Jeff Bingaman: “I commend the Senator for offering this amendment. I am cosponsoring the amendment. Title V of the underlying bill we…”

“I commend the Senator for offering this amendment. I am cosponsoring the amendment. Title V of the underlying bill we are debating renews the provisions of the Price-Anderson Act that relate to Department of Energy contractors, but it does not renew those that relate to NRC licensees. The reason is that jurisdiction over the contractor provisions was in the Energy Committee, which was where we were largely developing this bill. The jurisdiction over the NRC licensee provisions is in the Environment Committee that Senator Smith chaired. Some members of the Environment Committee asked us not to include provisions that were under its jurisdiction in this substitute. The pending amendment Senator Voinovich has offered now provides a substitute for the Price-Anderson provisions in the underlying bill. It repeats the provisions that renew DOE contractor portions of Price-Anderson that are already there, and in addition, it adds the new provisions related to the NRC licensee part of the act. Let me give a short summary of what the pending amendment would do. Section 502 of the amendment extends the NRC's indemnification authority for another 10 years. That has been recommended by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and it is part of what Senator Voinovich is proposing. It extends the indemnification authority of the Department of Energy indefinitely. That is also consistent with the 1998 report of the Department of Energy.”