Harry Reid: “S. 104 is a bad bill in the form it was originally introduced. The bill in its substitute form is bad--for a lot of…”

“S. 104 is a bad bill in the form it was originally introduced. The bill in its substitute form is bad--for a lot of different reasons. No one in this body that I know of is more in tune with the substance of legislation than is the junior Senator from New Mexico. This man, who graduated from Stanford University among other schools such as Harvard, is a person who understands the merits of legislation. He has worked for years to try to improve this piece of legislation. He has worked on it because he believes in good public policy. He has failed. He has tried, he has tried, but when it comes right down to it, the proponents of this legislation will not give the junior Senator from New Mexico anything that will really substantively improve the bill. They have tried at the edges to play with it a little bit, but they have not been willing to change the substance of this poor legislation. The Senator from New Mexico summed up this legislation best in his closing few minutes of remarks today when he said, and I am paraphrasing: It is very obvious what is happening. Once the system is short-circuited and they go around the law that now exists and establish a temporary repository, that will end good science and good law. In effect, what he was saying is once interim storage is established, the billions, the billions of dollars spent trying to determine if Yucca Mountain is suitable would be wasted. That is what it amounts to. S. 104 is bad.”