Bill Clinton: “I am concerned how this is being portrayed, and I am sure it is meant to be a fix for a specific situation in South…”

“I am concerned how this is being portrayed, and I am sure it is meant to be a fix for a specific situation in South Carolina, but it is setting a precedent. That is what we do around here. We set precedents. It is hard to imagine that the Department of Energy would be satisfied only taking their new definition to one State. It would be South Carolina first, but then what would be next? In particular, I am concerned about western New York where we have a site known as West Valley. Through the West Valley Act, the Federal Government and the State of New York agreed, decades ago, to partner to reprocess commercial nuclear waste. In many respects, this project has been a success, but in the last several years the site has been the subject of a bitter debate between the Federal Government and the State of New York. Why would that be? Because, in New York's view, the Department of Energy is not fulfilling its responsibilities for the cleanup obligations it assumed under the West Valley Act. I bring this up because it is directly relevant, even though it is not the same act. The West Valley site has the same type of waste that the Department of Energy would be able to reclassify at Savannah River under section 3116 of the Department of Defense bill. That is no coincidence.…”