[Pages S4698-S4703]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

LOW-LEVEL RADIOACTIVE WASTE STORAGE IN CALIFORNIA

Mr. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, I wish you a good morning. I ask you to
imagine the following situation: You are stricken with bone cancer.
Unfortunately, your doctor informs you that radiation therapy is no
longer an option because it creates low-level radioactive waste and
they simply cannot store any more.
Or another one: A loved one tests HIV positive. Sadly, we learn that
breakthrough research using radioactive materials to find a cure for
AIDS is being suspended. Why? Because we cannot store any more waste.
Finally, imagine this: You are the parent of a student at the
University of California. You're informed that a fire occurred in a
radioactive storage waste building on campus and exposed your son or
daughter to radiation released by the fire.
These are not farfetched situations, Mr. President. In fact,
radioactive waste is piling up on college campuses, hospitals, and
businesses at some 800 sites in California alone.
This chart tries to depict the distribution of low-level radioactive
waste that is stored today in California. The current situation shows
that it is virtually all over--in the bay area, the Sacramento area,
southern California, Los Angeles, San Diego, and so forth. There are
2,254 material licensees who store waste at some 800 sites in populated
areas, endangered by the threat of fires, earthquakes, and floods. It
is an extraordinary expense and duplication of effort.
Over 2,000 colleges, hospitals, and businesses in California alone
are licensed to use radioactive materials. I have a list of them. There
are radioactive materials or waste in San Francisco, as a matter of
fact, at the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco; in Chinatown, at 845
Jackson Street, to be specific; the University of San Francisco at 2130
Fulton Street; in Santa Monica at 2200 Santa Monica Boulevard; in
Beverly Hills at 9400 Brighton Way.
These are just a few of the research centers, the hospitals, the
biotechnical firms, and the cancer treatment centers that use
radioactive materials. These materials are needed and used to improve
and prolong our lives.
But we endanger our opportunity to enjoy these benefits when we do
not allow the State of California to carry out the radioactive trash
for proper disposal. That is exactly what is happening today because
our Interior Secretary, Bruce Babbitt, will not allow the State of
California to dispose of its low-level waste at Ward Valley, which is
the site California has licensed for this waste.
Mr. President, let me show you the second chart. This is California
without those 800-plus sites, with 1 site designated as a repository
for low-level waste, 1 site in a remote area away from the populated
areas, away from the area of southern California, away from the bay
area. This was a site selected after a 7-year process of scientific
study and public input. It is a site secure from fires, earthquakes,
and floods. It is carefully monitored and regulated, meeting all
Federal and State health and safety protection standards.
Is it not better, Mr. President, to just have 1 site for low-level
radioactivity instead of over 800 sites? Certainly it is. Soon we could
reach a point where advanced medical treatment for cancers and other
medical research will be curtailed or even halted due to a failure to
deal with the waste problem.
Is this a sane situation? Certainly not. Unfortunately, many of the
temporary sites used for storage of radioactive waste across California
are vulnerable to exposure such as fires, earthquakes, or floods, which
could cause an accidental release of radioactivity in urban or suburban
neighborhoods. Doctors are worried that the storage problem will
impact, if you will, future cancer treatment. Researchers are worried
that it will impact medical research. Educators are wondering how they
will explain to the parents of students that their children live on
campus that stores low-level radioactive waste.
Clearly, Mr. President, California has an environmental problem. But
to California's credit, California has acted in good faith to address
this problem.
Mr. President, as chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources
Committee, which has the oversight for this matter of both low-level
and high-level radioactive waste, I commend the Governor and the State
of California for the manner in which they have attempted to live under
the Federal law which has given the States the authority to address
low-level waste.
Acting in accordance with the Low Level Radioactive Waste Policy Act
and all applicable environmental laws and regulations, California has
found a solution. California wants this radioactive waste, used, again,
by more than 2,200 licensees in California, they want it to be removed
from those 800 suburban and urban locations to a safe, licensed
monitoring location at Ward Valley in the Mojave Desert, which I have
shown on the chart here.
Let us go back and look at a little of the history. After an 8-year
effort under the NRC guidelines, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
guidelines, and the expenditure of over $45 million, the California
Department of Health Services issued a license for a low-level waste
site at Ward Valley. The California Department of Health had the
authority to issue the license. The Federal Government gave them the
authority. They issued it.
But even with that license in hand, the operator of the site has been
unable to begin construction and operation because radical antinuclear
activists have launched a crusade to stop Ward Valley. Those activists
have used every conceivable method. They have sued. They have
demonstrated. They have occupied the site. They have made outrageous
and scientifically indefensible claims.

