Political Quotes

“following the current debate, let me point out a couple of things that I think the Senator from Arkansas may have overlooked with regard to his general statement that we have 557,000 sites in the abandoned mine category. I think it is important to recognize what we have done. We have a system. The system is working. Fewer than 3 percent of those 557,000 are considered to be of a significant environmental concern. Surface water contamination, ground water contamination, and Superfund make up less than 3 percent of these sites. The others--it is interesting to note--34 percent, or 194,000, have been reclaimed and are considered benign; 231,000, or 41 percent, have a surface disturbance. Obviously, if you are going to mine an area in an open pit, you are going to have a surface disturbance. But that can be taken care of in the reclamation process. The trees can grow back. I ask anybody who has visited the interior of Alaska to recognize the techniques used with the gold dredges where they basically built this dredge in a pond and it dug ahead of itself and deposited the tailings, the pond was not any bigger than the dredge, it simply moved, and yes, the tailings were evident at the time, but now the trees have grown back into the tailings piles. That is what is happening in these areas where appropriate reclamation takes place, and the technology today is much more advanced than previously. So there is significant advancement in the process.…”