[Page: S11529]---
Mr. BRYAN. Mr. President, in what has become one of the more unpleasant annual rituals here in the Senate, the majority leader has once again put the Senate on notice that we may soon consider legislation related to the disposal of high-level nuclear waste at the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada.
Since the Senate last considered this subject, the sponsors of this legislation have realized that the Senators from Nevada, and the Clinton administration, will never yield to the outrageous and dangerous--in my view very dangerous--demands of the nuclear power industry.
This year, it appears that the industry and its advocates here in the Senate have finally conceded defeat, and dropped their misguided attempts to require ``interim'' storage of high-level nuclear waste in Nevada.
We have been fighting the ``interim'' storage proposal since 1995, and its demise is a major victory not only for Nevadans, but for millions of other citizens, and taxpayers across the country.
Some of what remains in the current nuclear waste proposal, S. 1287, is reasonable.
In particular, I have long supported providing financial relief to utilities, and their ratepayers, who are financially damaged by the Federal Government's failure to begin removing waste from reactor sites in 1998.
Under the leadership of Secretary Richardson, the administration has offered to work with the utilities to provide such financial relief, and several of the provisions of this legislation are intended to give the Secretary the legal authority he needs to carry out this proposal.
If financial relief for the utilities was all we were talking about, I believe we could pass a bill today.
Other provisions of the bill, will, I expect, continue to draw a veto threat from the White House.
Should the Senate actually attempt to move to the bill in the coming months, I will have a lot more to say about the unsafe and irresponsible changes this legislation would make to the Federal high-level waste program, but today I want to focus briefly on one particular provision that in my view is threatening and dangerous and that is the attempt to lower the radiation protection standard to be applied to a potential repository site at Yucca Mountain.
The starting point for any fair evaluation of a potential repository is a fair and protective radiation release standard.
Since it is against this standard that the predicted performance of a repository is measured, the health and safety of the public depend on a strict and comprehensive standard.
The legislation reported by the Senate Energy Committee, if enacted, would emasculate current law and the Environmental Protection Agency's effort to establish a fair Yucca Mountain standard by shifting the responsibility for setting the standard to the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and establish, by legislative fiat, a standard far less protective of the public and the environment.
Since its creation by President Nixon nearly 3 decades ago, the Environmental Protection Agency has been the Federal agency charged with developing radiation release standards.
The EPA was created for a sound reason, which still holds true today: to
[Page: S11530]
As the lead Federal Agency for environmental protection, the EPA has, for many years, set standards for a wide variety of pollutants, including radiation, to be applied by a wide variety of Federal agencies and regulatory bodies.
In addition to its general authority to set radiation standards, the EPA was specifically charged, by statute, with setting standards for high-level waste disposal by the original Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982.
Under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the EPA is charged with setting the standard, the NRC is charged with implementing the standard, and the DOE is charged with characterizing and building a repository.
When the Nuclear Waste Policy Act was amended in 1987, numerous changes were made, but the EPA's role as the standard setting agency was left untouched.
In 1992, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act was amended once again, and over my objections, this time the statute relating to the standard was changed.
In an effort by the nuclear power industry to influence the outcome of the EPA's work, the National Academy of Sciences was instructed to make recommendations to the EPA regarding the standard, and the EPA standard was required to be consistent with the NAS recommendations.
In 1992, Congress nevertheless was still unwilling to set the dangerous precedent of taking the standard setting authority away from the EPA.
To the disappointment of the nuclear industry and its supporters, however, this attempt in 1992 to have legislative changes to modify the law in an attempt to prejudice the EPA's work backfired--the industry was unhappy with the NAS's 1995 study, and renewed its effort to jerryrig a legislative standard that gutted the EPA provisions in the original Nuclear Waste Policy Act.
Recently, after years of work, and numerous delays, the EPA issued a proposed radiation release standard for Yucca Mountain.
The EPA is currently accepting comments on the proposed standard, and will continue to work with all parties interested in developing a final standard in the next few years.
But supporters of the industry's efforts to target nuclear waste for Nevada do not want a fair standard. They want a standard so low that Yucca Mountain, or any other site, simply could not fail.
