Grace Stanke, Miss Wisconsin 2022 (Magic Dreams Productions)
CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – She is beautiful, and she’s very smart.
Today I’d like to introduce you to Miss Wisconsin. She’s Grace Stanke from Wausau. She went to high school at Wausau West, and earned a degree in nuclear engineering at UW-Madison.
Her platform is clean energy. Not windmills or solar panels. She supports nuclear power.
And she is right. Any clean energy plan that doesn’t include nuclear isn’t a serious plan. The problem with wind and solar is battery storage. We need ways to store that power so we don’t have blackouts and brownouts. Right now the batteries needed aren’t good enough. Perhaps someday it will improve. But when it isn’t windy or sunny, we can’t store enough energy to deliver it to where it’s needed.
And these are real problems. Canada, which plans to ban cars with internal combustion engines for 2035, will need so many solar farms that they’ll lose farmland and will become a net food importer. Studies say that making Wisconsin a zero-carbon state will lead to much higher electric rates, and our manufacturing sector will be non-competitive. The battery, wind, and solar technology comes from China, and needed raw materials from other parts of the world.
The problem with nuclear power in the U.S. is politics, not policy. There’s the perception that it’s unsafe. And yet the only large nuclear power failure in the United State was 43 years ago at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. There are 92 other plants that have operated problem-free for decades. Yet power companies will tell you that getting approvals for new nuclear plants is impossible. Storing nuclear waste is an issue. Onsite storage seems to work; it’s already being done at American military bases when our nuclear-powered naval ships get new fuel rods.
Former President George W. Bush had a brilliant idea. Put nuclear facilities at closed military bases. They already have perimeter fencing and other security features. At sites controlled by the federal government, the permitting process could be streamlined.
This is zero-emission, safe power… the kind of thing greenies are calling for. So, environmentalists, are you serious, or not?
Good luck Grace Stanke. I hope you win the Miss America crown. And I hope you win the nuclear argument.
Chris Conley.
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