But these groups are wrong. They have been proven wrong. All of their
radical lawsuits challenging the licenses have been heard, and they
have been dismissed. Their legal challenges have been exhausted.
Two environmental impact statements have shown their radical claims
about Ward Valley's environmental impacts to be absolutely inaccurate,
just plain wrong. The two biological opinions from the Endangered
Species Act have shown their radical claims about Ward Valley's impact
on the desert tortoise are simply wrong. They have reached out under
every conceivable avenue in an attempt to find an excuse to stop going
ahead with Ward Valley.
In a special scientific report which was prepared for Secretary of
the Interior Babbitt, the National Academy of Sciences concluded, on
the issue of ground water contamination which was certainly a
legitimate consideration, that there is a highly unlikely prospect of
any potential threat of ground water contamination in this area with so
little rainfall out in the Mojave Desert.
They further stated that there is no health threat posed to Colorado
River drinking water as some of the radical opponents continue to
erroneously claim. They claim that somehow this is going to seep down
into the ground water and get into the Colorado River. They will reach
out and conclude almost anything, Mr. President.
As the chairman of the National Academy's committee recently wrote:

[[Page S4699]]

. . . none of the data reviewed by the Committee support
further delay or opposition to construction of this facility,
provided the oversight and monitoring recommendations of the
Committee are in place.

On the merits, the radical antinuclear activists have been slam-
dunked. But merits are not enough in this process, Mr. President, as we
both know. As the Senator from Wyoming and myself, the Senator from
Alaska, have seen time and time again, you can win on the merits and
you can lose on the emotional arguments.
But on this issue, the activists have lost every battle. They have
been proven wrong again and again and again.
But the BLM land for the Ward Valley site has not been transferred to
the State of California. This is BLM, Bureau of Land Management, land
in California. It has not been transferred. Why? The waste still sits
in the neighborhoods, still sits in the schools, still sits in the
hospitals.
Why has it not been done? It has not been done because the
antinuclear activists have convinced the Interior Department to stand
in the way of the transfer. At each opportunity they present a new
twist, a new obstacle. The latest twist involves the discovery of
elevated levels of tritium gas at an old low-level waste site in
Beatty, NV. Opponents of Ward Valley claim that this somehow proves
that the same thing will happen at Ward Valley. The Interior Department
is now using this as an excuse for further delay at Ward Valley.
It is interesting to note what Secretary Babbitt's own Director of
the U.S. Geological Survey, in a memorandum dated February 14, had to
say about the supposed links between the Beatty site and Ward Valley:

. . . the observed tritium distribution at Beatty is
probably the result of the burial of liquid wastes and the
fact that some disposal trenches at Beatty were left open for
years until filled, allowing accumulation and infiltration of
precipitation. . . . The [Ward Valley] license does not
permit disposal of radioactive waste in liquid form and
requires that only the minimum amount of open trench
necessary for the safe and efficient operation shall be
excavated at any one time. Because of the differences in
waste burial practices at the Beatty site compared to those
intended for the Ward Valley site . . . extrapolations of the
results from Beatty to Ward Valley are too trenuous to have
much scientific value.

