Alan Simpson: “This debate has been going on for a while. I appreciate what the gentleman is saying. I have been having this debate…”

“This debate has been going on for a while. I appreciate what the gentleman is saying. I have been having this debate with the Secretary of Energy for some time. I understand where the people from South Carolina are coming from. We are talking about jobs and we are talking about the economy. I don't have a dog in this fight, but what I do have is responsibility as chairman of this committee. Five years from now, we are not sitting up here talking about the same thing, another chairman and another Secretary of Energy and another President. The Department of Energy is famous for starting programs and getting halfway down and then spending billions of dollars and then walking away from them. Yucca Mountain is the biggest hole in the ground--they spent $14 billion to build--than anything I have ever seen. And it is not the only thing that the Department of Energy has done. But they come to us now and say: Hey, we have a plan and it is going to be cheaper. We think that MOX is going to cost $30 billion. Other people say: Nah, that is a stretch. We are looking more like 20 or something like that. Nobody can get the numbers right, so we ask them to rebaseline it. They haven't done that. But they come to us and say: We have a plan. We think that what we ought to do is just dilute this stuff and then dispose of it. Okay. Great. What is that going to take? Well, first of all, we have a treaty with Russia. Have the Russians agreed to this? Well, no, but we think they will.…”