[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 41 (Monday, March 6, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3489-S3493]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   NUCLEAR WASTE DEBATE AT LOS ALAMOS

  Mr. BRYAN. Mr. President, I want to focus my colleagues' attention on 
a subject that has consumed a good bit of my energy now for more than a 
decade. It is the subject of a high-level nuclear waste repository and 
an ill-conceived proposal by the nuclear power industry that Yucca 
Mountain in Nevada is the ideal place to do that.
  I want to further call to my colleagues' attention the front page 
article in the New York Times yesterday which, in my judgment, says it 
all. I have had it blown up here. ``Scientists Fear Atomic Explosion of 
Buried Waste, Debate by Researchers, Argument Strikes New Blow Against 
a Proposal for a Repository in Nevada.''
  That does pretty well sum it up, because for the past 13 years, there 
has been an unremitting, relentless effort to locate a high-level 
nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, assuring us in Nevada that it is 
perfectly safe, nothing to worry about. This article reveals that, 
since last summer, Department of Energy scientists at Los Alamos 
National Laboratory, one of the most distinguished laboratories in 
America, have been studying a premise advanced by one of their 
colleagues that nuclear waste stored in a geologic repository in 
volcanic tuff risks ``going critical.'' That is nuclear jargon--``going 
critical.'' To those of us who are laymen, it means an explosion, a 
detonation, in which radioactive material would be scattered for miles 
and miles.
  Needless to say, the consequences of a spontaneous nuclear explosion 
90 miles from the city of Las Vegas would have a devastating impact. I 
must say, Mr. President, I continue to be shocked and outraged that the 
Department of Energy and the nuclear power industry continue to force 
the acceptance of a dump on Nevada when it appears that their own 
scientists cannot reach consensus on the most fundamental safety 
questions related to nuclear waste.
  As the New York Times article points out, ``even if scientists can 
debunk the new argument that buried 
[[Page S3490]] waste at Yucca Mountain might eventually explode, the 
existence of so serious a dispute so late in the planning process might 
cripple the plan or even kill it.''
  Nevadans are no strangers to the uncertainties of science when it 
comes to nuclear matters. I must say, the distinguished occupant of the 
chair and the great State that he represents are no strangers to this 
issue either. It has been 41 years since the first atmospheric 
detonation occurred at the Nevada test site outside of Las Vegas. 
Nevadans, Utahans, and Americans alike were assured there was 
absolutely no risk, no safety hazard, nothing to be concerned about. 
Let us in the scientific community reassure you that you have nothing 
to be concerned about.
  Mr. President, I have used this opportunity on the floor to share my 
own reaction. I was initially in the eighth grade at that time. Our 
science teachers had us go out and, using a scientific calculation 
after seeing that flash that was embellished in the early morning dawn 
and feeling the seismic impact, you could actually ascertain the 
distance from ground zero to where that flash was being received. We 
were pretty excited about it. I was 13 at the time. By the time we were 
in high school, it had become such a part of the southern Nevada 
culture that businesses, wishing to demonstrate their own patriotism, 
were renaming business establishments atomic this and atomic that. Some 
may recall there was a fashion in America, an atomic hair-do. We who 
were students of Las Vegas High School were so enthralled by the 
experience that the cover of our annual, the Wildcat Echo, had the 
nuclear mushroom cloud on it. We thought we were part of something that 
was very exciting and important to the country and that it contained no 
risk for us.
  The constituents of the distinguished occupant of the chair were told 
this as well. We know, decades later, that the people who were 
downwind--most of them, fortunately for us in Nevada, were not in 
Nevada; unfortunately for our sister State to the east, they were in 
Utah. They suffered the genetic effects, the cancer and the other 
serious illnesses because we were all told, and as good Americans we 
believed, there is absolutely no risk to health or safety.
  Well, fast forward, Mr. President. We are now told that burying high-
level nuclear waste is absolutely safe. As I have indicated, there is a 
relentless drumbeat of pressure and publicity, coordinated, if you 
will, between the Department of Energy, which on this issue simply 
serves as a surrogate of a nuclear power industry.
  But why are the public officials in Nevada opposed to this, because 
is it really safe? Is it just a matter of science and nothing to be 
concerned about?