The day after receiving this memo, the Deputy Secretary of the
Interior called for further tests, further delays, even though the
scientific advice he received was to the contrary.
Now, what you have here is a rather interesting situation. You have
the State of California, who has gone through a process of expending
over $40 million on the evaluation, the application, and the licensing.
Who has a greater responsibility to the health and welfare of the
people of California than the Governor and the California Department of
Health that have approved this site? They are certainly competent in
determining whether or not the recommendations by the scientific
community are carried out, all Federal and State laws are mandated in
compliance with regulations. The Secretary somehow seems to dismiss
this.
Why would the Interior Department want to take this attitude? Some
suggest they made a political calculation that Ward Valley can yet be
another environment issue that can be shaped to make perhaps Congress
look bad with respect to protecting the environment.
I am here to say that their political calculation is wrong, Mr.
President. On the issue of Ward Valley, the radical and antinuclear
activists and their friends in the administration have simply gone too
far. I think they have crossed the line, because they are jeopardizing
the environment, because they are jeopardizing human health and safety,
because they evidently would rather keep radioactive waste near the
schools and the neighborhoods than at a licensed site in the remote
desert, a remote area where people are far away, where children do not
play and people do not work.
Put simply, they have gone too far because their radicalism has
reached the point where it will start harming the safety of the people.
They think they can get away with that, because they believe Ward
Valley can be spun as an issue where the so-called environmentalists
are keeping Congress from thrashing the environment. Sooner or later,
even in this town, even with the media perception being what it is with
respect to radioactivity, I have to believe that the plain and simple
truth will eventually defeat this misinformation.
The plain and simple truth is this, Mr. President: We have an
obligation to protect the environment. We want to protect the
environment. If you want to maintain important medical research,
advance treatment, and so forth, if you want to get stored
radioactivity waste out of schools, hospitals, and neighborhoods to a
site that the National Academy of Sciences and the State of California
says is best, opening Ward Valley is the right thing to do.
Just do not take my word for it, Mr. President. Take the word of the
National Association of Cancer Patients; the Association of American
Medical Colleges; the American College of Nuclear Physicians; the
California Medical Association; the American Medical Association; the
Southwestern Low-Level Radioactivity Waste Commission, representing
California, Arizona, North Dakota, and South Dakota; the Southeast
Compact Commission, representing Alabama, Florida, Georgia,
Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia; the Midwest
Interstate Low-Level radioactivity Waste Commission, representing
Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin; the Northwest
Interstate Low-Level Radioactivity Commission, representing Alaska,
Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming; the
State of California Department of Health; University of California at
Los Angeles, UCLA; University of Southern California; Stanford
University--and more, Mr. President, too numerous to name, who all
support Ward Valley.
Mr. President, this should not be a partisan issue. We have not
sought to make it a partisan issue. Senate bill 1596, a bill to
transfer the land to the Ward Valley site, was introduced by both a
Democrat and Republican. It was voted out of committee by bipartisan
voice vote.
Let me warn those who attempt to make this a partisan issue. If you
oppose the bill for partisan political purposes, you are on the wrong
side of science. You will be on the wrong side of the environment. You
will be on the wrong side of human health and safety. You will endanger
the viability of the Low-Level Radioactivity Waste Policy Act. The
result of that might mean that the next low-level waste will be in your
State. I invite any and all my colleagues to join me in cosponsoring
Senate bill 1596.
Mr. President, the point I want to make here--and I think it is very
important--this is an issue that is in the interest not just of the
State of California but of the entire Nation. It is going to set the
threshold for just what we do with low-level waste, whether we
continue, like the ostrich, to bury our head in the sand and simply
ignore it.
We have seen, in this chart, in the State of California we have over
800 sites. If those critics propose no other alternative, or whether we
have one site that is approved by the State, supported by the Governor,
addressed by the National Academy of Science, then we can proceed with
this. That will set, if you will, policy in other States where we have
the same set of circumstances, perhaps not as acute in California. I
suggest New York and other areas where we have a concentration of
population and advanced medical and technical experiments going on. It
is not a partisan issue.
It is an environmental issue. It is a responsible environmental
issue. And this administration and this Secretary of the Interior by
not coming up with an alternative that is better than that proposed by
the State of California after the Federal Government has given the
States the authority to proceed with disposing the low-level waste is
acting irresponsibly.
What has happened here? I do not criticize President Clinton. But I
criticize the bad advice that he has been given by Secretary Babbitt
because the White House, in following the advice of the Secretary of
the Interior, has made this a partisan political issue, and they should
not have done so. The issue is science. Science is on our side. The
public health and the safety arguments are on our side.
Ward Valley is the legitimate site. If we are going to give the
States the responsibility, as we have done, and then

[[Page S4700]]

