Political Quotes

“Adopting a NEPA process open to alternatives opens up new areas for consideration. There is behind us the map showing all of the places other than a Nevada test site that could be used for an interim central storage facility. You can see them. They are all over the country. If you say yes to this amendment, you may be saying yes to nuclear waste storage in your State or near your State. The possibilities include New York, Hawaii, Connecticut, Washington, Maine, Iowa, California, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Arkansas, Wisconsin, Oregon, and others. There are potential locations in 40 other States of about 605,000 square miles; 20 percent of the continental United States. You have to put it somewhere. So what we have here is an effort by the Senators from Nevada that may sound reasonable at first glance but it sets this whole process back 15 or 20 years. It allows all the decisions we are making today to be reconsidered. It allows them all to be challenged in the courts. It guarantees further delay, further gridlock, further stalemate, and it will, therefore, force the ratepayers in all of these States not to pay once but to pay twice, to continue to pay into the nuclear waste fund and to build new interim reactor storage sites because some of them are full at this time. This is a giant loophole for the Government to use in avoiding its promise to store and handle waste.”