Energy Policy of 2005
ENERGY POLICY ACT OF 2005
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Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, on behalf of the people of Utah, I thank the managers of this Omnibus Energy bill for their leadership in producing a comprehensive and broadly supported proposal.
If the American people think bipartisanship is dead in Congress, they should look at this bill and how it is being managed on the floor these past 2 weeks.
On behalf of the people of Utah, I want to thank the managers of this Omnibus Energy bill for their leadership in producing such a comprehensive and broadly supported proposal.
If the American people think that bipartisanship is dead in Congress, they should take a look at this bill, and how it is being managed on the floor these 2 weeks.
I must commend the leadership of Chairmen DOMENICI and GRASSLEY, and their Democratic counterparts, Senators BINGAMAN and BAUCUS as the Senate considers this critically important piece of legislation.
In addition, I want to thank Chairman GRASSLEY and Senator BAUCUS for working so closely with me on the energy tax incentive package, now part of the Omnibus Energy bill.
In particular, this bill includes a number of provisions of great importance to Utahns, provisions I authored. These include my CLEAR Act, which promotes alternatives in the transportation sector, my Gas Price Reduction through Increased Refinery Capacity Act, and my proposal to improve the treatment of geothermal powerplants. All were included in the energy package.
I am also grateful to the leaders of the Energy Committee, Chairman DOMENICI and Senator BINGAMAN, for agreeing to include the major provisions of another bill of keen interest to Utahns, my bill, the Oil Shale and Tar Sands Promotion Act, S.1111, which was cosponsored by Senators BENNETT and ALLARD.
Our bill would promote development of the largest untapped resource of hydrocarbons in the world. There is more recoverable oil in the oil shale and oil sands of Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming than in the entire Middle East.
The chairman and his staff have done yeomen's work to successfully strike a compromise on S. 1111 that is agreeable to all sides and that can be accepted into this bill. I thank both leaders for that effort.
And finally, I thank them for including my bill, S. 53, in the Energy bill. S. 53 would amend the Mineral Leasing Act to authorize the Secretary of the Interior to issue separately, for the same area, a lease for tar sands and a lease for oil and gas, thus freeing up a new resource of natural gas in our Nation.
Now, I would like to turn to the Hatch-Bennett amendment on high level nuclear waste, which we filed in an effort to bring some focus to our Nation's policy for handling spent nuclear fuel.
In my hand is an article from yesterday's Washington Post.
The headline reads, ``Bush Calls for More Nuclear Power Plants.'' And the article begins: ``President Bush called today for a new wave of nuclear power plant construction as he promoted an energy policy that he wants to see enacted in a bill now making its way through Congress.''
The President is calling for a robust nuclear power strategy, and his reasons are clear: nuclear power is clean and safe, and there is an abundant supply of cheap uranium in Northern America.
But my question is, ``What are we going to do with all the waste?''
We cannot have a nuclear power strategy until we know what to do with all the spent nuclear fuel.
And what is becoming quickly apparent to me and to the people of Utah is that we do not have a coherent national nuclear waste policy. Until we do, we are putting the cart before of the horse.
For years, I have supported sending this high level nuclear waste to the desert of Nevada.
To be honest, it has never been an easy vote for me, because it was against the wishes of my friends and colleagues from that State. However, it has been our national policy for more than two decades to build a site at Yucca Mountain, a safe, remote location, where spent fuel could be taken over by the Federal Government and buried deep beneath the desert.
Even though Utah does not use or produce nuclear power, I have recognized the need to have a nuclear power program in the U.S. that relies on a plan to safely handle our waste. In other words, we need a strong nuclear waste program.
Here is a picture of the desert area where Yucca Mountain actually is. You can see it is desolate and out in the middle of nowhere.
Unfortunately, a few nuclear power utilities are attempting to hijack our Nation's nuclear waste strategy by joining forces to build an away-from-reactor, aboveground storage site for one-half of our Nation's high level nuclear waste on a tiny Indian reservation in Tooele, UT.
Even more unfortunate is that the only tribe they could con into taking this waste was the Skull Valley Band of the Goshutes, whose small reservation just happens to sit on one of the most dangerous sites you could imagine for storing high level nuclear waste.
The Skull Valley reservation is directly adjacent to the Air Force's Utah Test and Training Range and Dugway Proving Grounds where live ordnance is used.
