Political Quotes

“I particularly commend John Shimkus, the chairman of the subcommittee, who helped shepherd this bill through; Chairman Walden; Ranking Member Pallone and others; Mr. Tonko. It is truly a bipartisan work of art; 49-4 is what this bill passed in our committee. I can remember way back when when President Reagan was in office and signing the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in the Rose Garden. He said: We are going to keep our promise. The Federal Government is going to take care of nuclear waste. That is going to happen. Well, here we are now nearly 50 years later. I can remember the Upton-Towns bill back in the 1990s, a bill that did very much along the lines of what this bil does. We came within just a vote or two of having it overridden by the U.S. Senate, stopping it in its tracks. So, decades later, here we are again. In my district, we have two nuclear plants. Both of them have run out of room in their storage, so they have dry casks that are literally a John Shimkus baseball throw away from Lake Michigan. Every one of these 100-some sites across the country is in an environmentally sensitive area, and at some point they are going to run out of room. In Michigan, we have got two other sites that also have dry casks in addition to the two in my district. So we spent nearly $40 billion. Enough time has gone by. We need to deal with this.…”