Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2014
Floor Speech
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Mr. GARAMENDI. I thank the gentleman from New Jersey for raising opposition to the amendment. I'm glad he gave me a few moments, Madam Chair, to slow down a bit before I would comment on the amendment.
The author of the amendment would probably want to take a few steps more. To carry out the full intent of what he's proposing would be to eliminate all subsidies for everything. Then where would we be?
I suppose if we're going to be consistent in this, if we were to adopt this amendment, we ought to go to the oil and gas industry and eliminate all of the subsidies that they have, which are tax breaks, direct subsidies, by reducing their taxes to the tune of well over $10 billion a year. Probably not a bad idea. And then to go on, as the chairman of the committee has suggested, to take on all of the other subsidies.
Where would we be?
It's a long history of America, dating back, really, to the Founding Fathers, in which Alexander Hamilton presented to the Congress, at the request of George Washington, a plan on manufacturers in which was stated a policy then and carried forward ever since that time, some 230-plus years, in which the Federal Government has been directly involved in the development of the American industries.
For example, at that time, Alexander Hamilton suggested that the Federal Government ought to support the development of roads, ports, and canals, and, in fact, one not far from here received that assistance, the Potomac Canal. And ports were built, eventually lighthouses were put up, all of them to benefit commerce.
Abraham Lincoln subsidized, with the consent of Congress and the Senate, the Transcontinental Railroad that has helped the gentleman's State of California, and my State of California.
There's a long, long history of America in which the Federal Government has directly, indirectly, subsidized the creation of industry. We went to the Moon, but we created enormous numbers of businesses as a direct result. And in the gentleman's pocket is an iPhone or some other device that was directly subsidized by the Federal Government.
Now, if you want to go back and simply forget about progress, then carry out this amendment to its fullest extent. I don't think any of us want to go there.
I'd ask for a ``no'' vote on the amendment.
I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Chairman, the gentleman from Nevada is on to a very, very important issue here: What are we going to do with spent nuclear fuel? Our current light water reactors consume maybe 3 percent of the energy in the nuclear fuel. You can reprocess it once and you get another 3 percent, and so now you've got 93, 92 percent, or 94 percent, of the energy that you now consider as waste, in this case to be permanently stored at Yucca Mountain.
We actually have a 20th century solution. We spent some $10- to $12 billion on it in the '60s, '70s, '80s, and in 1993 we put that solution aside. We need to bring that solution back into place, and the gentleman's amendment would further us in dealing with this issue of spent nuclear fuel. It is not a waste; it is an extraordinary asset, and it's one that we should be utilizing. In doing so, we can dispose of it through multiple recyclings, all of which has been proved by the United States, readily available today.
We need to take it out of the closet, put it back on the front burner, and use the accelerator technologies in our reactors to adequately dispose of these very dangerous wastes. In doing so, we can not only dispose of the total longevity, we can take it from a couple of hundred thousand years down to a couple of hundred years of dangerous radioactive emissions.
We need to move on this. The gentleman's amendment allows us to do that. It solves a major problem that the entire world has. Spent nuclear fuel is an international problem.
The United States Government in the 1960s recognized this as a problem, set out to solve it, did solve it with what is known as the integral fast reactor--integral fast reactor. That is the accelerator reactor integral in that the reprocessing is a metallurgic process, not an aqueous process that can only be used once. This can be used multiple times, and in so doing eliminate much of the problem that we have with spent nuclear fuels.
I urge an ``aye'' vote on this very, very important amendment.
I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Chairman, I offer this amendment together with Mr. Polis. We've heard discussion repeatedly about the value of science. But if we back up a few moments, we also need to understand our values as Representatives of this Nation.
There's been an interesting subset of debates here over the last several hours and, on the one hand, it's the issue of, we must maintain our nuclear weapon superiority, and the committee has taken up that value, that goal, and has put a lot of money into that area while moving money out of the science.
Unfortunately, the committee couldn't take a larger view of the overall budget and the appropriations and deal with, perhaps, the fact that we're spending $82 billion in Afghanistan this year and maybe move some of that money over into these accounts. But that wasn't possible.
But if you stand back and take a look at what has happened throughout the course of this day, you'll see that there have been repeated efforts on the part of the Democrats to rebuild the science, the research budget of the United States.
