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However, to maintain the credibility of the site-suitability decision, siting a centralized storage near Yucca Mountain--

That is interim storage he has reference to--

should be deferred until a technically defensible site-suitability determination can be made at Yucca Mountain.

That is the essence of the argument, that no decision should be made until a defensible site-suitability determination can be made at Yucca Mountain.

He goes on to say:

We have estimated that such a determination could be made within about 4 years.

Those are Dr. Jared Cohon's comments.

So, Mr. President, it is clear that the nuclear utility industry is scrambling at the last moment to put together a few flourishes on the legislation that is before us, but they will not and cannot change the basic flaw in that they would propose to site interim storage at the Nevada test site before a determination is made with respect to the permanent repository.

Let me say, for those who have followed this issue over the years, the only justification for siting it at the Nevada test site--and this was debated last year on the floor, to some extent--was the assumption, the predicate that Yucca Mountain would be the permanent repository. That was the only basis. How in the world can you place interim storage until you have a determination made as to whether the permanent facility, which is the whole predicate of the interim storage licensing decision, has been determined, and that has not occurred.

So this has nothing to do with science. Frequently, science is invoked to defend the course of action that our colleagues on the other side of this issue would urge upon the body. This has absolutely nothing to do with science; it has everything to do with nuclear politics as advocated by the nuclear power industry and their legions of lobbyists who line the hallways and the corridors of this Chamber, as well as the other body.

A second point I think needs to be made here and was addressed, in part, by my senior colleague, and that is the transportation issue. If we should not be moving it at all until a decision is made, why place at risk the citizens of 43 States, 51 million people, along highway and rail corridors in America? Senator Reid is quite correct that Europe is often cited: `My gosh, they have their situation handled; why can't we do it here?' Believe me, once you start moving 85,000 metric tons of high-level nuclear waste, you are going to have communities, and rightly so, exercised about the transport of those kinds of volumes.

The chairman of the committee says, `Well, we're shipping nuclear waste around now.' That is true to some extent, but the difference between 2,500 shipments and 17,000 shipments in which the 2,500 shipments have traveled 900 miles or less is a vastly different proposition in terms of magnitude of risk of shipping waste over thousands of miles. Remember, most of these reactors are in the East and would be transported virtually from coast to coast, a very different proposition again.

Something else that we have tried to make understandable in this debate to our opponents is the fact that the casks that would be used have not yet been designed, nor have they been manufactured. So we are talking about a totally different reconfigured cask that will take some time.

I invite my colleagues' attention to the testimony of Dr. Jared Cohon, again, earlier this year when he indicated that it is not just a siting decision. He says:

But developing a storage facility--

And he is referring there, again, to interim storage--

requires more than a siting decision. It also requires the development of a transportation system, and it is likely that such transportation system will take several years to develop.

So the notion that somehow instantaneously this problem is taken care of, just pass S . 104 and all of our problems go away.

I want to respond to one other issue briefly before concluding. The notion is somehow fostered here that if an interim storage facility is located at the Nevada test site, that rather than having 109 different reactor sites around the country where nuclear waste is stored, we will have only one. Mr. President, that is not correct. We will have 110, not 109.