turn around and not let them exercise that responsibility, then the
enemy, as is often the case, is us.
We have an opportunity to do something about it, Mr. President.
Senate bill 1596 is just that. It would legislate because the Secretary
of the Interior refuses to proceed the land exchange mandating that the
Federal Government make this site available to the State of California.
Mr. President, I could not be more outspoken in my frustration, and
joining with the State of California in a matter in which this issue--
which affects the health and the welfare, and sets the precedent for
the manner in which we are going to address the eventual disposition of
low-level nuclear waste--is to be addressed.
How can we, Mr. President, think we will resolve the issue of
managing the high-level radioactive waste that has been generated
around this country by our national defense facilities as well as our
nuclear powerplants if we cannot even agree on what to do with low-
level waste? That is the situation we are facing today.
We have a proposal before this body to designate the Nevada test site
as the site for a temporary high-level nuclear waste storage facility.
What is this all about, Mr. President?
What we have done over the last 15 years or so is expend over $5
billion to investigate the suitability of Yucca Mountain, NV, as a site
for a permanent geologic repository for high-level nuclear waste. Yucca
Mountain is adjacent to the Nevada test site, which, for the last 50
years or so, has been used for a series of above and below ground tests
of atomic bombs. The Nevada test site is an area of Nevada that is
still off limits to the public because of the activities that have
taken place there. I have been there. I have been in the tunnel that is
being dug into Yucca Mountain to evaluate the permanent repository
site. Currently the test tunnel is nearly 3 miles long. However, the
prospect of the geologic repository being the answer to our immediate
high-level waste storage problem is fraught with the same bureaucratic
inefficiencies associated with the Ward Valley low-level waste facility
that I just discussed.
The crux of the current situation is that we have waste stored
throughout the Nation adjacent to our nuclear powerplants. About 20
percent of our country's power generation comes from nuclear
powerplants. This waste is stored at the plant sites. On-site storage
is licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But the fact is that
the Federal Government made a contractual commitment to take that waste
away from the reactor sites by the year 1998. Under those contracts,
the Federal Government has collected about $11 billion from America's
ratepayers to pay for a government facility to store the nuclear fuel.
Under the existing program, we are not going to be able to meet the
Government's commitment to take waste in 1998 or anytime in the near
future. Already, there are lawsuits that have been filed against the
Federal Government for nonperformance.
So here we sit, with a program that is continuing to pursue a
permanent geologic repository with no other alternatives in sight. We
will spend perhaps another $4 to $5 billion before the Department of
Energy will make a decision as to whether or not it should apply for a
license for Yucca Mountain for use as a permanent repository. Then we
have to actually get it licensed. Although the odds on the site being
found suitable by the Department of Energy have been set at 80 percent,
the odds on actually getting a license from the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission have been set at 50-50. This gives you some idea of the
gamble we are taking with the ratepayer's money.

So what many of us have proposed is that the Nevada test site be used
for an interim storage site for spent nuclear fuel until there is a
determination of whether or not Yucca Mountain can be licensed for
permanent storage.
There are some interesting things going on in the area of nuclear
waste disposal. Japan, France, and England operate under an entirely
different theory. Legitimate concerns over nuclear weapons
proliferation arise because nuclear reactors generate small amounts of
plutonium mixed into their spent nuclear fuel. It is a policy in the
United States that we take this high-level waste and bury it. In France
and Japan the practice is to recover it, and through a MO<inf>x fuel
process, put it back into the nuclear reactors, burn it, and thereby
reduce the proliferation risk. Each country's ultimate disposition of
its high-level waste is an interesting comparison, to say the least.
The French and the Japanese, of course, have the theory of burning
plutonium by injecting it into the reactor with depleted uranium. This
disposes of the proliferation threat because the high-level waste that
result does not contain plutonium. You have a residue that is a glass-
like substance. The point is that this kind of material cannot be
reprocessed and an explosive device made out of it.
So while it is a rather complex concept, Mr. President, the theory is
that you can either choose to bury your high-level waste permanently in
the belief that you can build a site that can be proven to withstand
earthquakes, that will withstand flooding, if it ever should occur, or
some other natural event that might interfere with the storage site, or
whether you use an advanced technical process and burn the plutonium
and, therefore, eliminate the threat of proliferation.
Although other countries have chosen this different approach, I would
like to point out that, in S. 1271, we are proposing that a temporary
storage site be built in Nevada, and that the plan to build a permanent
repository facility continue. Why Nevada, Mr. President? As I have
said, the site would be in that portion of Nevada that has been used
for tests of atomic bombs over the last 50 years. It is a site that
obviously carries a great deal of experience with radioactive materials
and seems to meet--at least as far as we can tell after 5 billion
dollars' worth of research--the test as a viable site for a permanent
repository. Having one interim storage facility would remove this
material from the areas where it is currently stored near the nuclear
power stations in some 41 States. We have over 80 storage areas in
those 41 States. Illinois, for example, has several in their State.
Centralizing all of that spent fuel in one location is really what we
are talking about in designating the Nevada test site as a temporary
storage site.
My good friends from Nevada are opposed to this. Why are they opposed
to this? Well, unfortunately, we only have 50 States, Mr. President.
You have to put nuclear waste somewhere. Where is the best place to put
it? Well, in my mind, it seems to me that Nevada is the best place
because the Nevada test site, used for nuclear materials testing for so
long, is remote and is because of its use in the past, must be secured
by the Government for the foreseeable future.
So why not use this site as a temporary repository until we can
determine where our permanent repository will be? If the permanent
repository site at Yucca Mountain is found to be suitable and the
Department of Energy decides to go forward to try to get a license, we
will need an interim storage facility at that site. Even after a
suitability decision is made, we are going to have to spend another
$4.5 or $5 billion to determine whether that site meets our licensing
requirements for a permanent repository. That decision will be years
down the line.
There is another activity going on here that I want to point out to
my colleagues. Some groups see this as a way to terminate, if you will,
the operations of many of our nuclear power generating reactors around
the country because the spent fuel storage at those sites is almost
filled to capacity. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission licenses them to
a specific capacity, and when they are filled, why, obviously, they
cannot add more spent fuel without violating their license. Building
additional on-site storage requires State approval. Because the Federal
Government is not able to fulfill its promise to take the fuel away,
getting that approval usually becomes a very contentious process.
Of course, the utilities' plans to store spent nuclear fuel on-site
were dependent on the Federal Government meeting its commitment to take
that high-level nuclear waste from the power generators at those sites
by the year 1998. However, we do not have the ability to meet that
commitment; we do not have a permanent site licensed or