Here is an illustration of an F-l6 that flies regularly in this area.
This location proposed for the aboveground storage of half of our nuclear waste sits directly under the flight path of 7,000 low altitude F-16 flights every year.
Even if this area were truly remote from all civilization, which it is not, its location alone should disqualify it for the storage of even one cask of high level nuclear waste. But that's the problem with allowing private intrests to establish our nuclear waste strategy, economics can get in the way of reason and safety.
Mr. President, 80 percent of Utah's population sits within 50 miles of the Skull Valley reservation.
Represented on this picture are the type of communities we have near that place.
As a crow flies, Skull Valley is less than 15 miles away from Tooele City, one of the fastest growing cities in Utah, which is becoming a major suburb of Salt lake City.
Skull Valley is only about 30 miles from the Salt Lake City International Airport. And let us not forget that many of the families of the Skull Valley Band live right on the reservation, and half, if not more, of them are against this. These families face, by far, the greatest risk.
When this group of utilities, known as Private Fuel Storage, or PFS, applied for a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Commission's three judge Atomic Licensing Board ruled that the threat of a crash from an F-16 was too great to allow a license for the proposed facility. Not letting science get in its way, PFS came back later after two of the three judges were replaced with new ones, this time making a different pitch even though all the facts remained the same.
As a result, the two new judges ruled, in a two-to-one decision, that the risk of a crash from an F-16 was low enough to allow the license.
One has to wonder who in the world would allow the license for a small tribe in this area with this type of danger. The trustee I don't think could possibly do that. Nevertheless, they ignored the prior commission and went ahead and did it.
However, Judge Peter Lam, the senior member of the panel, and its only nuclear engineer, gave a very strong dissent. I would like to quote from Judge Lam's dissent:
The proposed PFS facility does not currently have a demonstrated adequate safety margin against accidental aircraft crashes. ..... This lack of an adequate safety margin is a direct manifestation of the fundamentally difficult situation of the proposed PFS site: 4,000 spent fuel storage casks sitting in the flight corridor of some 7,000 F-16 flights a year.
Judge Lam also cited the inadequacy of the new methodology used to determine that the site would be safe.
He writes:
In this current proceeding, the Applicant has performed an extensive probability analysis and a structural analysis to rehabilitate its license application. As explained below, the Applicant's probability and structural analyses both suffer from major uncertainties. These uncertainties fundamentally undermine the validity of the analyses.
Mr. President, with 7,000 F-16 flights every year, one can imagine that emergency landings are not uncommon at the training range, and I am unhappy to report that crash landings are not rare, either.
In the last 20 years, there have been 70 F-16 crashes at the Utah Test and Training Range, and a number of these crashes have occurred well outside the boundaries of the training range.
I have found it baffling that the Final EIS for the Skull Valley plan does not require PFS to have any on-site means to handle damaged or breached casks. Rather, the NRC staff concluded the risk of a cask breach is so minimal that they did not have to consider such a scenario in their EIS. I find this conclusion dubious and dangerous in light of the facts relating to F-16 overflights.
In his dissent, Judge Lam refers to the threat of accidental aircraft accidents. He doesn't even go into the possibility of terrorists. Since the events of September 11, we have learned that one of our Nation's most serious threats may come in the form of deliberate suicide air attacks. It would seem inconceivable that a Government entity would consider giving their endorsement of the PFS plan without thoroughly taking into account the added terrorist threat our Nation now faces.
Yet the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has refused to reopen the Environmental Impact Statement to consider this new threat, even though post-9-11 studies have been completed at all other facilities licensed by the NRC.
It is apparent they just want to dump this stuff somewhere. I have to say, if this continues, I am certainly going to do some reconsidering myself.
I found this especially troubling since the NRC has never granted a license for the storage of more than about 60 casks, but the Skull Valley site will hold up to 4,000 casks of this waste.
I want my colleagues to understand that not only is the size of the PFS proposal a gigantic precedent, but issuing itself a license for a private away-from-reactor storage site has never been done and runs counter to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act which clearly limits the NRC to license storage sites only at Federal facilities or onsite at nuclear powerplants.
Former Secretary of Energy Abraham stated publicly he shares our interpretation. In a letter to members of the Utah congressional delegation, Secretary Abraham issued a policy statement that barred any DOE reimbursement funds from being used in relation to the Skull Valley site. This would include industry members who would lease space at the site. He said:
Because the PFS/Goshute facility in Utah would be constructed and operated outside the scope of the [Nuclear Waste Policy] Act, the Department will not fund or otherwise provide financial assistance for PFS, nor can we monitor the safety precautions the private facility may install.
