We need to take steps today to ensure nuclear power has a future in our country.

We have to decide we're going to do this. We have to set clear goals.

a few years ago, I recommended--5 years ago, in a speech at Oak Ridge--that we build 100 new reactors.

So you support opening Yucca Mountain?

So you would be comfortable with losing the nuclear option in terms of our country's ability to deal with climate change.

The law says it should, the court says the law says that, and the scientists say it's safe for a million years there.

So, it would seem to me that we're just introducing one more element of policy, the Clean Power Plan, in the name of carbon-free emissions that discriminates against the single largest producer of carbon-free emissions and makes it more…

I think our nuclear energy percentage, as a whole, is going to go down, and we're going to have a decimated industry.

The Subcommittee on Energy and Water will please come to order.

I've been critical of the Administration's, what I believe to be, obsession with giant wind turbines and the continued subsidy of them.

if we hadn't acted by 2030, the option would be gone

But do you believe we can open--so you--it would fail because groups like yours don't support doing it even though the science says it's safe there for a million years, and the law says we should do it.

do you think that it helps dealing with climate change to lose the nuclear option by 2030

Well, Senator Feinstein and I have been working for 5 years on this, and we were doing a pretty good job of reconciling Senators who have fundamentally different points of view on nuclear power in some ways, but not on nuclear storage, not…

Secretary Moniz said at our hearing that by the end of the year, the Department would begin the process of moving forward with interim storage facilities for nuclear waste.

I want to imagine a day the United States is without nuclear power, a day that I don't want to see in our country's future.

The place is Yucca Mountain in Nevada, and the law says that's where it should go.

I think it's in the best interests of the country, for many, many reasons.

We need to invest in the next generation of reactors.

Well, we like to work that way.

So we would lose 20 percent of our what, we call our base load capacity, of our electricity, which is base load capacity in this case, and about 60 percent of our carbon-free.

In practical terms, that means we can get another 20 years of cheaper, reliable, carbon-free electricity.

Solving the nuclear waste stalemate is a priority that Senator Feinstein and I agree on.

Senator Feinstein and I are united on that;

Yucca Mountain would be large enough to hold all the stored nuclear fuel in the country that we have today, correct?