Ed Markey

The decision was political, that they were going to stick the people in Nevada with the nuclear waste site.

The likelihood of that occurring in the near term at least is very, very slight, given all of the political opposition.

Senator Markey's Nuclear Waste Task Force would set up a process where we can hash out what consent really means.

It is an extraordinary abdication of regulatory oversight for the NRC.

We need to have better coordination.

Because an exemption the NRC has allowed to Holtec in the transfer of the license allows Holtec to stop paying for emergency planning to area towns.

Without a stronger regulator, I fear that the only thing that will be emptier than the decommissioning trust fund will be the public's trust in our government.

Well, you can hear from the State of Massachusetts, from the Attorney General's Office, how concerned they have been about the process, about the need for them to actively intervene in order to get answers.

But I prefer just to deal with it as something that is urgent, and now because I had my first meeting on the Pilgrim Plant in 1979.

I appreciate that, too, because this is my 45th year in Congress.

Allows licensees to make virtually all of the major decisions without NRC approval or meaningful public input.

Senator Markey has introduced legislation that would actually take the first constructive step on nuclear waste in decades.

The proposed rule is penny wise for nuclear plants and operators, but pound foolish for communities which have already been largely ignored.

The offsite emergency planning exemption means that a plant can cut its emergency preparedness procedures.

The people of Plymouth don't trust the experts anymore.

The NRC has essentially cut itself off from any ability to mitigate, direct, or understand the site specific issues around water discharge.

Will the Nuclear Regulatory Commission follow the advice of the IAEA and consider the environmental and political implications of allowing Holtec to dump 1 million gallons of radioactive water into Cape Cod Bay?

These are the issues that they are concerned about, the impact on the community, on safety, on the water, on the economy, on the fishing industry.

We need a restoration of trust, so that we improve the rule and improve community engagement.

The proposed decommissioning rule doesn't allow the decommissioning trust fund to be used for spent fuel management.

OK. Good. You are depending on the monitoring that you are going to be doing.

The NRC does not have a minimum balance which the company has to keep in order to make sure that the project is successfully completed.

Just so that people can understand, if Entergy, the owner of the plant, had kept ownership and had begun the decommissioning, the State of Massachusetts would not have been able to intervene.

So the NRC and Holtec contend that the proposal to dump the 1 million gallons of radioactive water into Cape Cod Bay is safe.

I think it is very important that Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute be a part of this process.