My amendment is compatible with the policy outlined by Secretary Abraham in his letter. It would ban the transportation of high level nuclear waste to private away-from-reactor waste sites and calls for a study to the feasibility of storing spent fuel either at Department of Energy facilities or of the Department taking possession of the spent fuel onsite at nuclear reactors.
My amendment calls also for a study of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel for future use.
Let me state the obvious for the record. The PFS plan is vehemently opposed by the entire Utah congressional delegation, Gov. Jon Huntsman, former Gov. Michael Leavitt, and an overwhelming majority of Utahans. In fact, virtually everybody in Utah. A large portion of the 70-member Goshute Band is strongly opposed to the proposal. We believe a majority of them are, but there is some indication of fraud in their elections out there.
Furthermore, the leader of the band, Leon Bear, has pleaded guilty to a Federal indictment. It is notable that every other tribal government in Utah has come out flatly against it. How could any trustee for the Indians allow something like that to be?
Utahns are well aware of the points I have made today. Because of the risks we face associated with the PFS proposal, we know better than any that our Nation's nuclear waste policy is broken. It was with good reason that our Nation's nuclear waste strategy has been built around the expectation that the Federal Government, namely the Department of Energy, would take possession of spent nuclear fuel rods. What better example do we need than the PFS plan to see why private industry should not be allowed to develop and implement our Nation's nuclear waste strategy.
Think about it. PFS is a shell corporation. If anything went wrong, Utah is going to eat it. That is all there is to it. It is ridiculous.
I understand why our colleagues from Nevada oppose the Yucca Mountain site. I am getting more and more understanding of that as I go along. But if they are concerned about waste at Yucca Mountain, they should be exponentially more concerned over the PFS site which is so flawed as to be inherently dangerous, extremely dangerous.
In closing, let me drive home one point. Our President has called for a dramatic increase in our Nation's capacity to generate nuclear power. As Congress considers that proposal, I ask, Should any increase we might authorize rest on a nuclear waste policy established by the Federal Government or should that policymaking rest with a couple of private companies that are driven by profit?
Do we want the Federal Government to take possession of our high level nuclear waste or is our national waste policy to allow private companies to control the transport, storage, and security of this waste? And with shell corporations at that. If that is to be our policy, then I need to inform our colleagues that our Nation's nuclear power strategy is a house built on sand.
Let me summarize my remarks. We Utahns are adamantly opposed to the storage of spent nuclear fuel at the Skull Valley reservation. The current site that has been selected by a consortium made up of eight utilities has several fatal flaws, including the fact that it contemplates a facility that is, one, located fewer than 50 miles from the Salt Lake Valley where 80 percent of our fellow Utahans live; two, directly under the Utah Test and Training Range where roughly 7,000 low-altitude F-16 training flights take place each year, many with live ordnance, and over a range where 70 crashes have taken place already; and three, on the small Skull Valley Goshute Indian reservation where about 40 of the band's 120 total members reside--only 40. Moreover, the Skull Valley Band's leadership is in question. Leon Bear, the band's current chairman, has been accused by his colleagues of disregarding a vote of no confidence. In addition, Mr. Bear recently pleaded guilty to Federal criminal charges and is awaiting sentencing relating to his management of tribal financial resources.
I would like to know if my friend, the chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, believes that storing spent nuclear fuel on a privately run and privately owned offsite facility, such as the Skull Valley reservation in Utah, is a component of our national nuclear waste policy.
Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, in response to that question, I would say that our national policy for handling high level nuclear waste is to store it at the proposed DOE site at Yucca Mountain. I don't know whether the Skull Valley site will receive the regulatory approval it needs. That is not my decision. However, in my view, our focus should remain on a solution that puts this waste directly in the hands of the Federal Government.
Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I thank the chairman for that clarification.
I again thank the leaders of this bill who have done such a great job in bringing both sides together to pass what will be one of the most important energy bills in the history of the world. It certainly is going to do a lot for our country if we will continue to follow this through conference and get it back for final passage. It is long overdue.
I know it has been an ordeal for Senator Domenici in particular and others as well. I pay my tribute to them for the hard work they have done.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
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