Mike Simpson

I would like to thank all the subcommittees again for their hard work on the fiscal year 2016 omnibus bill.

I am going to support that budget for nuclear physics.

It is absolutely the wrong time to close the RHIC.

I do not think that would be in the national interest, that we will be better off if we can apply the science that we do for the betterment of mankind.

I guess one of my concerns is last year during the budget negotiation or the appropriation negotiations on this bill my argument was now is not the time to drop out of this and withdraw our funding from it and we need to see how these…

Because there are going to be efforts to defund it essentially in this appropriations cycle, I am pretty sure. Would that be a mistake?

The offices that you run are very, very important to the future of this country, so I appreciate it.

I have been reading several books, or maybe not several, but a few books on the threat to our grid and the infrastructure of our grid from EMPs and solar flares, those kind of things.

I will never criticize you for working across and between different offices. In fact, I have said we need more of that in the future.

This committee's desire to make sure that we have the trained nuclear experts in the future when that time comes.

Having the workforce in the future is going to be a big issue.

I was wondering if it was when Mr. Hobson was chairman. I was wondering if it was when Visclosky was chairman.

Why does the request specifically target students in radiochemistry instead of what the committee has been trying to do?

That was hard coming out, wasn't it? President Bush.

Let's look at some of the places that can help solve the class divide.

I can put on the record we have the smallest NASA center in the country.

What do we have to do to the Federal Government to say, hey, pay more attention here?

I agree that an all-of-the-above approach should fund research in new energy sources, but we also need to ensure that we are efficiently and effectively using our existing sources.

Well, I will tell you what drives part of my concern I guess.

At what stage does it require Commission approval?

I am a little concerned in the effort to streamline the rulemaking process.

I look forward to seeing how these changes are being implemented and how the Commission is working to do that.

A key outcome of the Project AIM recommendations is the development of an overhead structure that is well defined, reasonable, and acceptable to external stakeholders.

The House obviously believes that Yucca Mountain is the law of the land and we need to be following the laws that exist.

I have suggested in the past that we not, as this debate on Yucca Mountain went forward, that we not do anything to ruin that cave because we are going to need a cave that size to store all the study papers that have been done on Yucca…