Ed Markey: “This is a great amendment. This bill puts a cap on how much money is going to be collected for the permanent and interim…”

“This is a great amendment. This bill puts a cap on how much money is going to be collected for the permanent and interim storage facility, and then it says that the money for the permanent repository will be expended for the interim facility. Because of wholesale and pretty soon retail competition in the marketplace, we know that there are going to be fewer and fewer nuclear power plants because they cannot compete economically. Connecticut Yankee closed down this year. Maine Yankee is about to close. The only place from which you can generate revenues from this are nuclear power plants. All the other power plants do not have to kick in. What is going to happen in the year 2002 is we may find that Yucca Mountain is not suitable, we will have run out of money, we will need more, there will not be any, we are going to have to pick a new State for the site. We know it will be a State with fewer than 3 Members of Congress. Maybe it will be a territory, I do not know, but once we do, we are going to have to go through the whole process again. Where will the money come from? Under the proponents' amendment, all of the money will come out of the taxpayers' pockets, even those that never had a single kilowatt of nuclear-generated electricity. That is wrong. The money should come from those that in fact enjoyed the benefit.”