10/08/04

SAMPLE RESOLUTION ON NUCLEAR WASTE IN WISCONSIN

The Problem:

In the mid 1980's, before designation of Yucca Mountain, Nevada, as an underground nuclear waste repository site, Wisconsin's Wolf River Batholith received close scrutiny by the Department of Energy (DOE), and was ranked second for a national high-level radioactive waste site. The Wolf river Batholith underlies much of Waupaca, Portage, Shawano, Marathon, Menominee, Langlade and Oconto counties. Truck and/or rail shipment of radioactive waste to a site, and away from existing nuclear power plants at Point Beach and Kewaunee, would impact the entire state.

Federal law requires designation of a second national site, east of the Mississippi, by 2007, and Wisconsin's granite bedrock is likely to be reconsidered. Nuclear waste contains the byproducts of the splitting of atoms in a nuclear reactor: radioisotopes which remain cancer-causing for over 250,000 years. Despite designation of Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a high-level waste dumpsite, no proven method of isolating these wastes from water and the environment for the necessary time span exists.

Whereas: Wisconsin is home to vital and vulnerable fresh water resources, and the Great Lakes area contains 20% of the world's freshwater resources, and

Whereas: Nuclear reactors enervate an average of 60,000 pounds of high-level radioactive waste each year, and,
Whereas: even under normal operation nuclear reactors release so-called "allowable" levels of radioactive isotopes into the environment through the release of water and steam, and,

Whereas: Studies of nuclear bomb-test fallout patterns show a correlation between low levels of dietary radiation and the incidence of leukemia and other cancers,

Now therefore be it resolved that_____________________________states its opposition to the production and storage of radioactive waste in Wisconsin, now and in the future, and hereby calls upon the Legislature and Wisconsin utilities to aggressively pursue a clean energy strategy to assure a clean and renewable energy future for Wisconsin, without future dependence on environmentally harmful and coal and nuclear plants.

And be it further resolved that no new nuclear plants be constructed in the state, that the current state statutes regarding nuclear plant siting, which specifically prohibit construction of new nuclear reactors without proof of financial competitiveness with alternatives, and without an operating and licensed federal repository, be upheld by the legislature