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BRYAN: Developing a storage facility requires more than a siting decision. It also requires the development of a transportation system and developing a transportation infrastructure, including the transportation cap, and enhanced safety capabilities along the routes necessary to move significant amounts of waste will likely take years longer than would be needed to develop a centralized storage facility.

I need to make that point again. I mean, the thrust of this debate--and you will hear much more from our colleagues who are saying that somehow it is a panacea of S. 104, if enacted and signed into law, that immediately the waste will be removed from the reactor sites. That is simply not true. Even if theoretically a site could be opened in the next year or 18 months--and absolutely no one believes that--siting interim storage would require at least 3 or 4 years.

But assume for the sake of argument that the site was available, what Dr. Cohon is telling us is that because we do not have the casks currently in existence--the standards, yes, but not the casks--that it would take us a while to develop the transportation system that would be required; that it will require a few years to get that done.

So all of this talk about the casks that have been depicted on film and all of the discussion about the casks being dropped from 30 feet, 50 feet, 60 feet, or 100 feet, are totally irrelevant. We

are talking about casks that will not be used for this purpose. We are talking about a new configuration cask that has not yet been developed, and I think that point needs to be emphasized.

Let me make one other point, if I may, with respect to the notion that somehow because Nevada, responding to a patriotic call during the height of the cold war in 1951, agreed to allow nuclear testing at the Nevada test site--I was in the eighth grade the year the nuclear testing began in Nevada. I have to tell you that it was a different age and a different time than it is today. We were all pretty naive about what that was about. Were we excited? Yes. We all thought it was a great thing. We were on the cutting edge in technology. In those days the nuclear power lobby convinced America that everything would be nuclear, that we would have little reactors in our back yards and planes would be powered by nuclear fuel; locomotives; and, indeed, as was often said, the nuclear power will be so cheap that it can't be measured. That goes back 46 years ago.

In my hometown of Las Vegas, businesses changed their names to atomic groceries, atomic this and that. There was an atomic hairdoo. Yes. Nevadans sensed that they were being asked to respond to a patriotic call of the Federal Government to respond to a confrontation that we had with a superpower, the Soviet Union. That frightened all of us. I hope that my friends would not suggest that because we responded to that, that there is somehow implicit a duty to accept civilian reactor wastes generated on site, a decision made by local utilities and local customers, and that that somehow be sent to us in Nevada.

I might just say parenthetically with respect to that rather naive world in which we lived in 1951, today every American pays as part of his or her tax dollars to the people who are downwind from those nuclear detonations that we were assured at the time that they were absolutely safe--`Don't worry about it. It is the most exciting thing in the world.' We invited members of the fourth estate, the Department of Energy. Then it was called the Atomic Energy Commission. There was a little place. They built bleachers for them called News Nob. Come on up and see for yourselves. This is science. This is exciting stuff, folks.

We sent thousands of our military personnel to a place called Camp Desert Rock, and we dug trenches out there and showed them what the exposure would be like to atmospheric radiation.

Mr. President, if any responsible scientist suggested that that was absolutely safe today, I mean he or she would be hounded out of any kind of scientific academy that exists. We all know now that is dangerous stuff. It is very hazardous, and a lot of people downwind paid with their lives, and paid through genetic damage which they have experienced and suffered from cancers. As a consequence, each of us as taxpayers in America today compensate those victims.