Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy Executive Director Martha Brand will testify at the Capitol Thursday in favor of keeping the 15-year-old nuclear power plant moratorium.

A bill to allow new nuclear power plants was introduced in the Legislature, even though no Minnesota utility has plans to build one. The problem is, not one single thing has changed since the moratorium was passed in 1994, and if anything, the problem is worse.

That problem is what to do with the highly radioactive nuclear waste that is produced in making electricity from splitting atoms. For almost 30 years, the U.S. has been working on possibly building a repository for the waste deep inside Yucca Mountain in Nevada. However, President Barack Obama last month pulled the money from that project and said he wanted to look at other alternatives.

"The moratorium should not be lifted becasue the building of a federal nuclear storage site is decades away," Brand will testify before a Minnesota House Committee.


The moratorium was passed during the highly contentious fight in 1994 which allowed Xcel Energy, then called NSP, to take its dangerous nuclear waste and place it in casks outside the power plant. As part of the compromise, the Legislature said no new nuclear power plants would be built in Minnesota until there is a functioning nuclear waste repository run by the federal government. The compromise also required, for the first time, that Xcel purchase wind power.

Nuclear power has other major drawbacks including the fact that it is the most costly    type of plant to build, at an estimated $6 to $12 billion, much of it subsidized by taxpayers. They also take too long. Even if the moratorium disappeared this year and a Minnesota utility quickly drafted plans in January to build one, it would be at least 2020 before a single watt of electricity was generated by the plant.

Brand will testify that there are plenty of other alternatives that are quicker and cheaper. Two of the most prominent are energy efficiency and renewable energy such as wind and solar.