Political Quotes

“I come to the floor a second time, as I promised a couple of weeks ago, to talk about high-level nuclear waste in the Yucca Mountain repository. Two weeks ago I highlighted Hanford, Washington, a DOE site that has 53 million gallons of nuclear waste--53 million gallons of nuclear waste that's stored 10 feet underground in tanks that are leaking. The waste is 250 feet above the water table and the waste is 1 mile from the Columbia River, versus Federal law which said in 1982 that Yucca Mountain should be our national repository. Now let's look at Yucca Mountain. Right now there's no nuclear waste on site. The waste would be stored a thousand feet underground. The waste is a thousand feet above the water table, and the waste would be 100 miles from the Colorado River; 100 miles versus 1 mile, high-level nuclear waste, especially with Hanford where you have nuclear waste that actually is leaking outside the tanks. So then my response was: What are the Senators in these two States doing and what's their position? The reason why we're not moving to Yucca Mountain is because of one U.S. Senator, the majority leader of the Senate, Harry Reid, who has blocked the movement of Yucca Mountain.…”