  Mr. President, if I am appearing a bit cynical, it is because that 
has, sadly, been my experience. My senior colleague and I, Senator 
Reid, have lived in southern Nevada. This has been part of our 
experience from the time of our youth until the time we entered public 
life, and now as we have service together in the U.S. Senate.
  Last Thursday, before this story broke, the Senate Energy Committee 
held a hearing. May I say to the new chairman, the distinguished 
chairman from Alaska, it was a very fair hearing. We in Nevada had a 
chance to express our view, and the Secretary of Energy and the 
civilian radioactive waste manager, Mr. Dreyfus, was there, and those 
in the nuclear power industry were there. This was last Thursday.
  Let me put this in context. In this debate in the scientific 
community in which there are three teams comprised of 10 scientists--
that is 30 scientists--they have been unable to rebut the assertion 
that there is genuine fear that an explosion can occur in a geologic 
repository. This discussion has been going on for months and months and 
months.
  I knew nothing about this discussion. Like Senator Reid, I have 
meetings at least monthly, probably more frequently, asking, ``What is 
the latest?'' ``What is happening?'' ``What are you going to do?'' My 
point is that as recently as this past Thursday, the nuclear power 
industry and its advocates repeatedly assert that there is no 
scientific or engineering basis holding back progress at Yucca 
Mountain, that all of the opposition to Yucca Mountain is purely 
political.
  Bunk. These people that have formulated this premise, which has been 
unable to be rebutted, are not people that have been hired by Senator 
Reid, myself, the Governor of Nevada, or antinuclear activists. These 
are people within the Department of Energy's own distinguished 
laboratory at Los Alamos. Not a word of this was shared with us. We 
learned it, as did millions of Americans, by becoming aware of the 
story yesterday in the New York Times and in subsequent news accounts 
that have followed.
  For 13 years, blindly they have proceeded on the premise that it has 
to be a deep geological burial and Yucca Mountain is the only place it 
has to be. I must say that some public officials from my own State came 
to the hearing last Thursday to say, look, maybe we ought to cop out, 
sell out for a few bucks and see what we can get--the so-called 
benefits argument.
  That is to their disgrace, Mr. President. There can be no compromise 
with the health and safety of the citizens of our State. And I must say 
that the nuclear power industry, in its cynicism, continues to advocate 
``just negotiate for benefits; just negotiate for benefits.''
  Well, the newest proposal now is that we have to have an interim 
storage facility; not a permanent, but an interim is what we need. And, 
you guessed it, the interim storage proposal, well, that should go to 
Nevada, too. And the premise for that is because Yucca Mountain is 
going to be a permanent repository, let us just have them all next 
door. That will require a statutory legislative change to the Nuclear 
Waste Policy Act. And, I must say, in light of this concern here, I do 
not know how any fair-minded Member of the U.S. Senate cannot take a 
look and say, ``Maybe we ought to take a little time out and take a 
pulse on this.''
  Even before this revelation, the testimony before the committee on 
Thursday was that there is about a 50-50 chance of the permanent 
repository at Yucca Mountain ever being licensed. As I say, this most 
recent revelation should put that into further context.
  Senator Reid and I for some time, joined by our government and 
district political officeholders, Democrat and Republican alike, in our 
State, have called for an independent review, an independent review. We 
have been joined by the GAO, the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board 
and many, many others in the community.
  Secretary O'Leary has simply refused our request. We waste billions 
on the program--proponents of the dump and opponents of the dump agree 
on that--more than $4 billion. And now, Mr. President, it is time to 
insist upon this independent review.
  I do not expect Secretary O'Leary will change her position, but it 
will be my purpose to introduce an independent review process by 
legislation later this week.
  I thank my distinguished colleague, the senior Senator from Nevada.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the Sunday 
New York Times article be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From the New York Times, Mar. 5, 1995]

Scientists Fear Atomic Explosion of Buried Waste; Debate by Researchers

                         (By William J. Broad)

       Debate has broken out among Federal scientists over whether 
     the planned underground dump for the nation's high-level 
     atomic wastes in Nevada might erupt in a nuclear explosion, 
     scattering radioactivity to the winds or into ground water or 
     both.
