Political Quotes

“Deferring the siting of a storage facility until that time will help to maintain the credibility of the site-suitability decision. That is what was said by the chairman of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, among other things. These same reviews have cited the steady and productive progress toward the objective--and I underline and underscore ``objective''--of determining Yucca Mountain's suitability for siting the Nation's repository for spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste. The powerful, aggressive, obsessive nuclear power lobby is not willing to wait. They are not willing to wait. They do not care about the credibility of the site-suitability decision. They are only interested in getting it out of their pockets, out of their backyards and putting it someplace else. Their arguments, I say, are mindless and reckless. Their arguments are specious. As we have indicated, spent fuel is safe right where it is. My friend, the senior Senator from Colorado, stated during the committee hearing that if the waste is safe enough to ship, it is safe enough to leave in place. That says it all. The arguments for consolidation are without substance because an interim storage facility at Yucca Mountain will not reduce the number of storage sites. On the contrary, it will increase their number. This is fact, it is not supposition, it is not presumptive, it is not vulnerable to contradiction.”