Political Quotes

“Before my Pennsylvania friends get all freaked out, I appreciate you letting me come to the floor for 5 minutes to do what is now a weekly constitutional of mine and talk about high level nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain. What I have been doing, to set the stage, is going around the country highlighting locations where there's nuclear waste throughout this country, and just making the statement that it is in the national interest, and actually it's national Federal law that this waste be consolidated in a centralized storage facility. And so with that, I'll begin. Today we're headed to the great State of Minnesota, and we're looking at a nuclear power plant called Prairie Island. Now, Prairie Island has 725 million tons of uranium, of spent fuel, onsite. Prairie Island has waste stored above the ground in pools and dry casks. Prairie Island is in the Mississippi River floodplain, as you can see from the photo here. And Prairie Island is 50 miles from the Twin Cities. Now, where should this waste be? Well, this waste should be where an 1982 energy policy, the Waste Policy Act, and then the amendments in 1987 said, by Federal law, it should be, which is underneath a mountain in a desert. And where is that mountain? The mountain's called Yucca Mountain. Currently, after $15 billion spent researching and preparing the site, we have zero nuclear waste onsite. If we were storing the nuclear waste there, it would be 1,000 feet underground.…”