[[Page S4701]]

built. So temporary storage is an interim alternative that makes a lot
of sense.
My colleagues from Nevada have suggested that interim storage is an
impractical alternative because you are moving spent nuclear fuel from
areas around the country where it is currently stored to one site in
the State of Nevada. They have suggested that if it is decided that the
permanent storage site will be somewhere else, you will have to move it
again.
That is a bit presumptuous, because the site at Yucca Mountain is the
best site that we have been able to come up with so far in all the 50
States. There is every reason to believe that ultimately Yucca Mountain
will be determined the permanent site. In any case, we must move the
spent nuclear fuel out of the other 80 sites where it is stored now and
put it in one concentrated area until such time as a final decision is
made about a permanent site. The Nevada test site is the best site. It
will go across the country in casks that are engineered in such a way
as to withstand any imaginable accident, including railroad
derailments. These are very highly engineered containers. A great deal
of expertise has gone into their design. So the exposure to the public
from the standpoint of transportation is virtually nil. The risk can be
almost eliminated. We can, therefore, safely take this waste that is in
the 41 affected States, move it to Nevada, and temporarily store it
until we have a permanent repository. That is what the legislation is
all about.
As time goes on, I will urge the leadership to take up the
legislation designating the Nevada test site as the site for a
temporary storage facility, and I will proceed with extensive floor
statements describing the sites around the United States where we have
nuclear powerplants, the concentration of nuclear waste that is stored,
and the merits of why the Nevada test site is the most logical and
practical site and why we should do it now.
As I indicated earlier with my discussion of the Ward Valley low-
level waste situation, this is yet another serious environmental issue
where we are being urged by some to put our head in the sand rather
than address a critical problem. This waste already exists. Further, we
need the 20-percent electricity that is generated by the nuclear power
industry. If we are to shut down those reactors, what are we going to
replace it with? Are we going to replace it with coal or oil? That
energy must come from some other source.
We need the nuclear power generating industry and its contribution to
the electric supply of the United States. We cannot do without it. But
whether or not we continue to have nuclear power, the question is how
we can responsibly relieve the existing spent nuclear fuel that has
accumulated over an extended period of time. How can we meet the
Federal Government's obligation? The Federal Government has been paid
$11 billion by ratepayers to take this waste by 1998, and we will not
able to do it under the existing program.
The only responsible alternative is to proceed and designate the
Nevada test site as a temporary repository site until such time as a
permanent repository can be licensed. So it is my hope we can schedule
this legislation in the not too distant future and proceed with
legislation that presents a responsible alternative to the current
irresponsible policy of simply avoiding a decision on this critical
issue.
Mr. President, I have editorials from newspapers including the Oregon
Statesman Journal, the Washington Post, the Denver Post, the St.
Joseph, MO Herald Palladium, and the Harrisburg, PA Patriot-News, as
well as many others, in support of naming Yucca Mountain a temporary
repository for nuclear waste. I ask unanimous consent that a sample of
these editorials be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the editorials were ordered to be printed
in the Record, as follows:

[From the Patriot-News, Jan. 26, 1996]

High-Level Risk: Federal Foot-Dragging Leaves N-Plants No Option But To
Store Waste on-Site