       The debate, set off by scientists at the Los Alamos 
     National Laboratory in New Mexico, is the latest blow to the 
     planned repository deep below Yucca Mountain in the desert 
     about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Opponents of nuclear 
     power and Nevada officials have long assailed the project as 
     ill-conceived and ill-managed, and it has encountered 
     numerous delays.
       Even if scientists can debunk the new argument that buried 
     waste at Yucca Mountain might eventually explode, the 
     existence of so serious a dispute so late in the planning 
     process might cripple the plan or even kill it. Planning for 
     the repository began eight years ago and studies of its 
     feasibility have so far cost more than $1.7 billion. The 
     Federal Government wants to open the repository in 2010 as a 
     permanent solution to the problem of disposing of wastes from 
     nuclear power plants and from the production of nuclear 
     warheads.
       [[Page S3491]] The possibility that buried wastes might 
     detonate in a nuclear explosion was raised privately last 
     year by Dr. Charles D. Bowman and Dr. Francesco Venneri, both 
     physicists at Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb. 
     In response, lab managers formed three teams with a total of 
     30 scientsts to investigate the idea and, if possible, 
     disprove it.
       While uncovering many problems with the thesis, the teams 
     were unable to lay it to rest, laboratory officials say. So 
     the lab is now making the dispute public in scientific papers 
     and is considering having it aired at large scientific 
     meetings as well.
       ``If we knew how to put the stake through it's heart, we'd 
     do it,'' Dr. John C. Browne, head of energy research at the 
     lab, said in an interview. Going further, some panel members 
     said they felt that the new thesis had been refuted.
       Dr. Bowman, the idea's chief advocate, said the internal 
     debate had changed some elements of the thesis but over all 
     had left it honed and strenghened.
       ``We think there's a generic problem with putting fissile 
     materials underground,'' he said in an interview, referring 
     to substances that fission, or split part, in a nuclear chain 
     reaction.
       The few scientists outside the laboratory who have become 
     aware of the debate say the explosion thesis is provocative 
     and probably wrong. Nonetheless, they say, the stakes are too 
     high to sweep the idea under the rug.
       ``It is important to see whether it has anything to do with 
     the situation that might arise in an actual repository,'' 
     said Dr. Richard L. Garwin, a prominent physicist at the 
     International Business Machines Corporation who has long 
     advised the Federal Government on nuclear arms and their 
     dismantlement.
       Highly radioactive wastes are the main orphan of the 
     nuclear era, having found no permanent home over the decades. 
     In theory, if the Yucca plan wins approval after a careful 
     study of the area's geology, a labyrinth of bunkers carved 
     beneath the mountain would hold thousands of steel canisters 
     for 10,000 years, until radioactive decay rendered the wastes 
     less hazardous.
       The spent fuel from nuclear reactors is permeated with 
     plutonium, which is a main ingredient used in making nuclear 
     bombs.
       Since plutonium 239 has a half-life of 24,360 years, 
     significant amounts of it would remain active for more than 
     50,000 years, long after the steel canisters that once held 
     the radioactive material had dissolved. (A radioactive 
     substance's half-life is the period required for the 
     disintegration of half of its atoms.)
       With the end of the cold war, the Nevada site has 
     increasingly been studied for a possible added role as a 
     repository for the plutonium from scrapped nuclear arms. In 
     January 1994, the National Academy of Sciences, which advises 
     the Federal Government, suggested that the plutonium be mixed 
     with highly radioactive wastes and buried, or burned in 
     reactors and then buried. In either case, some plutonium 
     would end up going underground.
       On Wednesday, President Clinton, trying to win a permanent 
     global ban on the spread of nuclear arms, ordered substantial 
     cuts in American stockpiles of weapons plutonium but did not 
     say what would become of the deadly substance. Officials said 
     it would remain in temporary storage above ground until a 
     decision was made on its ultimate disposition.
       The scientist leading the charge against the burial of 
     fissile materials, Dr. Bowman, has an alternative plan in 
     which particle accelerators would, by a kind of nuclear 
     alchemy, transmute radioactive wastes, as well as plutonium, 
     into more benign elements before they were buried. Dr. Bowman 
     is the head of the planning effort for the proposed project.
       Although that gives him a personal stake in the explosion 
     argument, experts say that such situations are common in 
     science and that ideas must be judged on their merits.
