WRPC website address: http://www.wrpc.net/index.html

January 12, 2005


Dear WRPC Member,

Thanks to all those who responded to Mole Lake's request to contribute to the Wolf River Protection Fund so that the tribe can pay off its $8 million debt to BHP Billiton and guarantee protection of the watershed. Unfortunately, the ill-conceived Crandon mine is not the only threat to the Wolf River Watershed. Although the U.S. Congress has approved plans to bury radioactive waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, on the traditional lands of the Western Shoshone Tribe, there are numerous technical and legal problems that have yet to be resolved before any waste can be stored at this site.

Even in the unlikely event that the Yucca Mountain site begins accepting nuclear waste, the repository would be full by 2037. Under current law there is a maximum of 70,000 tons that can be stored at this site. That would not be sufficient to bury all the nuclear waste already produced, let alone projected wastes from existing civilian nuclear reactors.

Before Yucca Mountain was selected in the 1980s as the nation's nuclear waste repository, the U.S. Department of Energy had considered locating the facility at the Wolf River Batholith, a massive granite formation in northern and central Wisconsin (see enclosed map). This site, which underlies much of Waupaca, Portage, Shawano, Marathon, Menominee, Langlade and Oconto counties, was ranked second for a national high-level radioactive waste site. The site was disqualified because of the region's heavy rainfall and the massive citizen-tribal protests that greeted DOE officials at every public hearing held in the state.

That was then. Federal law now requires the designation of a second national site, east of the Mississippi, by 2007. "The Wolf River Batholith in Wisconsin would be a likely choice for the next nuclear waste repository site due to its geologic and geographic characteristics," says Alfred Meyer, executive director of the Madison chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility. "Of all the secondary repository sites, (the Wolf River Batholith) was clearly the most attractive," said Bob Halstead, a Madison-based adviser to the Nevada government, which opposes the Yucca Mountain site.

The same Indian-environmental and sportfishing alliance that opposed the Crandon mine project is beginning to organize and educate the public about this latest threat (see enclosed article featuring WRPC activist George Rock). Of particular concern in the upcoming Wisconsin legislative session is the reintroduction of Assembly Bill 555, sponsored by Rep. Mike Huebsch (R-Onalaska), that would eliminate the current prohibition on planning for new nuclear reactors in Wisconsin. As Bob Halstead pointed out at a recent Wolf Watershed Educational Project meeting in Shawano last October, any future effort by the Governor of Wisconsin to veto a proposed DOE repository site, as permitted under current federal law, would be fatally compromised by the passage of AB 555.

Stay tuned.  

Al Gedicks, Exec. Secretary
info@wrpc.net
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