Political Quotes

“It's been a couple of weeks since I've been able to come down to the floor and talk about high-level nuclear waste. As you know, through the past year, I've been coming to the floor. I am chairman of the Environment and the Economy Subcommittee. We have jurisdiction over a lot of different types of waste. One of those is nuclear waste. I also have come to the floor to just give a short history lesson on where we're at, where we should be, and the problems that stand in our way. In 1982, the national government passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. In 1987 amendments were then offered that said we need to have a long-term geological repository and that repository should be Yucca Mountain. So I've been going around the country and looking at the different places where we have high-level nuclear waste, whether it's on the west coast, the State of Florida, Massachusetts, in the central part. Today I go to the State of Colorado, which has nuclear waste in the State, and I want to compare it to where it should be. As a review, Yucca Mountain is, by law, defined as the place where we should put high-level nuclear waste. Currently, there's no nuclear waste on-site. The waste would be stored a thousand feet underground. The waste would be a thousand feet above the water table because it's in a desert. And the waste is 100 miles from the Colorado River. Now, compare that to the nuclear waste that is at a location called Fort St. Vrain.…”