Two of the three nuclear power stations along the
Susquehanna River may soon begin storing highly radioactive
spent fuel in steel-and-concrete casks in on-site facilities
specially built for the purpose.
This nuclear material, one of the most dangerous substances
known to science, was never intended to be stored on a long-
term basis at nuclear power plants. Under a law passed in
1982 by Congress, the Federal Government was assigned
responsibility to take permanent custody of spent fuel from
commercial nuclear reactors.
A long-term storage facility for the waste was to be opened
by 1988, by the Energy Department, still conducting studies
of the proposed Yucca Mountain site in Nevada, says it
doesn't expect the facility to be ready until at least 2010.
This high-level radioactive waste is so lethal that it must
be stored in a manner that will shield it from the
environment for thousands of years, a period longer than
mankind's recorded history. Not surprisingly, no state wants
to serve as permanent host for the waste, but the end result
of the failure of the government to move decisively to build
a storage facility is that nuclear power stations around the
country are fulfilling that role by default.
Under ordinary circumstances, spent fuel is removed from
the reactor and held in nearby pools of water for several
months to cool and to allow some of the radiation to
dissipate. Utilities have gone to great lengths to devise
ways to increase the capacity of the cooling ponds, but a
growing number have run out of options and are moving to
construct new facilities in which the waste is stored in
dry steel-and-concrete canisters.
Pennsylvania Power & Light Co. plans to begin construction
this year of a $10 million on-site spent-fuel storage
facility at its Susquehanna nuclear power station at Berwick.
PECO Energy Co. is contemplating a similar move at its Peach
Bottom nuclear power facility in York County.
Three Mile Island is expected to have sufficient storage
capacity to last through the expected life of that nuclear
plant, according to owner GPU Nuclear Corp.
A lawsuit, in which GPU, other utilities and the state
Public Utility Commission are participants, is seeking to
force the federal government to speed up the process of
establishing a high-level radioactive waste repository. A
federal appeals court in Washington recently heard arguments
in the case.
Meanwhile, there is legislation in Congress to establish an
interim storage site near Yucca Mountain until a permanent
facility is completed. In our view, this offers the most
sensible answer to the nuclear-storage dilemma.
The country is courting catastrophe by permitting this
highly dangerous waste to be stored in dozens of areas of the
country, usually along waterways, and unnecessarily creating
more radioactive-conaminated facilities, as well as expense
for ratepayers.
Congress needs to end its dithering on this serious issue
and move to bring this waste under federal control in a
single facility until a permanent one can be built.
____

[From the Statesman Journal, Feb. 11, 1996]

Congress Stalls on Nuclear Waste

Congress seems to be stalled on a bill to find a home for
tons of waste from the nation's nuclear power plants.
Measures to establish a temporary nuclear repository at
Yucca Mountain in Nevada have had strong support in both
chambers, but nothing has happened. House Resolution 1020
needs to be enacted promptly.
It will rectify two financial problems. It will give
residential and business customers of power generated by
nuclear power plants something for their money. Oregonians
and others have paid nearly $12 billion into a fund to build
a repository for nuclear waste. The money has done nothing
but help the government make the budget deficit look a little
smaller.
And it will save utilities from having to build temporary
storage facilities at their nuclear power plants to hold
spent fuel rods that by now should have found a permanent
national repository. At the now-closed Trojan plant, the rods
are kept in pools of water. But dry storage will have to be
built--at ratepayers' expense--if the Yucca Mountain site is
not approved. Other nuclear power plants are running out of
storage space. They either will shut down or, more likely,
build expensive temporary storage.
The measure also will move the nation toward a permanent
repository in Yucca Mountain. The temporary site will hold
nuclear wastes until the final scientific studies of Yucca
are completed.
Although the measures have strong support, controversy
remains. Some in Nevada and elsewhere are not convinced the
Yucca Mountain site is safe for centuries-long storage of
radioactive wastes. Reputable scientific studies discount the
risk.
Other people worry about transporting nuclear fuel rods to
Nevada from throughout the country. This, too, is a needless
worry. The casks that would hold the wastes were engineered--
and tested--to withstand a head-on train crash and the
hottest fires.
This country must take the decisive step and finally
provide--after 13 years of political indecision--a safe place
for its nuclear wastes.
____

[From the Washington Post, Jan. 12, 1996]

The One Best Place for Nuclear Waste

(By Luther Carter)

Despite continuing controversy and hand-wringing analysis,
the nuclear waste problem has for early two decades grown as
a political issue while seeming every more confused and
opaque. Curt Suplee's recent article in The Post [Dec. 31]
ably described the quagmire in which the waste issue is
stuck.

