By Tracy Will
WisBusiness.com
The Legislative Council Special Committee on Nuclear Power has endorsed a proposed bill to end Wisconsin’s nearly quarter-century-old moratorium on construction of nuclear power plants.
The committee, created last session under the Republican-controlled Legislature, voted 10-6 this week to approve a bill draft by the Legislative Council to include nuclear power in the mix of options for the Public Service Commission to consider after 2008.
The vote, split along party lines and between representatives of utilities and environmental organizations, won with the unanimous approval by public members representing the utility industry. The committee was chaired by state Rep. Phil Montgomery, R-Green Bay.
But Sen. Dave Hansen, D-Green Bay, warned the committee: “Gov. Doyle is not going to support this legislation and neither is the Democratic Senate.”
The moratorium, enacted in 1983 Wisconsin Act 401, prohibits the PSC from certifying or approving for construction, any “nuclear-fired large electric generating facility,” unless certain conditions are met according to PSC findings. Those conditions include creation of a federal repository for spent nuclear waste.
In other action, former state Sen. Brian Rude gained a compromise version of his proposal to urge Congress to proceed on development of a final nuclear waste storage facility, in order to remove nuclear waste stored for decades at Dairyland Power Cooperative’s defunct nuclear power plant in Genoa, Wis.
While Rude voted with industry representatives to remove the moratorium on nuclear plant siting in Wisconsin, he said that his utility had learned from its experience, “that we will never ever build a nuclear plant ever again.”
MATC economics instructor Richard Shaten said although the final vote favored removing the moratorium, “the vote was a victory for the truth about the costs of nuclear power, because the committee came into this five months ago, split 12-4.”
The committee also proposed telling Wisconsin’s congressional delegation to look into the annual payments made by Wisconsin’s nuclear plants to pay for nuclear waste storage. Dairyland pays an average $6 million annually for the nuclear waste storage fee, while waiting for the Yucca Mountain waste storage repository to be developed.
Rude said the fund is likely depleted and that the utility has a suit in federal court against the federal government to recover money spent to store waste from the decommissioned plant that has been closed for nearly 30 years.
In their five months of investigating nuclear power issues in Wisconsin, committee members traveled to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository under construction on the Federal Nuclear Reservation in Nevada.
There, they learned that the site was widely unpopular in Nevada and that its opening may take another decade before waste stored in Wisconsin and the nation’s 76 other nuclear power plants may begin to move to its final storage site. Each utility pays a fee per kilowatt hour for developing the nuclear waste storage facility.
