Nuclear power? No thanks

There's a hearing today on the bill to allow more nuclear power plants in Wisconsin even if there is no solution to the nuclear waste disposal problem, which gets worse every day.

Clean Wisconsin reminds Wisconsinites that our state's granite was once considered as a repository site for the high level waste, which is only deadly for 250,000 years. Wisconsin voters, in an advisory referendum, rejected that idea by an 8 to 1 margin in the early 1980s.

From Clean Wisconsin:

Nuclear power plants generate a waste that is so toxic that, a half-century after the nuclear power industry began, a solution for its disposal still has not been found. In Wisconsin, more than 1,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste is stored along the shores of Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River, both vital freshwater resources, because of industry's failure to solve the disposal problem.

More than nine tons of plutonium, one of the most lethal substances known and a primary ingredient in nuclear weapons, are contained in this waste which remains dangerously radioactive for tens of thousands of years.

New nuclear reactors would exacerbate the nuclear waste problem. By 2010, the volume of nuclear waste in the U.S. is expected to exceed storage capacity at the unfinished nuclear waste dump in Yucca Mountain, Nevada. If new reactors are constructed, or if existing reactors are relicensed, it is certain that the federal government will again look to the Wolf River batholith in Wisconsin as a disposal site for the nation's nuclear waste, as it did in the 1980's.

Any plan by Dominion, the recent purchaser of the Kewaunee nuclear plant located near Green Bay, to construct a new nuclear plant at the Kewaunee site would dramatically increase the risk of the Wolf River being targeted as a disposal site for radioactive waste.

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Are those anti-nukers just exaggerating the dangers and problems?

From Grist, the online environmental magazine:

Is This the "Safe, Clean" Nuclear Power We Hear So Much About?
Illinois nuke-power operator criticized for leaks and "incidents"

Quantity doesn't equal quality with Chicago-based Exelon Corp., which runs all six nuclear plants and 11 nuclear reactors in Illinois. There were at least four "incidents" at Exelon plants last week, including a false alarm at one generating station that initiated the first "site-area emergency" at a U.S. nuclear plant in 15 years.

These came on the heels of disclosures that there were eight radioactive leaks and spills at Exelon plants since 1996 that went unreported to the public. One spill of roughly 3 million gallons of tritium-laced water in 1998 wasn't completely cleaned up eight years later. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) plans to introduce legislation this week requiring nuclear facilities to notify state and local officials of unintended or accidental radioactive leaks -- or face possible loss of their operating licenses.

straight to the source: Chicago Tribune, Robert Manor, 25 Feb 2006
straight to the source: Time.com, Eric Ferkenhoff, 23 Feb 2006
straight to the source: Morris Daily Herald, Jo Ann Hustis, 23 Feb 2006