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[Page: H1480]  GPO's PDF
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   The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 19, 1999, the gentleman from California (Mr. FILNER) is recognized during morning hour debates for 4 minutes.

   Mr. FILNER. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to tell you of the danger faced by 25 million people who get their water from the Colorado River because of radioactive waste leaching from an abandoned mine waste pile that is located only 750 feet away from the Colorado River.

   This deadly waste pile, abandoned by the Atlas Corporation, sits in the Moab Valley of southeastern Utah. The Colorado River, flowing past this site just south, provides water for 7 percent of the United States population, including Las Vegas, Arizona and the southern California urban areas of Los Angeles and the city I represent, San Diego.

   Legislation that the gentleman from California (Mr. GEORGE MILLER) and I have introduced, H.R. 393, would move this contaminated pile away from the Colorado River. Yesterday, the Project on Government Oversight, known as POGO, released a report recommending moving the pile as the most reliable way to save the growing population of Nevada, Arizona and California from having the highly contaminated waste leak into their water supply for the next 270 years.

   I pledge to continue to fight to move this pile, lest my constituents and most of the Southwest be forced to live under a sentence of radioactivity and contaminants in their drinking water for nearly 3 centuries. This is an unacceptable sentence and would likely be a death sentence for many. I cannot sit idly by while polluters and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission inflict this on innocent people.

   Recently, this commission which, has jurisdiction over cleaning up the site, issued a Final Environmental Impact Statement stating that Atlas' plan to cap the radioactive pile is, quote, environmentally acceptable.

   Is it environmentally acceptable to cover 10.5 million tons of uranium mill wastes with rock and sand where the river can reach it during the spring runoff and cause a public health crisis? With the pile only 10 to 20 feet above the underground water aquifer, highly concentrated ammonia will continue to seep into the ground water. If the runoff is bad for three endangered species of fish, as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Fish and Wildlife Service acknowledge, it surely is deadly, over time, for our children and our grandchildren.

   This POGO report details a clear problem with the NRC's jurisdiction of this pile, and our bill, H.R. 393, addresses this by removing the responsibility for the pile to the Department of Energy, which has the technology and experience with cleaning up sites and protecting public health.

   When the Department of Energy has been involved with contaminated sites along the Colorado River, it moved, and did not just cap, the sites with uranium concentration levels of less than 2 milligrams per liter.

   The uranium concentration levels at Moab which I am talking about exceed 26 milligrams per liter, and yet the NRC pushes forward with its plan, forcing the Fish and Wildlife Service to sign off on the sand capping plan just because the NRC lacks the authority to move this pile.

   As the report illustrates, it is past time to move this deadly pile, and to move jurisdiction for moving it to the Department of Energy, which will get this life-and-death job done.

   Mr. Speaker, I urge support for H.R. 393.

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