Vernon Ehlers: “in the middle of the desert and underneath a mountain in the western United States we were building or trying to build a…”

“in the middle of the desert and underneath a mountain in the western United States we were building or trying to build a repository for nuclear waste. It is commonly known as Yucca Mountain. We have already collected billions and billions of dollars from the consumers in this country, consumers of electric power, in order to pay for that waste storage facility and the problems that arise from it in the future. And we are talking about billions and billions of dollars for that purpose alone. The question is can we perhaps improve the operation of that facility, can we perhaps save some money by not simply dumping things in there, but rather processing them first, categorizing the waste, putting the short-lived waste in one type of container, putting the long-lived waste in another type of container? One of the advantages of the project that is before us is that it is an attempt to separate waste into the high-activity, long-life waste and the high-activity, short-life waste, and, if we can do that, I would expect that to result, result in a substantial savings to the American taxpayers who are currently paying for the Yucca Mountain facility. Getting rid of nuclear waste is a very complex business. If it were easy, it would have been done long ago, and I hope that in fact we do manage to resolve this problem and deal with nuclear wastes in a safe, sane, and less costly fashion in the future.”