[[Page S4702]]

But political consensus won't come on this issue until we
begin looking at the waste problem as actually one of the
more manageable aspects of a far larger question. With the
Cold War and nuclear arms race of a bipolar world now behind
us, we can address what to do about the entire atomic legacy
we began creating more than a half-century ago.
This awesome issue raises two questions: What to do about
nuclear weapons, and what to do about nuclear power?
It's time now for a national and global debate about the
weapons and the elaborate industrial complexes established to
produce them. The nuclear forces and production
establishments of the nuclear weapons states were created
through great human ingenuity and national sacrifice. So
whether over the next generation we might summon the will and
ingenuity to abolish all (or nearly all-- these weapons and
complexes is not a possibility to be ignored and decided by
inaction or default.
It's time, too, for a debate about whether we wish to rid
ourselves of civil nuclear power or, if we think it might be
needed, to give this politically besieged enterprise a fair
chance to rise or fall on its merits.
But however these larger questions ultimately might be
decided, there will be no escaping the need for a solution to
the nuclear waste problem, and this almost inescapably means
establishing a national storage center at the Nevada Test
Site (NTS).
Coming to this conclusion does not require sophisticated
research and analysis. The country needs such a storage
center for four surprisingly diverse reasons:
Relief for the electric utilities. The center would relieve
the utilities' growing fear that the federal government will
be unable to honor its obligation, effective three years
hence, to begin accepting the spent fuel now accumulating at
more than 100 power reactors in 34 states. This grievance is
particularly rancorous in light of the billions in federal
nuclear waste funds already collected by utility companies
from their rate-payers.
Reactor decommissioning. The center would support the safe
decommissioning of nuclear reactors that utilities shut down
either for financial or safety reasons or in response to
public mandate. Without such a national center, spent fuel
must remain indefinitely in storage pools and dry vaults at
reactor sites.
Cleaning up the nuclear weapons production complex. The
center would offer a timely and needed place to send high-
level waste and spent naval reactor fuel from Savannah River
and the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, and ultimately
the high-level waste from the Hanford reservation in
Washington state.
Strengthening the nuclear nonproliferation regime. The
center, if placed under International Atomic Energy Agency
inspection, could become a model of close accountability for
large amounts of weapons-usable plutonium.
Most of this plutonium would come to the NTS in commercial
spent fuel from routine reactor operations. But some of it
would be plutonium recovered from weapons production sites
and dismantled warheads, and (for security reasons) made
highly radioactive either by mixing with high-level waste or
burning in specially designated reactors. Secure
but retrievable storage of plutonium could continue
indefinitely at the center, given the chance that this
fissionable material might eventually be recovered for its
energy value.
There simply is no place other than the Nevada Test site to
store all these various radioactive and proliferation-
sensitive nuclear materials. The NTS is uniquely fitted for
this role by its remoteness, its tradition of tight security
from four decades of nuclear weapons testing, and its very
real (though much disputed) potential for safe storage and
disposal--a potential based on the exceptionally dry climate,
great depth to the water table and location inside a closed
desert basin that drains to Death Valley. The ongoing
investigation of Yucca Mountain for a geologic repository
shows promise but is now hampered by severe budget cuts.
The state of Nevada is, for its part, opposed to any
national waste repository or storage center coming to the
NTS. But that state alone could not prevent broad acceptance
of a national waste policy that rests on long-term interim
and possibly permanent storage at the test site.
Nevada's main hope at the moment may lie with the Clinton
White House, where the president's senior advisers have
favored a veto of any legislation calling for interim storage
of spent fuel at a specific site. They would have the site
determined by ``scientific analyses.'' But the reality is
that while technically, just about any site is acceptable for
interim surface storage, politically the affected state,
whatever it is, will be opposed.
Antinuclear activists and many environmental groups back
Nevada's contention that spent fuel can safely remain on site
at the reactors for up to a century. But this view obscures
larger environmental concerns and the need now, without more
years of delay, to start facing up to the dangerous legacy
from a half-century of use and misuse of the atom.
____

[From the Herald-Palladium, Nov. 28, 1995]