This appropriation bill simply decimates that budget, that critical investment in today and tomorrow, and in the economy of the future. Our ability to deal with climate change, our ability to deal with energy, are just stripped, gutted and actually set aside as a result of this appropriation bill.
The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, a $2 billion reduction, 73 percent, ARPA-E, the subject of this amendment, a $329 million reduction, an 87 percent reduction. The Office of Science, 25,000 researchers across this Nation are likely to be laid off, thousands of research projects will simply not be funded. They will simply die on the vine.
The Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, an $80 million reduction. It goes on and on.
This is so backward, this is so backward. What this Nation needs to do is to build its research capabilities, build its science. We do not need to build more bombs. But yet, that's what we are doing here.
This amendment replaces the $329 million dollar cut to the ARPA-E program, a program that has actually created many new opportunities, which my colleagues will be discussing here in the next few moments, but a program based upon the Defense Department's DARPA program, that has, through arguments that we've heard over the last several hours, developed extraordinary technology that has now found its way into the world's economy, for example, the Internet.
We really must restore this money, and we must restore the science budget and research budget for the Department of Energy. We can't fail. If it's a choice between building more nuclear weapons and replacing our nuclear weapons or creating tomorrow's economy, it's a simple choice.
But this bill doesn't do that. It deals with yesterday. Yes, we're going to need nuclear weapons, but not 5,500 of them. We don't need to rebuild all of them. We don't need to spend $7.7 billion on that enterprise while gutting the research and the science future of this Nation.
I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Chairman, the committee has done a considerable amount of work on one of the very expensive facilities we have in the nuclear arena. This is the MOX facility in South Carolina.
In the current report language, the committee deals with the problem that this facility has. It's over budget, isn't going anywhere, will ultimately produce a product that nobody wants. So what I'm trying to do with this amendment is to take this thing one step further in order to try to find a solution to this very, very expensive problem. If I might just quote the committee's report here:
Despite the influx of additional funding, the NNSA has been unable to recover its schedule and is now facing another $2.8 billion in additional costs. Instead of its fulfilling its responsibility to address these rising costs through reforming its management of the project and conducting an independent cost estimate to quantify these cost increases, the NNSA wrote ``TBD''--which I suspect means ``to be determined''--in its budget justification and removed all project funding from its 5-year plan while it carries out a strategic pause.
This program is in deep trouble, and it is a hole into which the U.S. taxpayers continue to pour money. I am pleased that the committee is taking steps, but I'd like the bill to take an additional step, and that's what this amendment does. Let me explain what it is all about.
Technically, the bill takes $1 million from the Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation and reinserts the same amount into that account. This is done in order to avoid a point of order. The legislative intent of the amendment is therefore to remove the $1 million from the funding from the MOX facility at the Savannah River site and then direct the NNSA to instead use these funds for:
One, an independent report to analyze the potential cost-effective alternatives for plutonium disposition, including a detailed assessment of technologically feasible costs; and, two, a study examining whether there are other potential uses for the facilities already built and for the Savannah River site more generally.
While not legally binding, the Agency should comply with this legislative intent if this amendment is adopted.
The amendment is consistent with an amendment that I offered earlier with regard to the NDAA, and the language would be similar. I would urge the adoption of this. We really need to try to figure out the very best way to deal with this sinkhole of taxpayer money.
With that, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mr. GARAMENDI. I appreciate the respect. You and the chairman have made a very good argument for my amendment, and I thank you for that.
My amendment doesn't do anything that you're not already trying to do. It simply gives some more specific direction to the Department, specifically to seek outside analysis of the alternatives that might be available.
Clearly, the Department has not been successful in running this project, and they are not in the process of seeking outside help. They're going to try to do it inside. I think that would be a mistake. There are people out there--there are companies and there are actually researchers outside--who could provide that outside view of what's going on.
Secondly, there are other ways of dealing with this problem. This is an aqueous process that's being used there, and it simply isn't working. There are other ways of disposing of the plutonium and of the highly enriched uranium that are proven to work--I discussed this earlier this day--and we need to study whether that can be used at this facility. We're not talking about jobs. We are actually talking about making this facility work and possibly using a different technology, but we really need to have somebody outside take a look at this whole thing.
Both you and the ranking member and the chair have adequately explained why my language should be adopted. I thank you for the committee's looking at this thing in a very hard, structured way. It has to be dealt with.
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