Capitol Words a project of the Sunlight Foundation

Rep. John Shimkus

Mr. Speaker, it's great to be back down on the floor, back to being in Washington, DC, to continue with what I spent most of my time last year doing, which was addressing the high-level nuclear waste issues in this country.

Today, we go to the great State of Tennessee, and identify a location where there is presently high-level nuclear waste stored and compare that to the site that was picked and that is in Federal law right now, which is the high-level nuclear waste depository scheduled to occur in Yucca Mountain.

First of all, this is Sequoyah in Tennessee, where there are over 1,094 MTU of spent nuclear fuel onsite. At Yucca Mountain, which is in the desert in Nevada, there is currently no nuclear waste onsite. At Sequoyah, the waste is stored above the ground in pools and dry casks. If we were to put it in Yucca Mountain, where it is supposed to go, the waste would be stored 1,000 feet underground--underneath, in essence, a mountain. At Sequoyah, the waste is 25 feet from the groundwater table. At Yucca Mountain, it would be 1,000 feet above the water table, and Yucca Mountain is 100 miles from the Colorado River. Sequoyah is 14 miles from the city of Chattanooga and 14 miles from Chickamauga Lake.

So why do I highlight these issues? Because of what happened in Japan with Fukushima Daiichi and the high-level nuclear waste.

A lot of the nuclear exposure was because pools had dried up. The nuclear waste heated up, and then you had almost a worldwide catastrophe right next to the ocean. If we were doing what was public policy in Federal law in collecting our high-level nuclear waste and taking it to a desert underneath a mountain, that would be a much more secure location than around our major municipalities, our streams, and our groundwater locations. But, no, because of this administration and some political promises made in the last election cycle, they have defunded and pulled off the table Yucca Mountain from consideration.

In 1982, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act made the Federal Government responsible for checking waste. Since that time, $9 billion and 20 years was spent studying for a suitable location. That study ended in Yucca Mountain.

In 1987 Congress named Yucca Mountain the sole candidate site for a permanent repository, and then in '94 DOE published scientific results demonstrating Yucca as capable of protecting public health and safety; in '98, the statutory deadline for DOE to commence disposal of spent nuclear fuel.

So we pay these nuclear utilities money to hold their own waste that we should be collecting based upon Federal law.

In 2002 we voted here, and the President and Congress approved Yucca as the site repository. DOE issued a license application in 2008, and then in 2009 President Obama announced plans to terminate Yucca Mountain after $15 billion spent in studying this site.

And I'll close with this: Would you rather have nuclear waste 14 miles from a major metropolitan area next to a lake or would you rather have high-level nuclear waste hundreds of miles from the major, largest city, 100 miles from a river, underneath a mountain, in the desert?

Public policy, good public policy demands that we move forward on Yucca Mountain.