[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 5]
[House]
[Page 7072]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1020
                             YUCCA MOUNTAIN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Ms. Buerkle). The Chair recognizes the 
gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Shimkus) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SHIMKUS. Madam Speaker, I've come back to the floor, as I have 
almost weekly since this Congress, to talk about nuclear waste.
  It's kind of unique to follow my friend from Ohio (Mr. Kucinich) 
because we are a nuclearized country; we do have nuclear weapons. A lot 
of our nuclear weapons were developed from World War II. And guess 
where the waste still is from World War II? Still buried in silos under 
the ground in Hanford, Washington. That's a legacy of 50 years of 
nuclear waste that we still have yet to address--not including the 
nuclear waste for fuel, which is what I'm going to talk about today. 
I'm going to the State of Michigan and the State of Indiana.
  Michigan has five nuclear reactors. They're all on the Great Lakes--
either Lake Michigan or Lake Superior, I think--and the waste is right 
next to these Great Lakes. So we want to do a comparison/contrast, as I 
do every week based upon a region of the country, and compare where the 
nuclear waste is in Michigan to where it should be, under Federal law--
the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act and the adjoining amendments passed 
in 1987--that says we need to consolidate our high-level nuclear waste 
and put it in one single repository that is underneath a mountain in a 
desert, and that place is Yucca Mountain.
  So let's compare the two locations. I'm picking the Cook Nuclear 
Generating Station in Michigan, comparing it to Yucca Mountain. How 
much nuclear waste do we have at Yucca Mountain? Zero. How much do we 
have at Cook? We have 1,433 metric tons of uranium--this is of waste--
at just one nuclear facility at Cook.
  Where is the waste stored? At Yucca, it would be 1,000 feet 
underground. Where is the nuclear waste stored at Cook? Well, it's 
stored above ground in pools and in casks. How is it compared to the 
groundwater issue? Well, at Yucca Mountain it would be 1,000 feet above 
the water table. As we know, at Cook it's 19 feet above the groundwater 
table.
  Yucca Mountain is 100 miles from the only body of water you can find 
in a desert, and that's the Colorado River. That's 100 miles away. How 
far is the nuclear waste at Cook? Well, you can see from the picture it 
is next to Lake Michigan. So in a comparison/contrast, it's easy to see 
that Yucca would be a safer place to put high-level nuclear waste than 
Cook Generating Station in Michigan.
  So what have the U.S. Senators done from the surrounding States on 
this position of, should they have nuclear waste in their State or 
should they not? Senator Coats is supportive of Yucca Mountain. Senator 
Lugar is supportive of Yucca Mountain--I have quotes here that affirm 
that. Senator Levin has voted for Yucca Mountain and supports that. And 
our friend, my former classmate here in the Chamber--and she is a good 
friend of mine--Debbie Stabenow, has not supported Yucca Mountain.
  So part of why I'm coming down to the floor is just to help paint the 
picture that there is nuclear waste all over this country--104 
different reactors, not including our defense waste--and it's stored 
all over the place. Wouldn't it be better to have a centralized 
location to put the nuclear waste in? So I've been doing a tally of 
U.S. Senators, and we finally got over the 50 Senator mark. Because of 
the Senate rules, you know you have to break the filibuster. That's 60 
votes.
  It's interesting now, based upon the information, past information--
whether gleaned from votes or public statements--we have 54 U.S. 
Senators who say we ought to have Yucca Mountain as our single 
repository. We have 19 that we really have no record of a statement or 
a vote. And then we have 21 that have, either as a former House Member 
or a public statement, said, no, we don't think Yucca Mountain is a 
place for nuclear waste to go.
  We still have a couple more States to go, and we're hoping that we 
get to a 60-vote position to make the claim throughout the country that 
these Senators should really deal with this issue of high-level nuclear 
waste, not just the spent fuel, but, as we talked about earlier, the 
defense waste in this country.
  This was a promise made to the ratepayers of States that have nuclear 
power. The government said we're going to charge you extra for your 
electricity. We will take your money, and we will build a long-range 
geological repository for nuclear waste, and that's Yucca Mountain.

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