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Grassroots Environmentalists Begin to Rebel on Nuclear Opposition

By Eric McErlain
Last week, a coalition of 232 environmental groups released a statement reiterating their opposition to the expansion of the use of nuclear energy. One of the organizations that signed on to the document was the Wisconsin Public Interest Research Group (WISPIRG), that state's chapter of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, U.S. PIRG.

Reading through their statement, you'd get the impression that just about everybody inside these these organizations was dead set against nuclear energy.

And that impression would be wrong.

Recently, blogger and WISPIRG supporter Phil Nelson received an email from Jennifer Giegerich, WISPIRG's State Director, urging him to join the fight against the incentives for new nuclear build contained in the comprehensive energy bill that just passed the Senate yesterday.

Phil had other ideas. He expressed them in an email he recently set to WISPIRG and published on his blog:
I am a paying member and long time supporter of your organization, however I really disagree with your point of view on this topic. I live in Green Bay, within site of a large coal pile and downwind of the output of the Pulliam power plant as well as an industrial stack. Between coal dust from the piles and output of the stacks, I have to breathe this every day. I have to clean it off my house every day. The consequences are real, and they are real now, something that is not the case with the 2 nuclear power plants within 30 miles of my house . . .

The policies WISPIRG and others support can at best only slow the hard decisions about what to do, unfortunately prolonging the existing problems rather than building a complete vision of a long term strategy that could actually work. I think nuclear power should be in that vision along with a set of inspired plans for dealing with the waste. The waste is a huge problem, but not bigger than the combined size of a Montana strip mines, Green Bay coal piles, coastal oil slicks, melted artic tundra, lost Atlantic shoreline, sunken pacific islands, forests and lakes lost to acid rain or wars fought to "protect" our oil supply. Please consider making some of these hard choices when you formulate your policies going forward.
As we've said before, as hard as some environmental extremists might try, they can't spin away the fact that cracks are developing in their community when it comes to nuclear energy.

POSTSCRIPT: The two plants that Phil refers to are Kewaunee in Carlton Township, and Point Beach 1 and 2 in Two Creeks. Together, these three reactors supply more than 20 percent of Wisconsin's electricity.

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