Political Quotes

“The gentleman from Nevada is on to a very, very important issue here: What are we going to do with spent nuclear fuel? Our current light water reactors consume maybe 3 percent of the energy in the nuclear fuel. You can reprocess it once and you get another 3 percent, and so now you've got 93, 92 percent, or 94 percent, of the energy that you now consider as waste, in this case to be permanently stored at Yucca Mountain. We actually have a 20th century solution. We spent some $10- to $12 billion on it in the '60s, '70s, '80s, and in 1993 we put that solution aside. We need to bring that solution back into place, and the gentleman's amendment would further us in dealing with this issue of spent nuclear fuel. It is not a waste; it is an extraordinary asset, and it's one that we should be utilizing. In doing so, we can dispose of it through multiple recyclings, all of which has been proved by the United States, readily available today. We need to take it out of the closet, put it back on the front burner, and use the accelerator technologies in our reactors to adequately dispose of these very dangerous wastes. In doing so, we can not only dispose of the total longevity, we can take it from a couple of hundred thousand years down to a couple of hundred years of dangerous radioactive emissions. We need to move on this. The gentleman's amendment allows us to do that. It solves a major problem that the entire world has. Spent nuclear fuel is an international problem.…”