Volume 143, No. 145 covering the 1st Session of the 105th Congress (1997 - 1998) was published by the Congressional Record.
The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“THE HAZARDS OF NUCLEAR WASTE TRANSPORT” mentioning the Environmental Protection Agency was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H9549-H9552 on Oct. 24, 1997.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
THE HAZARDS OF NUCLEAR WASTE TRANSPORT
The SPEAKER pro tempore [Mr. Pease]. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 7, 1997, the gentleman from Nevada [Mr. Gibbons] is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. GIBBONS. Mr. Speaker, I believe it was H.G. Wells who was once quoted as saying, ``Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.'' Right now, Mr. Speaker, this Congress is in a race and we must not let catastrophe win.
In examining both the education and catastrophe spectrum here, I would first like to do my part in educating the ladies and gentlemen of America, Mr. Speaker, on the facts concerning H.R. 1270, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1997. This legislation will mandate transportation of high-level radioactive nuclear waste by way of our national highways and railways.
This deadly waste will traverse 43 States to a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, NV, that is right, through 43 States out of 50, traveling right alongside of you during your commute to work or on your weekend outing, or with your family over bridges that traverse your community's source of water, near schools where your sons and daughters are attending their education. On these routes will be nuclear, radioactive waste from 109 of our country's nuclear reactors.
American citizens from Los Angeles to New York, from Atlanta to Denver, from Pittsburgh to Dallas, St. Louis to Tucson, Kansas City to Baton Rouge, Jacksonville to Chicago, and from here in Washington, DC, to Cleveland, are all in harm's way. That is exactly why it is important for us to educate Members on H.R. 1270.
Mr. ENSIGN. Mr. Speaker, would the gentleman yield?
Mr. GIBBONS. I am happy to yield to my colleague from district 1.
Mr. ENSIGN. Mr. Speaker, I would ask, is the gentleman aware that in the transport of this nuclear waste across the country, that the most highly dangerous substance ever produced by mankind is an environmental problem, is a health and safety problem? This high-level nuclear waste on these routes of transportation will be going near even elementary schools, day care centers, and the like across the country?
Is the gentleman aware that we tried to offer and tried to get approved in order an amendment just to make nuclear waste not go within 1 mile of schools, and that the leadership, the Republican leadership, did not allow this amendment to be in order? Is the gentleman aware of that?
Mr. GIBBONS. I thank the gentleman from Nevada for reminding me of that fateful day when we proposed those amendments, and certainly were told that we could not offer those amendments; an amendment which would, in essence, protect children from transportation and the exposure to the transportation of nuclear waste by their schools. I am aware of that.
Mr. Speaker, we would like to point out to everyone just exactly where the proposed railway and highway routes are going to be. Imagine, if you will, that 75 percent of all the nuclear waste in America is generated east of the Mississippi, and it is all coming right here to southern Nevada. Seventy-five percent of those 109 reactors are going to have to funnel their waste through what could be regular hub and spoke communities. For example, if we took St. Louis, MO, where I-70 passes through St. Louis, MO, crosses over the Mississippi River, an accident in St. Louis, MO, could have catastrophic results.
As we recall, earlier, I would remind the gentleman today that we heard earlier about a train accident in West Virginia, a terrible catastrophe. In fact, there were two train accidents in the last several days in West Virginia: a head-on, two trains colliding head on, and a train intersecting or a train intersection where it impacted a truck.
Mr. ENSIGN. If the gentleman will continue to yield, Mr. Speaker, from what I understand from hearing the gentleman from West Virginia this morning, or this afternoon, he talked about this train collision happening, and he even said, luckily, only by God's grace, was the explosive material on one of the trains taken off just before these trains collided.
Mr. GIBBONS. If the gentleman will yield for point of correction, I think he said that that was a truck that was at an intersection that was loaded with explosives, or previously loaded with explosives, just hours before.
Mr. ENSIGN. Yes. If the gentleman will yield further, let us take, for instance, if we had nuclear waste in these tri-cask cannisters, which are supposed to, based on the testing, if I am correct on this, they are supposed to be able to withstand temperatures of up to 1,500 degrees.
Mr. GIBBONS. One thousand five hundred, that is correct.
Mr. ENSIGN. Explosive materials could lead to a fire. Diesel fuel, what does diesel fuel, if the gentleman would answer, being a geologist and a scientist, what does diesel fuel burn at?
Mr. GIBBONS. Diesel fuel burns at 1,830 degrees, but in addition to that, if cooked long enough, the metal surrounding structures will burn in excess of 3,000 degrees, sometimes.