       Last summer and fall, Dr. Bowman began talking of the 
     dangers of underground storage and was urged to set them down 
     in an internal Los Alamos report, which he did by November. 
     The crux of his argument was that serious dangers would arise 
     thousands of years from now after the steel canisters 
     dissolved and plutonium slowly began to disperse into 
     surrounding rock.
       The rocky material, he said, could aid the start of a chain 
     reaction by slowing down speeding subatomic particles known 
     as neutrons that fly out of plutonium atoms undergoing 
     spontaneous decay. Neutrons of a certain speed can act like 
     bullets to split atoms in two in a burst of nuclear energy.
       Under some circumstances, Dr. Bowman theorized, the slowing 
     of the neutrons could make an individual pile of plutonium 
     explode in a nuclear blast equal in force to about a thousand 
     tons of high explosive, setting off other blasts throughout 
     the vast repository.
       The team assembled to review the thesis concluded that it 
     held serious flaws, said Dr. Browne of Los Alamos. First, 
     dispersal of plutonium, if it happened at all, would take 
     much longer than envisioned--so long that the plutonium would 
     have mostly decayed.
       Second, the review team felt that if a plutonium pile did 
     begin to heat up, the reaction would automatically slow down 
     and stop as the heat made the pile expand.
       Third, the team felt that any reaction would be too slow to 
     cause an explosion and that, at worst, a pile would simply 
     heat up like a reactor.
       ``The burden of proof rests on Charlie,'' said Dr. Browne, 
     referring to Dr. Bowman. ``He's hypothesized some scenarios 
     that, if correct, are clearly very important. In spite of the 
     fact that there is a sizable amount of opposition to 
     Charlie's paper, our feeling is that the subject is so 
     important that it deserves additional peer review outside the 
     laboratory, since we could not resolve the disagreement 
     internally.''
       Dr. Bowman says the explosion thesis is alive and well. On 
     Friday he finished an 11-page draft paper thick with graphs 
     and equations that lays it out in new detail.
       The team criticisms, he said in an interview, repeatedly 
     fall flat. For instance, dispersal could happen relatively 
     quickly, especially if water percolated through the dump. 
     Even if slow, plutonium 239 decays into uranium 235, which 
     harbors the same explosive risks but requires millions of 
     years to decay into less dangerous elements.
       So too with the other criticisms, he says. Water could aid 
     the slowing of neutrons and make sure the reaction went 
     forward rather than automatically slowing down. And a pile 
     could explode, he insists, while conceding that the blast 
     from a single one might have a force of a few hundred tons of 
     high explosive rather than the thousand or more originally 
     envisioned.
       On the other hand, his new paper says plutonium in amounts 
     as small as one kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, could be dangerous.
       ``We got some helpful criticism and that, combined with 
     additional work, has made our thesis even stronger,'' he 
     said.
       The most basic solution, Dr. Bowman said, would be removing 
     all fissionable material from nuclear waste in a process 
     known as reprocessing or by transmuting it in his proposed 
     accelerator. Other possible steps would include making steel 
     canisters smaller and spreading them out over larger areas in 
     underground galleries--expensive steps in a project already 
     expected to cost $15 billion or more.
       A different precaution, Dr. Bowman said, would be to 
     abandon the Yucca site, where the volcanic ground is 
     relatively soluble. Instead, the deep repository might be dug 
     in granite, where migration of materials would be slower and 
     more difficult.
       Cathy Roche, vice president for communications of the 
     Nuclear Energy Institute, a nuclear industry trade group 
     based in Washington, said the debate suggested the need for 
     more study of the Yucca site, not less.
       ``We're concerned that this not be used as an excuse by the 
     opponents of waste solutions to stop the scientific analysis 
     of the mountain,'' she said.
       Dr. Daniel A. Dreyfus, the head of civilian radioactive 
     waste management at the Energy Department in Washington, 
     which runs Los Alamos and the Yucca Mountain studies, said he 
     was keeping an open mind on whether Dr. Bowman's thesis might 
     trigger an overhaul of the project.
       ``The characterization work has any number of 
     uncertainties,'' he said in an interview. ``Criticality is 
     clearly a major consideration when you put a whole bunch of 
     high-level waste anywhere. Whether Yucca Mountain is the 
     right site, I don't know.
