William Bryan: “Mr. President, let me add, if I may, the significance I find in this piece of legislation that we are offering today.…”

“Mr. President, let me add, if I may, the significance I find in this piece of legislation that we are offering today. This has for too long a time been characterized strictly as a Nevada issue, and many of my colleagues have, obviously, focused less time on this than my senior colleague and I, because Nevada is targeted as the interim storage facility in this piece of legislation. But the point that we have sought to make is that there is a national impact in the transportation of 85,000 metric tons--that is the emphasis, 85,000 metric tons--of nuclear waste in an order of magnitude never before seen. There have been over the years 2,500 shipments, but we are talking about 17,000, and as the Presiding Officer may recall from our debate earlier on this, those earlier 2,500 shipments involved a relatively short distance of about 900 miles or less. By reason of the proximity of the Nevada test site, as contrasted from the origin of the nuclear waste itself at the reactors, we are talking about thousands of miles. I think my colleagues will recall that we are talking about rail and highway corridors that go through 43 States. Forty-three States are involved. So it is not just Nevada. Forty-three States. To give you some idea of the size of each cask, although they have not yet been designed, what is contemplated is that a rail cask would weigh 125 tons and a truck cask would weigh 25 tons.”