So the problem we have here is twofold. We have natural hazards, diesel fuel from trains and trucks and the metal surrounding it, the incendiary position of the metal; as well as the explosives, if the accident had occurred with a trainload of nuclear fuel and this truck, loaded with explosives; or a terrorist act.
Not too long ago in Arizona it was reported that a terrorist blew a bridge out in Arizona and a train derailed. The exposure of hazard to this material in transportation across America exposes a great risk. But it is a fact that these casks are dangerous.
I would tell the Members, Mr. Speaker, just what is in one of these casks. That is the critical part. These concrete and steel casks contain 24 nuclear fuel rods, spent nuclear fuel rods. Each one of these casks contains 10 times the nuclear radioactive fallout as the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima in the Second World War. That is 10 times that in one cask, in one cask; and we have nearly 80,000 tons of this material being transported primarily from the East Coast over to the West.
Mr. ENSIGN. If the gentleman will continue to yield, Mr. Speaker, from what I am understanding, based on the scenario that the gentleman has painted, based on this hot metal burning and causing one of these casks to come apart, looking at the gentleman's map down there and looking at St. Louis, looking at Denver, CO, right through the center of Denver, CO, looking at Los Angeles, CA, looking at potentially coming across Hoover Dam, which is, from Arizona coming into Nevada, if one of these transport mechanisms, say, was on Hoover Dam, had a crash, went over the side of Hoover Dam, which is about 450 feet down onto a concrete slab, and we had a fire down there, one of these casks broke open, what State would be most affected, besides the State of Nevada, which is sitting right there, and the State of Arizona? What is the No. 1 State that would be affected by this radiation fallout?
Mr. GIBBONS. First, let me address the issue that the gentleman has talking about, dropping these casks. These casks are certified to be fracture-resistent when dropped from a height of 30 feet. It is a lot different from dropping a cask from the top of the Hoover Dam to the bottom, 450 feet.
Only 2 months ago we had an 18-wheel tractor-trailer rig in an accident, spun out on the top of that dam, and the back end was hanging over the edge of the dam. It can happen. It is not a farfetched idea.
{time} 1500
But, what you present is one of the greatest environmental catastrophes for the most populated State in the United States and the most populated community that gets a lot of its drinking water and agricultural water from the Colorado River, and that is Los Angeles, CA. All of those millions and millions of people, the lives along the southern Colorado River would be in danger of jeopardy from a nuclear contamination spill just off of that one roadway.
Mr. ENSIGN. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, people say if we cannot bring it to Nevada in an interim storage facility or a permanent repository that Congress is talking about, they ask me,
``What is the answer?''
Correct me if I am wrong on this. When they were developing the transport mechanism, these things they say are safe, the Committee on Commerce says they are safe, but when they were developing this--and I had a conversation today with the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Upton], the lead sponsor of the bill from the Committee on Commerce, and I asked him when they were developing the transport mechanism they developed these dry casks to store them. I asked him, are these dry casks safe for up to 100 years? And he said, yes, they are safe for up to 100 years. And I said why not leave them right where they are instead of transporting them and talking about the potential accidents?
Mr. Speaker, I would ask the gentleman from Nevada if he sees any reason at all for transporting this dangerous waste through cities like St. Louis and Denver and Los Angeles and many other cities like Atlanta across the country?
Mr. GIBBONS. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time again, that is exactly what the problem is here that we are facing today. It is a poor policy developed in the 1980's in order to provide an industry with an escape mechanism for something which we should have changed when we allowed them to build these nuclear reactors. Notwithstanding the issue of the nuclear reactor, what we are talking about is what should the policy of this country be with regard to the storage of nuclear waste?
Current technology today indicates that these dry cask storage mechanisms that are on site at the nuclear powerplants are indeed safe for the next 25 to 75 years, if not a longer period of time for the storage of nuclear waste. During that time we have talked to a number of physicists from MIT to Brigham Young University regarding how we could better handle the nuclear waste; rather than just burying it in the ground to an uncertain fate or transporting it across this country with an exposure of danger to all the American people in its path, and that is twofold. One is recycling and reprocessing the material to be used by the reactors that are still in existence or, No. 2, developing the research and the technology that will allow us to change the radioactive hazard of the material.
One physicist that I talked to, a professor from a university in Utah, indicated that he has just recently developed technology that will allow this material, the radioactive waste, to be converted through his process into titanium and copper, to relatively inert but precious metals that we can use in the industries around this country. But it is a far better policy to convert the nonuseful, very dangerous, very deadly toxic substance of nuclear waste into a rather inert valuable metal of titanium and copper. That is the policy that this country ought to be developing rather than the dangerous transportation and uncertain burial.
