David Obey: “Mr. Chairman, this is the third cutting amendment that I will have offered on this bill. Let me simply explain what it…”

“Mr. Chairman, this is the third cutting amendment that I will have offered on this bill. Let me simply explain what it does. This amendment cuts $40 million in the bill for the advanced light water reactor program. What I would simply say is ``Here we go again'' as President Reagan used to say, with another example of corporate welfare for the nuclear industry. Essentially what these funds do is to help large corporations obtain design certification from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. This amounts to the Government funding a portion of the licensing costs of large corporations in order to comply with its own regulations. The committee has heard volumes of testimony this year from organization after organization saying, ``Let the marketplace determine what is commercially viable; the Government should not be in the business of picking winners and losers.'' How many times have you heard that? Yet these remarks apparently have fallen on deaf ears, or, alternatively, the committee has determined these concepts do not apply to the nuclear industry. Since 1974, the Federal Government has spent $26 billion on nuclear fission programs. This has occurred despite the fact that not one American utility has successfully ordered a nuclear powerplant in all of that time.”