John Ensign: “I do want to address the map that the junior Senator from Alaska has put up over here. When he was talking to the…”

“I do want to address the map that the junior Senator from Alaska has put up over here. When he was talking to the Senator from Missouri, talking about the transportation through Missouri, he was saying these things are already happening, going through Missouri, going through her State, because that was the major reason she was voting against the Yucca Mountain proposal. This is not the same kind of waste that is going to Yucca Mountain; otherwise, you would need a different kind of repository. This is not as high a level of nuclear waste as is coming to Nevada. So to equate the two is irresponsible, I believe. We should not even have that map on the floor. I want to clear up two other quick things. The first is, the Senator from Idaho just said, Isn't it better to have one site? If, in fact, we had one site, and we are going to have all the nuclear waste at one site, that would be true. Except we are not going to have just one site. We are going to continue to have sites all over the United States with nuclear waste. Here is a very simple graph to understand. Currently we have 45,000 metric tons of nuclear waste in America. By the time Yucca Mountain is supposed to start receiving waste in 2010, we will have 65,000 metric tons.”