Providing for Consideration of H.R. Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2017

Floor Speech

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Ms. TITUS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for those kind words and for yielding to me.

Mr. Speaker, I represent Las Vegas, which is the heart of southern Nevada. We have over 2 million people, and we welcome 40 million people from around the world every year. Let me give you a different perspective.

I have been fighting Yucca Mountain since the 1980s. I do know these issues. I appreciate some of the points that have been made, but some of them are just incorrect. H.R. 3053 is a flawed piece of legislation, and it just doubles down on bad policy and bad politics.

I testified in front of the Energy and Commerce Committee on this bill when it was first introduced last year and noted many of the flaws in the legislation, flaws that remain in the bill.

I also presented a map that showed that, if this waste is taken to Nevada, it will go through over 300 of our Members' districts: past their schools, past their churches, past their businesses, in their backyards. So I want them to keep that in mind as they focus on Nevada.

Other flaws with the bill: First, the bill would bust the cap for the amount of highly radioactive nuclear waste that would be dumped in Nevada. The bill arbitrarily increases the amount by 37 percent, 37 percent over what was authorized in 1987. But what is more, not one of the environmental impact studies, the five-volume safety evaluation report, or any scientific document that relates to Yucca Mountain has studied the impact of increasing that original 70,000-metric-ton cap. So this would not only increase it, they haven't even studied what the impact of the increase would be.

The bill also deems approved changes in the EPA's radiation protection standards for Yucca Mountain prior to the NRC's final licensing document. This leads one to conclude that, no matter what challenge they face, they will just figure out a way to get around it regardless of what the science says.

Proponents of this legislation also say that, well, you will get generous host benefits if you take this facility. Well, that is just another falsehood. The provisions in the bill that were changed after it passed the committee in order to bring down the cost of the bill and address the massive scoring issues make our getting those benefits much less likely.

These benefits have to be approved by future Congresses appropriating hundreds of millions of dollars. You don't really think they are going to do that, do you? They shut down the government twice just this year alone over disagreements on spending.

If this legislation were about good policy or addressing the issue or getting the technicalities correct, I would be standing here supporting it, but I just cannot do that the way it is written.

Mr. Speaker, the Congress first passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, as you heard, in 1982. It was amended in 1987 just to look at Nevada, not any of the other sites. We call that the ``Screw Nevada'' bill.

Well, we call it that because you didn't have Nevada wanting it to come there. You didn't have the science to put it there. You just screwed Nevada and stuck it there.

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Ms. TITUS. Well, this is just more of the same. It is politics, pure and simple. It is three decades later. We have heard we spent $15 billion. All you got is a hole in the ground. This is ``Screw Nevada 2.0.''

I am going to offer an amendment that allows for consent-based decisionmaking, which was the Blue Ribbon Commission's recommendation, and I hope that we can go in that direction. You allow consent-based for interim storage, why not for permanent storage? That would be the way to solve this problem. That would be the way to move us forward. We wouldn't waste billions more and decades more in terms of time.

So I urge a ``no'' vote on the rule and a ``no'' vote on the bill.

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