Mike Simpson

How are we progressing about moving facilities to EM that need to be moved to EM and getting them out of the laboratory part of the budget?

So you are saying that with the proposal currently by the Administration to down blend and package this stuff and ship it to WIPP, it won't delay the schedule of things that are already scheduled to go to WIPP?

Ok. NNSA's new proposal to start shipping plutonium to WIPP, will that take up any of the limited shipping capacity?

Our strategy is not based on hope.

So that is what they mean when they say partial---- opening?

Back to WIPP, we like to jump back and forth and around.

A Federal judge has set new deadlines for the Hanford Vitrification Plant requiring this utility to come online and by 2036.

I am frankly inadequate to sit in a hearing with this stuff because most of it I don't understand.

Wait one second before you ask one more question. I am still trying to understand this.

We are going to plus it back up because Congress is not going to sit still while it goes down a billion dollars.

They underfunded, the Army Corps of Engineers by over a billion dollars, which we are going to have to find somewhere.

The budget submission by the administration calls for about a $650 million increase over last year.

We already can make renewable hydrogen from solar and wind today, and if we can push down the cost further through advanced water-splitting technologies, you have an opportunity to really deeply decarbonize transportation.

Well, that would be a mistake living in Florida instead of Idaho.

I have not heard a problem here that a small modular reactor could not fix.

The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015 established an Energy Security and Infrastructure Fund.

So you would do research into those arenas?

But, ultimately, it is up to them to install it.

The grid is privately owned by private utility companies. What is our role in helping modernize the grid?

I would like to yield to Congresswoman Lowey for a final question.

I would like to thank the Commission for the work that you have done thus far to develop the issues and issue a supplemental environmental impact statement for Yucca Mountain because the Department of Energy seems to refuse to do so.

I appreciate that. The reason we gave it to the NRC is because we used to do it within the Department of Energy and the Department of Energy did not take it very seriously, and so we gave it to the NRC which I think you have done a good…

The government must live up to its responsibilities to our nation and provide for the eventual safe disposal of commercially spent fuel that is currently stored at these sites.

In addition to $10 billion we have already spent on Yucca, the Department of Energy estimates that we have $27 billion of liabilities deriving from our failure to meet our legal obligation to dispose of this waste.

It would be nice to actually get things done on time.