Pete Domenici: “I want to speak about a bill I introduced yesterday and I did not get a chance to speak on it. It has been introduced…”

“I want to speak about a bill I introduced yesterday and I did not get a chance to speak on it. It has been introduced and has been referred. It is now known as S. 755. It has a very uninteresting caption and name: United States Enrichment Corporation Privatization Act. Actually, while that does not sound like much, we hear a lot these days about Russia, Iran, and Russian scientists having to find some way to earn a living. We hear a lot about the fact that Russia has a very significant amount of enriched uranium and that we have agreed, in a sense, to buy it. Now we find ourselves kind of in a quagmire. Our own trade laws do not let us buy and resell the material because that is dumping. So we have a $4 billion commercial transaction going and the Russians are saying, ``Fine, we made a deal, let's do it.'' And so we have an entity here, the U.S. Enrichment Corporation, currently in existence. It is Government owned, and thus it is corporate only in the sense that we call it a corporation. The U.S. Enrichment Corporation, when we sell it--and what we propose here has been cleared by and looked at by a lot of marketplace people--we believe it will generate $1.5 billion for the Treasury of the United States, when we take the existing Government corporation and put it on the market, make it a corporation.”