13 states to pass a moratorium. But even in states that ignored the threat to public safety, soaring costs soon brought new construction to a halt anyway.
And during those three decades, our political system still has failed to create a safe storage repository for radioactive nuclear waste that remains deadly for hundreds of thousands of years.
As a result, dangerous waste remains spread all over this country at nuclear sites that were abandoned years ago. Who knows how long we’ll even remember what went on there. Future archeologists uncovering our so-called civilization in, let’s say, just tens of thousands of years may be in for a deadly surprise.
There was nothing unreasonable or irresponsible about the Wisconsin anti-nuclear movement.
Three years after the moratorium passed, the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl directly killed 31 people and an estimated 4,000 or more others from lingering cancers after radioactivity spread across much of the Soviet Union and western Europe.
Then, in 2011, just as nuclear advocates in Wisconsin, including newly elected Gov. Scott Walker, began pushing to lift the moratorium, the world’s second worst nuclear accident at Fukushima, Japan, created another catastrophic release of radioactivity.
But, hey, here’s the good news for Wisconsin. All those elected officials who kept pushing nuclear power weren’t telling the truth. We’ve never needed it.
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Even after the Kewaunee nuclear plant closed in 2013 because it became much too expensive to operate, utilities have more than enough capacity to supply Wisconsin’s anticipated energy needs. No new power plants are planned for at least a decade.
And our last choice would be a cost-prohibitive, potentially catastrophic nuclear plant. Nuclear plants are shutting down all over the country as plummeting natural gas prices make gas-powered plants far cheaper.
Blaming the EPA
So why in the world are Wisconsin Republicans introducing legislation to resume building nuclear power plants in Wisconsin without waiting for any safe place to store nuclear waste?
The Republican cover story is such an outrageous lie they should be embarrassed to repeat it. Republicans claim they might be forced to build nuclear plants to meet clean energy standards of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to reduce carbon emissions and reduce global warming.
These are the same Republicans who publicly deny the overwhelming scientific evidence of global warming, threaten to fire any state employee who even breathes the words and vow to legally battle EPA clean energy standards to the death.
Besides, if state Republicans were remotely serious about developing clean energy, they would be encouraging solar and wind power in Wisconsin, the two most rapidly growing renewable energy technologies of the future. Uranium isn’t a renewable resource.
Instead, Wisconsin Republicans are doing just the opposite. As soon as Walker and Republicans gained control of state government, they began blocking wind farms around Wisconsin.
And once Walker’s appointees took control of what the state still calls the Public Service Commission (PSC), the agency dropped all pretense of serving the public by regulating public utilities.
It now should be officially renamed the Let Utilities Do Anything They Want to the Public Commission.
We Energies, Milwaukee’s energy company, had previously been permitted to build a new cheap-and-dirty coal-fired power plant in Oak Creek, missing all the benefits of cheap-and-clean natural gas.
Now the PSC has backed a direct assault on solar power and energy conservation by allowing We Energies to shift more of its costs into higher monthly fixed charges that aren’t based on energy use to prevent customers from lowering their bills by installing solar panels and consuming less energy.
But why would the nuclear industry have its paid Republican lackeys end the state nuclear moratorium if nuclear plants still lack any safe place to store nuclear waste and are so prohibitively expensive and that it’s hard to imagine ever building another one?
First, it’s surprising what you can get your paid political lackeys to do without a nuclear moratorium. In 2012, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensed two new nuclear power plants in Georgia that are now three years behind schedule and approximately $1.5 billion over budget.
Besides, the nuclear industry also remembers all those parties back in 1983 celebrating the moratorium on nuclear plants. They’ve always hated us for rubbing their noses in it.