The industry wants a standard that will provide a path around the many failings of the site, irrespective of the effects on public health and safety.
Although the radiation release standards are technical in nature, and quite complicated, the major issues of contention between the EPA, the NRC, and industry, however, are not.
First, what is the maximum increase in exposure to radiation Nevadans should be expected to bear due to the operation of the repository? And the second question is, should we protect a major aquifer that lies underneath the proposed repository site?
On the first subject--the level of protection--the report prepared by the National Academy of Sciences provides some helpful guidance.
This exhibit, as reflected in the chart, reflects that range. The white brackets here indicate the standard range from 2 to 20. The NRC standard, as one can see, in S. 1287, the current legislation, is far beyond the parameters of what the NAS, the National Academy of Sciences, has recommended. The EPA standard, on the other hand, set at 15 millirems, is well within those standards. So that is consistent with what the 1992 legislative changes mandated.
The exposure levels suggested by the NAS and the EPA were not simply plucked out of thin air. Both agencies relied heavily on similar standards established in the United States and by other countries. As this chart indicates, again, at the top is S. 1287, 30 millirems, which is far beyond the standard of most other countries; EPA at 15, the United Kingdom at 2; Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, and Finland at 10.
Once again, the EPA standard lies well within the midrange of standard practices around the world, while the standard included in S. 1287, as I indicated, lies at the extreme upper end of the range of existing practice.
More technical, but just as important, is the issue of what population the standard is measured against.
For the EPA proposal, the standard will be applied to the group of people most likely to be harmed--using reasonable assumptions regarding distance from the repository, and average eating and other personal habits, the EPA standard protects the ``maximally exposed individual.'' S. 1287 would apply the standard to an ``average'' member of what could be a very large group of individuals--leading to the possibility of very large exposures to members of the group who are at greater than ``average'' risk from the repository.
Proponents of gutting the radiation release standard, and of taking the EPA out of the process, claim that Nevadan's concerns are meaningless, and that natural variations in background radiation between regions render our concerns with an increased millirems a year meaningless.
That argument shows a blatant disregard for the health and safety of the people of Nevada.
We all live with whatever background radiation we may be exposed to; there is nothing we can do about that.
What we can do, as a matter of sound public health policy, is limit the amount of radiation exposure we add to background from manmade sources.
An ordinary chest x-ray--something we all subject ourselves to when necessary, but certainly don't consider a desirable event to occur on a regular basis--results in an exposure of about 5 millirems.
Under the legislation reported by the Energy Committee, Nevadans would be subjected to the equivalent of at least 6 additional, and unnecessary, chest x-rays each and every year.
We don't really know what the full health related effects of this type of exposure can result in, but I doubt that any member of the Senate would volunteer to subject his or her state, or family, to that type of risk.
Even under the EPA's proposed standard, individuals could expect to be subjected to future exposures equivalent to three chest x-rays a year--a proposal which, while more suitable than the alternatives offered by the nuclear power industry over the years, provides little comfort to Nevadans.
The second major issue which has raised such outrage by the nuclear power industry, the NRC, and their supporters here in Congress is the EPA's insistence upon requiring compliance with a separate groundwater standard.
Under the EPA's proposed standard, the repository would need to be in compliance with the goals of the Safe Drinking Water Act, which, in effect, limits radiological contamination of the groundwater to 4 mrems.
The proposed Yucca Mountain site lies over a major, if largely untapped, aquifer.
Water from the aquifer is currently a source of drinking water for several small communities in the vicinity of Yucca Mountain; it could, in the future, provide a drinking water source for several hundred thousand people.
While it is clearly not now a cost-effective source of drinking water on a large scale, it is incomprehensible to someone from the desert Southwest to intentionally contaminate such a large potential source of drinking water.
The EPA has been charged with protecting our nation's drinking water sources, and it takes that
responsibility very seriously.
It has established standards to protect drinking water sources in a wide variety of regulatory programs, including those related to hazardous-waste disposal, municipal-waste disposal, underground injection control, generic spent nuclear fuel, high level waste, and transuranic radioactive waste disposal, and uranium mill tailings disposal.