Mr. ENSIGN. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield further, could the gentleman possibly address what seems to be happening in the Congress? We have talked about many different parts of the science, whether it be on site, dry cask storage being the best storage up to 50 years. Second, the gentleman mentioned some type of recycling, reprocessing this waste. Even if the new technologies the gentleman talked about are not developed, there are older technologies currently in the works in Great Britain, in France, and in Sweden, and they are doing it very safely and they have obviously a much better nuclear power industry in those countries.
So when we are looking at what is driving this policy in this country, I believe and the gentleman's comments on this would be appreciated, from my perspective I see several things happening. First of all, Members of Congress that have nuclear reactors in their districts, they want to get the wastes out of their State. But probably, and most significantly, the driving force behind this is the nuclear power industry, because the nuclear power industry right now only has nuclear powerplants that are going to last 20 to 30 years from now. After that, if we left it where it is, they would be responsible for storing this waste and paying for that storage.
If the Yucca Mountain or the interim storage facility is built in Nevada, would the case not be that ratepayers and the nuclear power industry no longer would have to pay the bill, but now the taxpayers from across the country, even in those States which do not have any nuclear reactors, all of those States and the taxpayers in those States would be left holding the bill? So not only do people have to have this stuff transported through their State when they never had nuclear power in their State, but they are also going to have to foot the bill to pay for the storage of this stuff for thousands of years.
Mr. GIBBONS. Mr. Speaker, again reclaiming my time, I would like to point out something specifically. The gentleman raised absolutely an important question that fails to be asked and answered publicly, and I am glad he brought the subject up.
Yes, indeed, what we see today, for example let us take the State of Connecticut. It has four nuclear reactors and for the problem of safety they have shut those nuclear reactors down. They are not generating nuclear waste anymore, but they have it sitting in this dry cask storage or on site. They want to get it out of their backyard because the nuclear power company sees a serious problem and it is called a
``stranded capital'' problem. It will ultimately have to be responsible for the nuclear waste that that industry, that powerplants generated, unless it transfers that to the gullible taxpayer to take care of it. And that is what is driving this.
If we look here, this chart provides a very insightful window on what is taking place in the nuclear industry. As the gentleman said, every powerplant that is in America today, due to its shelf life or operating life, is scheduled to shut down within the next 20 years or so. This nuclear waste takes 10,000 years to at least get through a half-life of most of it. They have been charging their customers a mill rate on the electricity generated to store this. And it has generated a trust fund. This indicates the balance by the mill rate paid by the end user of the electricity for that storage of about $600 million.
But if we take the time from 1995 and spread it out, as those powerplants shut down the mill rate drops off. In other words, the fund balance goes to zero because expenses are still taking place. Well, it is that timeframe out there when the power plants are no longer producing electricity and those powerplants are no longer bringing in that revenue that that fund balance is zero. Well, guess who gets to pick up that fund difference for the storage, the monitoring, and the handling of that nuclear waste? The taxpayer.
If I may say so, the cost of storage on site today has been told to us by the nuclear contractors who are capable in this field and have the knowledge of this field, but the cost of securing that material on site, where it is at even for the next 100, 75 to 100 years is about
$300 million. And giving them the benefit of the doubt, add another
$100 million in it, $400 million, even if they were wrong, the cost of shipping it, just shipping it across this country from the east coast to Yucca Mountain, is not $300 million, but $2.3 billion. Well, there is no way $2.3 billion is going to come out of this waste fund. So who picks that tab up? The taxpayers.
Mr. Speaker, this is an unfunded mandate by a nuclear power industry that wants the taxpayers to pick up the tab.
Mr. ENSIGN. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, speaking of what the taxpayer is going to end up holding the bag on, the Committee on Commerce in its infinite wisdom, Republicans and Democrats alike in the Committee on Commerce, and correct me if I am wrong on this, from what I understand in reading the bill, and we checked with many sources that agree with this, if we had a driver of one of these trucks that was going through, say, Denver, CO, the driver of the truck happens to be drunk, happens to be coming through during the evening one time barreling down and ends up crashing through an apartment building killing x amount of children and adults, even though that person should be held totally responsible and that company should be held totally responsible, not only do we have the loss of life but we have an incredible environmental disaster.
Mr. Speaker, I have heard that this company, because of what the Committee on Commerce did, that this company will not be held liable, that the financial end of this will fully be picked up by the taxpayer. Mr. Speaker, I would ask the gentleman, is that correct?
Mr. GIBBONS. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is correct. It is absolutely mind boggling and the answer to his question is yes. Under the current law, and the laws that they want to pass with regard to this, we are indemnifying the transportation companies. They are going to haul this stuff clear across America and what do they have for responsibility or accountability? Zero, zip, nada, nothing.