       ``Maybe there's no good solution,'' he added. ``But walking 
     away from the problem is no solution either. We better keep 
     trying, because we already made the decision to have the 
     wastes in the first place.''

  Mr. BRYAN. Mr. President, I yield back any time I may have remaining.
  (Mr. GORTON assumed the chair.)
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I extend my appreciation publicly, as I have 
done privately on a number of occasions, for the leadership of Richard 
Bryan on this issue. And I say Richard Bryan, because his leadership on 
this issue started long before he became a Member of the U.S. Senate. 
During his tenure as Governor of the State of Nevada, he was a leader 
in recognizing the fallacy of attempting to geologically bury nuclear 
waste next to the No. 1 destination resort of the world--Las Vegas.
  Mr. President, I, like my friend, the junior Senator from Nevada, as 
a little boy used to watch the flashes in the morning sky. I lived 
about 60 miles from Las Vegas, 60 miles farther away from the explosion 
than did Senator Bryan. We would get up--it would be dark--a bunch of 
little kids, and we would see that flash in the sky. Sometimes in 
Searchlight, where I was born and raised, we would hear the explosion, 
because by the time it got to Searchlight, a lot of times the sound 
would bounce clear over Searchlight.
  But, as I told many people, we were the lucky ones, because the winds 
did not blow toward Searchlight. The winds blew toward St. George, they 
blew toward Enterprise in Utah, and those young men and women who 
watched the night sky explode got diseases and some died. I have talked 
to parents, I have talked to children, sons and daughters. And, of 
course, there are the stories that have been written about sheep, 
people herding sheep. Herders would get up in the morning and the wool 
would just come off their 
[[Page S3492]] animals, even though they were still alive.
  So, Mr. President, this is a serious matter, and I know everyone 
recognizes it is a serious matter.
  But for those of us who have lived with this since 1982, to see this 
headline in the New York Times yesterday says it all. ``Scientists Fear 
Atomic Explosion of Buried Waste''; just like on Senator Bryan's chart, 
his visual aid, on the front page of the New York Times.
  And what troubles me so much is this has been going on for months and 
months. It is easy for the people in charge of the program, when 
somebody says, ``Oh, don't worry about it.'' They come and testify. 
They write papers. But when there is evidence by a scientific community 
that says an explosion could occur, we do not hear about it.
  How many congressional hearings have we had since this took place? 
Several. How many public gatherings have we had where Department of 
Energy officials have come forward? Numerous.
  The Secretary of Energy, I say to my friend from Nevada, has recently 
said that this is a priority with her to get nuclear waste in Nevada. I 
wonder if there would be a sting of conscience that would say, ``I 
wonder if we should be worried about this atomic explosion.''
  And, Mr. President, it is not as if it has not happened before. In 
the former Soviet Union, they had an explosion from nuclear waste.
  The article is frightening, to say the least. ``Debate has broken 
out''--I am reading directly from this article-- ``among Federal 
scientists whether the planned underground dump for the Nation's high-
level atomic wastes in Nevada might erupt in a nuclear explosion, 
scattering radioactivity to the winds or ground water or both.''
  This is not sensationalism that the Senators from Nevada has created. 
This is a newspaper article and it comes from the scientific community.
  We have been called everything--``unpatriotic'' was one of the better 
terms we have been called--because we have stood in the road to try to 
stop this thing from happening.
  ``The debate, set off by scientists at the Los Alamos National 
Laboratory in New Mexico''-- one of the finest scientific institutions 
in the world--``is the latest blow to the planned repository.''
  I wish I believed that.
  It says, ``Even if scientists can debunk the new argument that buried 
waste at Yucca Mountain might eventually explode, the existence of so 
serious a dispute so late in the planning process might cripple the 
plan or even kill it.''
  I hope so, because, as I say, Mr. President, rather than do as they 
do with all the so-called good news that comes in relation to the 
repository, they hid this. This has been hidden. And they did it by 
saying, ``We do not believe it is possible.'' And here we are going to 
have 30 scientists prove this wrong. They have tried to prove that it 
is wrong for almost 10 months. They cannot. They admit this. The 
scientists, the three teams, were not told to go prove how it could 
happen, I say to my friend from Nevada, they were asked to prove how it 
could not happen, and they could not do it.

