David Obey: “I would simply like to make four points once again. After the Congress voted to end the advanced liquid metal reactor…”

“I would simply like to make four points once again. After the Congress voted to end the advanced liquid metal reactor program, the agency asked Congress for money to terminate that program and to begin to lay off people at the labs associated with that program. After they got permission from the Congress to do it, the agency then decided they wanted to change their mind. They asked for $37 million to continue employing 900 people at these labs who were going to be doing work on that project. They asked to continue to employ them rather than to terminate them. Yet they do not have any new mission. That seems to me to be a very big waste of money. Second, DOE claims that reprocessing technology might be a treatment that can be used for disposing of spent fuel. But the fact is that internal documents in that very same agency show that there is no consensus within that agency on the subject, and they show that in fact their planners are proceeding ahead under the assumption that their plans for dealing with spent fuel will not involve reprocessing.”