Angie Craig: “Let me also talk about one other issue that we discussed when we talk about the capacity of Yucca Mountain and…”

“Let me also talk about one other issue that we discussed when we talk about the capacity of Yucca Mountain and, therefore, that there will always be waste out there somewhere in these temporary repositories at these nuclear reactors generating our commercial power. Yes, there will be temporary storage for periods of cooling pretransportation. There would be anyway under any circumstance. But what we are talking about--and the Senator from Nevada showed a dip--is that you can just double the numbers at each one of those, if you want. And doubling the numbers, in my opinion, does have a risk factor, certainly a management factor. What is most important is that many of these temporary repositories were licensed under State authority for a certain volume. To exceed that means you have to go back to the same State authority that was granted 15 or 20 years ago, versus today, and the politics have changed a great deal, and we know that, because those States were led to believe that the Federal Government would react responsibly in building a permanent repository and the temporary facility would be just that-- it would not become a permanent facility. Therefore, it would be a point to cool and a point to transfer. That is what those temporary repositories were always intended to be. So this really was the hand-in-glove scenario.…”