Ed Markey

So I think for everyone here today you have just said something very important to them, which is that you said, you will not discharge the water unless you have the consent of the stakeholders.

No one has ever done this before in congressional history.

I know I wouldn't trust checking one of them every 5 years.

I am going to stop my questioning at this point in time and recognize Congressman Keating, who has been a real leader on this issue of the discharge of radioactive water into Plymouth Harbor.

I would contend that the dumping of 1 million gallons of radioactive water into Cape Cod Bay may affect the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary.

I agree, it makes more sense to me to conduct an environmental review and give the public...an opportunity to weigh in before the decommissioning process begins.

We will be bringing that message back to Washington, DC.

If you make rules more onerous, and we put more processes in place that basically make the decommissioning more expensive, it is going to have the effect of these plants hanging around a long time.

It does not, and it is obvious. So we just have to make sure the NRC reflects that in their rulemaking.

I love long nuclear safety hearings, by the way. I have done hundreds of them.

I am going to be organizing, obviously, my Senate colleagues to send that message to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Would you pursue legal action then against the company if that happened?

The costs of decommissioning power plants significantly exceed the NRC's site specific cost estimate for these plants.

You cannot, no one can point to a single environmental impact that this facility would have on the host community.

The State of New Mexico has not consented to receive a consolidated interim storage site in the Nation's nuclear waste.

Waiting decades to move on that cleanup harms communities and the larger State interests.

I think we need that the NRC accept the fact that post-shutdown decommissioning activity reports should be approved by the NRC in order to ensure that there is support for community and stakeholder involvement, accuracy, and environmental…

I am deeply troubled that the proposed decommissioning rule would essentially codify the process of regulating by exemption.

Without a viable solution for the long term storage of nuclear waste, it is clear that spent fuel will remain in dry casks at independent spent fuel storage installations for longer than originally anticipated.

Has the NRC ever taken action on changing a decommissioning report?

Maintaining requirements for emergency response and preparedness at least until all fuel is out of the spent fuel pool and put into dry casks.

We are in a period of great tension with the Russians right now.

I don't think that is going to be acceptable to the people here in Plymouth.

The proposal will allow for three times as much water released in 1 year as Pilgrim has ever released in the past.

I think the people who are going to be attending the public hearing have a right to know what the answers to those questions are before you have the public hearing.