Political Quotes

“Mr. President, first, let me say what a pleasure it has been to work with Senator Crapo on these issues. Our situation is pretty simple. We have a U.S. Navy that generates spent nuclear fuel through its operations; we have a U.S. industry of next-generation nuclear technology that needs that spent fuel in order to test those innovative technologies; and we have extraordinary National Labs with world-class expertise in handling that nuclear material and supporting that innovation. This amendment brings those three together. It allows the U.S. Navy's spent fuel to be delivered to National Labs so that pursuant to a law we just passed in the Senate recently, the cooperation between the National Labs and the nuclear innovation community can move forward. We have already passed that bill. I hope we will pass this bill. I will close by saying there is something else in this that I think is worth our consideration. We have an enormous national liability with respect to our existing stockpiles of nuclear waste. Presently, we have no realistic plan for dealing with that. There is a prospect--it is definitely a maybe; I don't want to overpromise anything--there is definitely a prospect and it is the intention of some of these next- generation technologies that we will be able to develop nuclear technologies that will go through our nuclear waste stockpile and turn that into productive electricity generation. If we can get there, that would be a terrific Holy Grail.…”