Political Quotes

“It's great to be back down on the floor, back to being in Washington, DC, to continue with what I spent most of my time last year doing, which was addressing the high-level nuclear waste issues in this country. Today, we go to the great State of Tennessee, and identify a location where there is presently high-level nuclear waste stored and compare that to the site that was picked and that is in Federal law right now, which is the high-level nuclear waste depository scheduled to occur in Yucca Mountain. First of all, this is Sequoyah in Tennessee, where there are over 1,094 MTU of spent nuclear fuel onsite. At Yucca Mountain, which is in the desert in Nevada, there is currently no nuclear waste onsite. At Sequoyah, the waste is stored above the ground in pools and dry casks. If we were to put it in Yucca Mountain, where it is supposed to go, the waste would be stored 1,000 feet underground--underneath, in essence, a mountain. At Sequoyah, the waste is 25 feet from the groundwater table. At Yucca Mountain, it would be 1,000 feet above the water table, and Yucca Mountain is 100 miles from the Colorado River. Sequoyah is 14 miles from the city of Chattanooga and 14 miles from Chickamauga Lake. So why do I highlight these issues? Because of what happened in Japan with Fukushima Daiichi and the high-level nuclear waste. A lot of the nuclear exposure was because pools had dried up.…”