Political Quotes

“I rise this evening to speak on a serious issue that affects my constituents. I've been investigating it since it was brought to my attention several months ago through our local media. The Department of Energy is in the process of moving dangerous radioactive waste thousands of miles across the country from east Tennessee to southern Nevada. This waste is destined for the Nevada Nuclear Security Site, formally known as the Nevada Test Site. This is a totally separate issue now from the proposed Yucca Mountain storage site debate that we have heard earlier today. If you're unaware that this radioactive waste is traveling through your backyard, I'm not surprised. The DOE has failed to properly inform Congress about this activity. The project involves the transport of hundreds of canisters containing high-concentration fissile materials from the Consolidated Edison Uranium Solidification Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to be dumped in my State of Nevada. The materials are so radioactive that they have a half life of more than 160,000 years. I want to be clear that this is not the kind of low-level waste that the Nevada Test Site has been accepting for years. In fact, just weeks ago, I learned that the Department of Energy had reworked the waste acceptance criteria for the security site to allow storage of materials that have radioactive concentrations more than 40 times higher than anything that has ever been brought to the site for disposal before.…”