There is nothing that says they cannot go out and hire somebody who has never driven a truck before to haul this stuff around. If they crash off one of these bridges or leave the truck in the middle of a railway and they create a nuclear accident, that company that hired them, who should have known better, who had responsibility to do that, who had accountability for any other accident at any other department or any other material in America for any damage or environmental problem would be liable for that.
Mr. ENSIGN. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, I heard the gentleman from Nevada speak this morning in front of the Committee on Rules on the cost of the potential cleanup if we had one of these accidents with leakage in an area. Could the gentleman address the cost of cleaning up one of those environmental disasters?
Mr. GIBBONS. Mr. Speaker, this is a Freeland, MI, picture of a train accident. Just say this accident occurred somewhere near one of those communities. Say it was Denver, CO; Kansas City; St. Louis, just name the place the stuff is going to go.
Mr. ENSIGN. Salt Lake City.
Mr. GIBBONS. You bet. An accident like this, if it even allowed a fraction of the radioactive material out of these casks, would contaminate an area that they estimate would be as large as 4 square miles. Cleanup of that 4-square-mile area would cost nearly $19 billion. That is billion with a ``B'' dollars. Because every structure on it in that 4 square miles would have to be razed. The soil, depending upon the penetration of the cesium and other parts of the nuclear reactor content, if they penetrated the soil would also have to be removed. And it would be years before they could actually certify that they have cleaned up that area.
Put that in downtown Denver, put that in downtown Cleveland, and put that in downtown St. Louis on the Mississippi River and guess what we have got? We have a national catastrophe within which the Superfund that we have created to handle environmental cleanup would never be able to even address in its wildest, richest moments, let alone the fighting and the attorneys that would take the money.
Mr. ENSIGN. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, this possibly could be why every major environmental group in the United States opposes this legislation.
I have heard Newt Gingrich lately talk about that he wants to be friendly to the environment. I think that Newt, the Committee on Commerce, and the rest of the people supporting this bill, both Republicans and Democrats alike, because make no mistake about it, this has been a bipartisan effort to bring nuclear waste, transporting it across so many different communities and across this country, across 43 States, that they have to look themselves in the mirror and say, ``Why is every major environmental group opposing this legislation?''
Mr. Speaker, I think that we have heard the answers today. It is because it can be such a potentially damaging incident to our environment if we end up with an accident occurring during the transporting of this waste.
I thank my friend from Nevada. I have to go catch a plane back to our lovely State. I thank the gentleman for allowing me to participate in this special order.
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Mr. GIBBONS. I thank the gentleman from Nevada for joining me in this dialog here with regard to the hazards of H.R. 1270. I appreciate his support. I appreciate his eloquence and his delivery of this information.
I would like to continue the rest of my time to help educate the American public a little more about the hazards about what is taking place. I know many of my colleagues today, on their way in to work, might have driven down 395, taken the House or Senate exit here over to the Capitol, and could have noticed one of those big red signs that say, no hazardous material transported here. That is because it is not in my backyard are we going to have them transport this material. That is because they do not want it here. It is the classic NIMBY syndrome.
But if you look at the transportation of nuclear waste in Maryland, guess what? To those people who do not want nuclear waste in our Nation's Capital, it is actually going to go right through the Nation's Capital, in fact, right through the center of the Nation's Capital; that is, Union Station, just down the street, part of the railway transportation scheme for transportation of nuclear waste on this route.
In addition to that, let me talk a little more about what was brought up about hazards of this material and why the American public is being duped in this regard. If we want to take standards and use sound scientific evidence to establish hazards of materials, then all we have to look at is some of our previous experience in the legislative history of this material and come up with a basis of what is taking place.
First of all, the Environmental Protection Agency has established the number of millirems per year that is allowable in drinking water. And that is 4, 4 millirems per year is available to be safe in drinking water in our country. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says, well, we will up it a little bit, for a low-level nuclear waste site, you can be exposed to 25 millirems a year and still be healthy.
EPA again, under the waste isolation pilot project plant in New Mexico, where they are taking high level nuclear waste and treating it in storage there as a pilot project, they have got a whopping 15 millirems per year. An independent spent nuclear storage facility is estimated to have 25 millirems per year, and the interim storage exposure range is about 10.3.
Under 1270, H.R. 1270, all of those standards, the EPA standards do not have to be met. All of the safety guarantees that we have got environmentally around this country do not have to be met. In fact, they guarantee that they will exceed 100 millirems per year in the transportation of nuclear waste.
Mr. Speaker, absolutely incredible that we could have the American public be duped by the nuclear power industry into accepting this material.
