Sustainable Energy

A year after a March 11 earthquake and tsunami caused a major disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power reactors, it’s almost business as usual for the US nuclear industry, which remains bullish about its prospects to expand and build more reactors.

In Wisconsin, home to three of the nation’s oldest reactors, with two more just across the Mississippi River in Minnesota, that may pose serious risks to the environment, the economy, and to human health.  

In America, today, there are three kinds of drivers: those who look at the other gas pumps down at the ol’ gas station and think: “Oh my God, I can’t believe how much that guy’s spending on gas”, those who look at their own pump down at the ol’ gas station and think: “Oh my God, I can’t believe how much I’m spending on gas” – and those who are doing both at the same time.

Naturally, this has brought the Sarah Palins of the world back out in public, and once again the mantra of “Drill, Baby, Drill” can be heard all the way from the Florida coast to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

But what if those folks have it exactly backwards?

What if, in a world of depleting oil resources, the last thing you want to do is use yours up? To put it another way: why isn’t all our oil part of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?

At least that's how it's described in a story by Ron Seely of the Wisconsin State Journal, which also ran in a sister newspaper, the LaCrosse Tribune.

Seely's ecstatic about research on fusion energy at UW-Madison, which could theoretically provide energy without that little problem of high-level radioactive waste that's deadly for hundreds of thousands of years.

Lee Enterprises, the chain that owns those papers and the Racine Journal Times, doesn't want to wait the 50 years (the rosiest prediction) for fusion to be "perfected." All three papers are pushing for repeal of the state's safeguards on building new fission reactors.

And so it goes.

Opening the door for expanded nuclear power in Wisconsin was one of the items the new Republican majority in Madison planned to railroad through this spring. But that appears to be on hold, Tom Content of the Journal Sentinel reports:

State Rep. Mark Honadel (R-South Milwaukee) said he still plans to co-sponsor a bill this year that would overturn the moratorium on new reactors, which was enacted in 1983 in the aftermath of the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania.

Because of the crisis in Japan, though, Honadel said he would not submit the legislation immediately.

"Out of courtesy, we should relax a little bit and let everything settle down over there and see how severe the ramifications are," Honadel said.

Fifteen environmental and other public interest groups have asked the legislature and governor to focus on expanding renewable energy in the state instead of relaxing or repealing state laws to make it easier to build new nuclear power plants.

Energy efficiency and renewable energy “are cheaper, safer, and will quickly create more jobs,” the organizations said in a letter to lawmakers and Gov.

It turns out that those critics of Gov. Scott Walker appointing Jeff Plale to a cushy state job managing state facilities -- who claimed it was just a political payoff -- were wrong.

Plale's first responsibility in his new job was to kill a clean energy project, the conversion of a University of Wisconsin boiler to biomass.

Who better qualified than the guy who killed the entire, comprehensive Clean Energy Jobs Act last fall?

He was uniquely qualified for the job in the Walker administration.

There are reports, by the way, that the utilities wanted Walker to name Plale to the Public Service Commission, but that was too much even for Walker.

Energy Forum CandidatesI attended the Candidate Energy Forum in Eau Claire on Oct. 5.  This is an event that is held during election cycles by Eau Claire Energy Cooperative and other sponsoring organizations.  This is always a good opportunity to hear from the candidates about what their stance is on energy issues.  In the past these have often been carefully thought-out policy statements by the candidates.

This year, however, I seem to have learned only two new and enlightening things:

New ad from Senator Feingold on protecting our resources.