All of these, and other, EPA standards and programs work together to protect groundwater resources throughout the nation, and the Yucca Mountain standard is merely another piece of this important regulatory framework.
The bottom line is simple: the groundwater under Yucca Mountain needs to be protected.
[Page: S11531]
The standard proposed earlier this year by the NRC, and the standard included in S. 1287, encourage the intentional contamination of a potentially important aquifer running under the proposed repository site.
The EPA is duty bound to protect this aquifer, and has done so in its proposed standard.
It would be unconscionable for Congress to step in and reverse course on what has been a nearly 30 year effort by the EPA, and numerous other federal, state, and local governmental agencies, to protect and preserve our valuable natural resources.
While the Yucca Mountain standard is controversial, this is not the first time the federal government has gone through the exercise of setting radiation release standards.
Most recently, the EPA established standards for the Waste Isolation Pilot Project in New Mexico.
Like the proposed Yucca Mountain standard, the EPA's WIPP standard provides a maximum exposure of 15 millirems/year, and includes a separate 4 millirems groundwater standard.
It is not unreasonable for Nevadans to expect the same level of protection offered the citizens of New Mexico--and that is exactly what the EPA has proposed.
Fair treatment of Nevadans, of course, is not something that appears on the nuclear power industry's list of priorities.
Unfortunately for Nevadans, the nuclear power industry does not care much about the justification behind the EPA proposed standard.
For the industry and its supporters, the EPA is nothing more than an impediment to their ultimate plan to ship high-level nuclear waste to Nevada, no matter what the cost.
For the nuclear power industry, the test of whether or not a standard will be acceptable is not how protective it may be of the public health and safety, it is whether or not it allows a repository to be licensed.
Instead of focusing its attention on whether or not the Yucca Mountain site can meet a fair radiation release standard, the nuclear power industry is attempting to rig the standard to comport to what is being found at Yucca Mountain.
This cynical approach to public health and safety has led the industry along a strategy that seeks to undo decades of federal
environmental protection policy, and to ask Congress to establish a very dangerous precedent of ``forum shopping'' for environmental protection standards and regulation.
Mr. President, Nevadans have the most at stake with the development of the Yucca Mountain standard.
The health and safety of future generations of Nevadans depend on a fair, protective standard.
There are, however, broader issues at stake here as well.
The integrity of our system of federal environmental protection is at risk.
The fundamental reason the EPA was created was to consolidate and coordinate federal environmental protection in a single agency.
Reassigning important standard setting authority to a more sympathetic agency on the whim of a particular industry could well mark the unraveling of decades of progress in protecting our environment.
Should the nuclear power industry have its way with Congress, and succeed in its efforts to undermine the EPA's long standing authority to set standards, who is next? Should we start down a path of returning to the days before 1970, when environmental protection was a hit or miss proposition for the federal government, leading to events such as 1969 fire near Cleveland, where sparks from a passing train actually ignited the polluted Cuyahoga river? I hope not.
Some in Congress continue to claim that Nevadans' concerns are foolish, that the shipment and burial of 80,000 metric tons of high-level nuclear waste are nothing to worry about.
Anyone subscribing to that line of reasoning should talk to some of the downwinders suffering genetic and cancer effects from our atmospheric nuclear testing; or the thousands of children suffering thyroid and other problems due to the 1986 Chernyobl accident; or the thousands of DOE workers at the Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Paducah, Kentucky, now agonizing over the effects of 40 years of mismanagement and coverup.
As Secretary Richardson has said about the situation in Paducah ``we weren't always straight with them in the past.''.
Mr. President, the Senate has plenty of work to do this fall.
Only one Appropriations bill has been signed into law, and the fiscal year ends this week.
Inportant measures that most of us agree need to pass, such as the Bankruptcy bill, or the FAA reauthorization, sit on the calendar awaiting action.
The nuclear waste bill reported by the Energy Committee is an environmental travesty which stands no chance of being enacted, and I hope the Majority leader will come to the conclusion that we should not waste any more of the Senate's time on this irresponsible special interest legislation.
END