       The possibility that buried wastes might detonate in a 
     nuclear explosion was raised privately last year by Dr. 
     Charles D. Bowman and Dr. Francesco Venneri, both physicists 
     at Los Alamos * * * the teams were unable to lay it to rest * 
     * *.

  Dr. Bowman, among other things, said, ``We think there's a generic 
problem with putting fissile materials underground.'' That is an 
understatement, reading the rest of this stuff.

       Highly radioactive wastes are the main orphan of the 
     nuclear era, having found no permanent home over the decades.
       The spent fuel from nuclear reactors is permeated with 
     plutonium, which is a main ingredient used in making nuclear 
     bombs.

  ``Since plutonium 239,'' listen to this, ``has a half-life of 24,360 
years, significant amounts of it would remain active,'' to say the 
least.
  Should we not stop and just relax a little bit and not be driven by 
the nuclear power industry? Sure, they have invested a lot of money in 
nuclear waste disposal in Nevada. That is the only place they have cast 
their lot.
  Should we not stop and let common sense dictate proper policy? We are 
not talking here about storing wheat. We are not talking about storing 
tires that may burn for a little while. We are talking about storing 
nuclear waste that will explode like an atomic bomb that occurred at 
Nagasaki and Hiroshima. And hundreds of times they have been exploded 
in the deserts of Nevada.
  I have heard many times people say, ``Well, what is the 
alternative?'' There are a lot of alternatives. The No. 1 alternative 
has been created, again, by scientists. During this period of 13 years 
they have been trying to figure out a way we can transport nuclear 
waste, and scientists came up with an idea that might work pretty well. 
That is a dry cast storage container.
  But why transport it? If it is safe to haul in a truck, why do we not 
leave it where it is, and then it is really safe. Now, this is not 
something that Harry Reid, who has a very inadequate scientific 
background, came up with. Scientists came up with this. And they have 
said leave it where it is.
  It is really time to step back, think, and study this issue. It is 
time to do some scientific investigation, to look at other 
technologies, to look at other sites. It is time to drop the efforts to 
amend the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, to drop efforts to speed the 
process up. It is premature to change our strategy, to accelerate our 
strategy, to think about moving nuclear waste anywhere else.
  In this newspaper article one of the scientists said, I think you 
better give up on Nevada and start looking someplace else. Mr. 
President, I do not want to create this problem for somebody else. We 
have to know what we are going to do before we start talking about 
burying geological waste. One scientist here said we better look to 
granite formation because the water will not come through and water 
could help accelerate the process that could lead to an explosion.
  There are some who say that there is another crisis that exists. Our 
cooling ponds are filled. I say, leave them filled. Move the spent fuel 
rods out and put them into dry cast storage containers at the reactor 
sites. We have time. It is perfectly safe to store the waste where it 
is.
  Why the rush? The rush is because the nuclear waste power industry is 
fixated on this. It is like an obsession. They do not want to be proven 
that they may have been wrong and spent billions of dollars of the 
ratepayers money wrongly. That is what it amounts to.
  Mr. President, I am happy this came out, even if it was through the 
newspaper. I think it would have been more appropriate had people from 
the Department of Energy at the hearing that was held the other day 
testified that we have another problem that has come up: Scientists 
fear atomic explosion of buried waste.
  I do not know how the newspaper got this information. There is 
nothing in the article to indicate how or where they got it. I do not 
know if they got it from the Department of Energy. However they got it, 
this is not an appropriate way to do business when we are dealing with 
the most poisonous substance known to man, namely, plutonium.
  It gives me pause about the Department of Energy. I have called 
publicly for doing away with the Department of Energy. This certainly 
does not distract from my initial goal. I think it adds to it. I think 
the functions of the Department of Energy should be spread out among 
other agencies, some to the Department of Defense, some to Interior, 
some to the EPA.
  I am very disappointed in my Government, especially the Department of 
Energy. I yield the floor.
  Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mrs. HUTCHISON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The Senator from Texas.
  Mrs. HUTCHISON. I thank the Chair.
  (The remarks of Mrs. Hutchison pertaining to the introduction of S. 
498 are located in today's Record under 
[[Page S3493]] ``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint 
Resolutions.'')


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