Now, we have heard a lot recently about the site or the location where this material is going to be placed, in a mountain in southern Nevada. Theoretically it is dry, no problem with storing it there. After all, people only live miles away.
Mr. Speaker, let me tell you, from a scientific basis, after all, I think I am qualified inasmuch as I have a degree in mining geology, I have studied it. I have a master's degree. I understand some of the hazards with regard to geologic settings.
Yucca Mountain did not become a safe storage site unless you take the standards and you keep changing and reducing the bar and the acceptable level downward and downward and downward. Yucca Mountain did not get to be Yucca Mountain because of a stable geotectonic event. It became Yucca Mountain due to faulting and geologic volcanic activity which is currently active today. Numerous faulting in the area exists and has continued even today with 621 seismic events of a magnitude greater than 2.5 within a 50-mile radius over the last year. That is incredible. There are at least 33 known earthquake faults in Yucca Mountain itself, this little piece of land that they want to put this.
A National Science Foundation study showed that previous testing at the Nevada test site, located 20 miles away, had released plutonium into the surrounding dry rock during one of the underground testings. As a result, they wanted to study that plutonium, very dangerous, half-
life much longer than uranium, enriched uranium, to see what the migration into the groundwater would be. Thinking that it would not have gone anywhere in the last 20 years, it has gone nearly a mile. It has migrated a mile. That is 5,000 feet.
Well, 10,000 feet below that is the water aquifer, a huge aquifer for all of the Southwest, including Las Vegas, a city of 1.2 million people, as well as other surrounding communities in the area.
This tells us one thing, that the standards by which they are judging Yucca Mountain are wrong. It is not geologically safe. It is not geologically stable. The transportation and migration of radioactive nuclides through the rock, through the soil and into the groundwater is more than just an expectation. It is an inevitability. It will occur.
We have today probably one of the greatest opportunities to stop this nuisance, to stop this nonsense, to change the policy of this country, to change the idea of sticking it in the ground and walking away from it.
As we talked earlier, the cost of transportation, seven times more expensive than storage on site where it is at. You pick the difference up. You pick up that $2.3 billion. It comes out of your pocket, takes away from your children's education, takes away from your highways, takes away from anything, the defense of this Nation. That is $2.3 billion out of your pocket just to move it versus 300 million that the industry itself could pay to store it for the next 100 years while technology is developed to change the hazard of this material so that we do not have to bury it.
They say they have built a storage site that will last. I defy them to answer me how they know that. We in this country have never built anything to last longer than 1,000 years. We have never been in existence for 1,000 years. The Egyptians built the pyramids 3,500 years ago. They are not lasting. What is it that they expect to see, 1,000, 2,000 or 5,000 years from now when they come across this cavernous Yucca Mountain site where they have buried this nuclear waste?
Who knows what we will find at that point in time, if it is accessible, if it has not erupted or some cataclysmic activity destroyed or changed the site itself. I wonder what the warnings will look like 1,000 years from now that say, do not dig here. We buried high-level nuclear waste.
What sort of paint will they put on the sign that will last for 1,000 years? Will they chisel it in stone and place it at the entry? Will 1,000 years or 2,000 years from now allow us to have that warning available to those people, if there are people, who may stumble upon that area? We do not know. And that is the question of the day. What do we know? We do not know what it will be like. We do know we have the ability to change the policy today, to ask that we go forward with research and development, that we go forward with science to change the hazard of this material.
H.R. 1270 is the transportation of nuclear waste across America. We talked earlier about the odds of an accident. River Front Times, June 12 through the 14, 1996 said it very clearly: No matter how slim the odds of an accident, the potential consequences of such a move are cataclysmic. Under the plan, tons of radioactive material would likely pass through the St. Louis area by either truck or rail a few times a week for the next 30 years. Each cask would contain the radiological equivalent of 200 Hiroshima bombs. Altogether, the nuclear dunnage would be enough to kill everybody on Earth.
Maybe a little bit eccentric, maybe a little bit exaggerative in terms of the cataclysmic event that might occur, but certainly not impossible, not farfetched.
Whether it is a terrorist act on the railway transportation of this material or a simple accident along the highway or railway with this material, you, the Americans, are both at risk economically, environmentally, personally.
I think it is up to America to advise their representatives in Congress of their opposition to H.R. 1270, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1997. We have a chance today to educate our Members through your phone calls, through your letters, requesting that they oppose H.R. 1270. Do not let this opportunity, do not let this time go by without taking advantage of that opportunity because your future, your children's future and the future of this country depend on your ability to see through the nuclear wool that the nuclear industry wants to pull over the eyes of America.
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