Patty Murray: “as a country we have congratulated ourselves time and time again on our enormous victory in winning the cold war. But…”

“as a country we have congratulated ourselves time and time again on our enormous victory in winning the cold war. But today I want to remind my colleagues that the cold war was won at a cost, a very steep cost, and one of the biggest debts owed remains unpaid: the environmental devastation created at places like Hanford Nuclear Reservation in south-central Washington State. Later today, the Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee will mark up its fiscal year 1998 appropriations bill. We will have a lot of work to do to make up the shortfalls found in both the Senate Armed Services defense authorization bill and the House national defense authorization bill. Rather than funding the cleanup bills, the authorizing committees have taken nearly $1 billion-- billion--from the defense environmental management accounts of the Department of Energy and moved them into procurement and other Department of Defense accounts. Let me tell you the effect this move will have on one place in my State. Probably the single biggest environmental problem on any of our former defense nuclear weapons sites is the 177 storage tanks filled with chemical and high-level radioactive waste at Hanford. Each of these tanks contains from a half million to a million gallons of toxic waste. Some of that waste is rock solid, some of it is soupy sludge, some of it is liquid, and some is poisonous gas. Several tanks have "burped" their noxious gases.”