All the uranium used in the past half-century at Wisconsin’s Point Beach Nuclear Plant, a bit over 1,000 metric tons, is still at the plant north of Two Rivers.

Four miles farther north, all the fuel used at the smaller, now-closed Kewaunee Power Station in its four decades of producing reliable, exhaust-free electricity is still along the Lake Michigan shore.

One can be grateful for all the power — the two plants alone produced one-sixth of all electricity made in Wisconsin since 1990 — while wondering why the radioactive spent fuel sits by the lake. Why won’t the plants’ owners properly dispose of it?

Simple: Because the federal government won’t let them. Spent uranium isn’t the plant owners’ responsibility because Uncle Sam bigfooted his way into the matter in 1982, then accomplished nothing.

State Sen. Chris Kapenga and Rep. Clint Moses are seeking support for legislation that would prohibit Wisconsin’s 700,000 FoodShare recipients from buying Snickers bars and Mountain Dew — an excellent idea that has long been opposed by big spenders and junk food lovers throwing their weight around.

FoodShare is Wisconsin’s name for a federally funded and state-administered program known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — a misnomer if ever there was one. The number one so-called “nutritional item” purchased by recipients is soda, the Wisconsin legislators point out in a memo seeking other sponsors.

It is true everyone should have a right to eat what they want — but only if they’re paying for it with their own money.

Wisconsin was one of the lowest-ranked states in a state-by-state index of teacher morale released by the news outlet Education Week in early March. But Wisconsin teachers said hiring more colleagues could help.

Wisconsin teachers’ assessments of their own morale averaged out to a score of 2, better than only eight other states. State averages on the -100 to 100 scale ranged from -14 in New Hampshire to 47 in Georgia. The national average was 18.

Besides New Hampshire, states with respondents reporting worse morale than Wisconsin were Oregon, Massachusetts, Vermont, Idaho, Colorado, Kansas and New Jersey. Among Wisconsin’s neighbors, Illinois was a sunny 36, Iowa was 21, Minnesota nearly average at 19, Michigan was 11, and Indiana barely better than us, at 4.

Of the nearly 30,000 Wisconsin state employees, 11,501 of them, 38%, work in Dane County. Dane County is also where the greatest number of state employees live — 8,051, about 27.4% of all state employees.

But Dane isn’t the county with the greatest share of its population employed by the state. That’s Juneau, which has a population of 26,594 and is home to 538 state employees — over 2% of the population.

According to the Legislative Reference Bureau’s most recent Wisconsin Blue Book, Wisconsin comprises 1,850 cities, towns and villages.

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