[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 17]
[Senate]
[Page 23445]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                   YUCCA MOUNTAIN RADIATION STANDARD

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, today President Bush took time away from 
dealing with the Nation's economic crisis to direct his Environmental 
Protection Agency, EPA, to release a new standard for `acceptable' 
public radiation exposure from the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump. 
In other words, the agency decided just how much radiation you and I 
can live with. Let me be clear, there is no way this weak standard will 
breathe life into the Bush-McCain plan to dump nuclear waste in Nevada. 
Instead, it will breath life into more litigation against this terrible 
project.
  The EPA has collaborated with the Department of Energy, DOE, to tweak 
a standard that a Federal court of appeals threw out in 2001 because it 
failed to comply with the Energy Policy Act of 1992 and would have left 
Nevadans dangerously unprotected against radioactive contamination. If 
the repository at Yucca Mountain was ever actually built, the DOE does 
not deny that water infiltration would eventually corrode nuclear waste 
packages and radioactivity will inevitably leak into Nevada's ground 
water. Instead of working to protect Nevadans from a public health 
catastrophe, this scandal-ridden EPA has chosen to simply make the 
rules more lenient so DOE can legally dump waste less than 100 miles 
outside of Las Vegas. This is unacceptable.
  Instead of working to protect the health and safety of Nevadans, EPA 
and DOE are casting science aside in an attempt to get the nuclear 
waste dump approved. Instead of warring against science, I side with 
Nevadans and experts who support safe and attainable solutions to our 
Nation's nuclear waste. That is why I am working with Senator Ensign to 
keep nuclear waste on-site at the powerplants where it is produced in 
secure dry cask storage containers that are approved by the Nuclear 
Regulatory Commission. This plan is safer, more cost effective, and 
will give us at least a century to find a more permanent solution to 
nuclear waste.

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