Getting Closer to Nuke Waste Solution

The lethal nuclear waste sitting in Southwest Michigan and
dozens of other sites across the United States may be headed
to a new--and safer--home.
A bill sponsored by U.S. Rep. Fred Upton, R-St. Joseph,
would open up a temporary storage site in the Nevada desert
and would push the opening of a permanent site deep beneath
the desert surface.
We're glad to see that his bill, approved earlier this year
by committee, is headed for a House vote. We urge its
passage. A similar bill is expected to come up for a Senate
vote next year.
The question of what to do with high-level nuclear waste
has been looming ever since the first nuclear power plant
opened in this country three decades ago. From the beginning,
the federal government committed itself to the eventual
disposal of the waste. It recognized the danger in having
high-level nuclear waste disposal sites scattered in various
places across the country near populated areas.
In 1982, Congress tried to light a fire under the feet of
the Department of Energy by passing a bill requiring the
government to have a waste site ready by 1998. There's no
chance now of meeting that deadline. The earliest a waste
site will be ready is 2010, and even that won't happen at
the current pace of development.
That's why Upton's bill is so important. It not only pushes
DOE into selecting a waste site--probably at Yucca Mountain,
Nevada--but also allows the government to store the waste
temporarily above ground in an unpopulated desert location.
The chief opponents of Upton's bill--besides Nevada
residents who don't want the waste site in their back yard,
even though the remote desert isn't really anybody's yard--
are people who are opposed to nuclear power in general. They
know that settling the waste issue will open the door for the
construction of more nuclear power plants and allow those
that are running out of storage room to keep operating.
But closing down the nation's nuclear power plants not only
would have a devastating effect on the energy production--and
therefore, the economy--but would do nothing to solve the
problem of nuclear waste disposal.
Upton's bill moves the process forward, and we hope
Congress approves it.
____

[From the Denver Post, May 1, 1996]

Politics, Not Science, Delays Yucca Mountain

(By Linda Seebach)

The question of what to do with America's spent nuclear
fuel and other detritus from the atomic era is more political
than scientific. Progress toward the permanent storage
facility proposed for Yucca Mountain, Nev., is slowed by
endless debate about all the things that could possibly go
wrong centuries from now.
I was inside Yucca Mountain last week. The Valley Study
Group, an organization of people in and around Livermore,
Calif., who are interested in the activities of Lawrence
Livermore and Sandia national laboratories, organized a tour
to the site, which is on the western edge of the Nevada Test
Site about 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
As part of the years-long process to determine whether the
site is suitable for keeping nuclear waste isolated from the
environment for millennia, the project is boring a 5-mile
tunnel in a loop inside the mountain. They're about 3 miles
along now, and our group put on hard hats and safety belts
and hiked along in for a few hundred meters to see how the
tunnel is constructed and where the scientific studies are
done. Project scientists sample the rock, air and water
because the crucial fact that determines how long the storage
is safe is whether water percolating through the rock will
eventually corrode the canisters containing the wastes, and
then (even more eventually) carry radionuclides through the
rock to ground water.
Yucca Mountain was chosen as a potential site because there
isn't much water anywhere near it, and in particular because
the groundwater level is hundreds of meters below where the
waste canisters would be placed.
Seeing the site and the tunnel doesn't imply anything about
the quality of the science, but I already knew about that,
having been reading about this project for years. Being there
did impress me simultaneously with the huge sale of the
project in human terms, and its insignificance in the vast
and desolate landscape around Yucca Mountain.
Even the desert tortoise, a threatened species that is
treated with respectful deference by tortoise-trained
personnel, is at much greater risk from ravens who think
soft-shell tortoise is a treat than from anything humans are
doing around the project site.
The safety expectations for Yucca Mountain, or any other
potential site if that one turns out to be unsatisfactory,
are unreasonable, not so much because they can't be met but
because they are more stringent than those applied to the
alternatives. At present, spent fuel is stored in cooling
ponds near the plants that used it. There's no evidence it's
unsafe there now, but for the next 10,000 years? That's
longer than humanity's written history.
Non-nuclear alternatives aren't clearly better. Extracting
and burning coal and oil is not environmentally benign,
though the effects can be mitigated, but we can't plan on
doing it for millennia. There's not that much to burn.
Freezing in the dark is not healthy for children and other
living things, either.

[[Page S4703]]

It's true that radioactive material takes a long time to
decay, but the consequences of deforesting a continent are
pretty permanent, too. It makes sense to store spent nuclear
fuel in the safest place available, rather than leaving it
where it is, but trying to plan for thousands of years in the
future is wasted energy.
A civilization that maintains our current modest level of
technology should have no more difficulty coping with the
consequences of using nuclear energy than it does with any
other kind. And without that much technology, the human
species will have far more serious things to worry about than
what its forebears buried deep under a mountain in Nevada.

Mr. MURKOWSKI. I thank the Chair. I thank you for the time allotted
to me and wish you a good day.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Grassley). The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. GRASSLEY addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Thomas). The Senator from Iowa.
Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for 12
minutes as in morning business.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

____________________