GOP Lawmakers Push For More Nuclear Power in Wisconsin
Discussion comes as new Microsoft data center expected to use more power than every house in Dane County.
Point Beach Nuclear Plant, circa 1973. (Public Domain).
Two Republicans who chair state legislative committees on energy and utilities say they want to bring more nuclear power online in Wisconsin in the coming years.
To start that effort, they introduced a resolution calling on the Legislature to publicly support nuclear power and fusion energy.
“The resolution, more than anything, makes a formal declaration that Wisconsin is open for business — it is open for nuclear,” said Rep. David Steffen, R-Howard, who chairs the Assembly Energy and Utilities Committee.
He’s working with state Sen. Julian Bradley, R-New Berlin, chair of the Senate Utilities and Tourism Committee, on the effort.
In addition to the resolution, they plan to propose a nuclear siting study to identify locations around Wisconsin that make sense as sites for nuclear power plants. They also hope to bring an international nuclear summit to the state in the coming years that would help market Wisconsin for development and research opportunities, Steffen said.
He said completing a siting study could take two years off the development time for a new nuclear plant, which can take a decade or more to bring online.
Steffen said the biggest factor pushing him toward supporting nuclear power was seeing the large energy needs of Microsoft’s data center campus in Mount Pleasant. The first phase of that project is expected to use more electricity than all the homes in Dane County combined.
“That data center is just one of four or more that Wisconsin may host over the coming years,” he said. “As we continue to be in a deficit situation of energy production here in Wisconsin, we really need to be expanding the opportunities and options for energy production.”
Proponents of nuclear power say it can serve as a reliable source of energy that can run continuously — like a coal-fired power plant without carbon dioxide emissions. Renewable energy sources like solar and wind are reliant on the conditions outdoors.
“Nuclear energy has the potential to be the clean and reliable answer to powering our future,” said state Sen. Bradley in a Jan. 16 statement. “The technology surrounding nuclear energy has developed a great deal over the past few decades; it’s safer and more efficient than ever before.”
Nuclear energy accounted for about 16 percent of the energy generated by Wisconsin providers in 2023, according to the state Public Service Commission’s most recent strategic energy assessment.
Wisconsin has one active nuclear power plant, located in Two Rivers. The Point Beach Nuclear Plant came online in the 1970s and has a generating capacity of 1,200 megawatts. In 2020, the plant’s owners applied for a license renewal with federal regulators to keep the plant running through 2050. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has a decision in that case scheduled for this December.
The state already has assets that it can build on to expand investment and research around nuclear energy, Steffen said.
He said the University of Wisconsin-Madison has one of the nation’s best nuclear engineering programs, and there are several companies that have spun off from the university working on nuclear technology.
“Beyond it being a necessary part of our energy production portfolio, it can also be an incredible economic development opportunity for the state of Wisconsin,” Steffen said.
UW-Madison, private sector working on nuclear advancements
Paul Wilson, chair of the Nuclear Engineering & Engineering Physics department at UW-Madison, said the university is doing a lot of research around nuclear fission and fusion.
Fission is the process of splitting atoms and is what’s used in traditional nuclear plants. Fusion is fusing two atoms together to create energy. Research into fusion is still ongoing, and it could be more than a decade away from commercial uses.
Wilson said faculty on campus are looking at design changes to make traditional nuclear reactors cheaper and smaller, as well as exploring how nuclear fits into the clean energy balance of the future with things like solar and wind.
“There’s great opportunity for more solar and wind energy in Wisconsin, but we can’t really get to a clean energy system without nuclear energy, and that’s often underappreciated,” he said.
On the fusion side, faculty are looking at the science of what makes a fusion reaction happen and how technology from fission reactors be applied to emerging designs for fusion, Wilson said.
Three fusion companies have grown out of UW-Madison’s nuclear engineering department: Shine Technologies in Janesville, Type One Energy based in Tennessee and Realta Fusion in Madison, he said.
Realta Fusion spun-off from a university experiment in 2022. Kieran Furlong, co-founder and CEO of Realta Fusion, said the company is pursuing what it believes will be the lowest-cost, fastest path to commercial fusion energy.
He said the company’s partnership with UW-Madison allowed it to become one of the few fusion companies with access to an operating prototype plasma fusion machine.
“The next step for us will be to build a larger version of that where we can get to a scale that’s more relevant for commercial fusion energy deployment,” he said. “By the mid 2030s, we are aiming to have our first commercial energy producing power plant, and that will be producing either heat or electrical power for a downstream energy customer.”
Nuclear energy could be an area of bipartisan interest
While he and Bradley are Republicans, Steffen said he believes expanding nuclear power will be a bipartisan issue in Madison.
“In this Capitol, where there’s often a lot of strong, powerful disputes, this is an issue that is receiving bipartisan attention and bipartisan support,” Steffen said.
The state’s clean energy plan released in 2022 by Gov. Tony Evers said the state should explore new nuclear power as part of the clean energy transition. Democratic state Reps. Supreme Moore Omokunde, D-Milwaukee, and Shelia Stubbs, D-Madison, are listed as cosponsors on the resolution supporting nuclear energy.
Steffen also said he plans to meet with the governor to discuss nuclear energy and where both parties can work together on the issue.
“This can be a great opportunity for both his Public Service Commission, his executive branch, as well as the energy and utility leaders in the Senate and the Assembly to all work together [on] something that is for the benefit of the state,” he said.
Right now, Wilson said one of the biggest drawbacks of nuclear energy is the upfront cost that goes into building a plant.
There are also public fears around the nuclear power. The U.S. largely abandoned new nuclear plants for decades amid rising costs and concerns about safety.
“There’s a lot of interest from a lot of different commercial sectors in taking advantage of nuclear energy, but nobody wants to be first,” Wilson said. “They all want somebody else to dip their toe in the water first and take on that risk.”
2 GOP state lawmakers pushing to advance nuclear energy in Wisconsin was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.
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