U.S. Reps. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and John Shimkus (R-IL) toured the San Onofre Nuclear Generation Station (SONGS) on Friday and discussed how to resolve ongoing issues surrounding the storage of nuclear waste.
Issa invited Shimkus, the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Environment Subcommittee, to tour SONGS. More than 3.6 million pounds of nuclear waste is being stored there indefinitely near the coastline, a freeway, a military installation and a railway.
“Southern Californians have waited too long for the federal government to uphold their promise to take, and safely store, this nuclear material,” Issa said.
“The time for delay is over. It’s a privilege and honor to have Congressman Shimkus here in our district to see SONGS first-hand and hear local concerns on this critical issue. By bringing other lawmakers to our district, to educate and allow them to see the problems we face here locally, it’s my hope we can inspire action and the buy-in we need to advance a solution,” Issa said.
Issa recently introduced the Interim Consolidated Storage Act, H.R. 474, to allow the government to designate temporary, consolidated nuclear storage until a permanent solution at the Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada is completed.
“In Congress, I’ll continue working on common-sense solutions to nuclear storage that ensure the federal government upholds the promise it made to ratepayers and gets this waste safely, and securely removed from our communities as quickly as possible,” Issa said.
Shimkus said the federal government’s failure to take possession of spent nuclear fuel has nearly doubled the costs for American taxpayers, which now totals approximately $30 billion.
“This number will continue to rapidly increase until the federal government fulfills its promise to local communities and ratepayers to permanently dispose of this material,” Shimkus said. “This unnecessary burden weighs even more heavily on communities where used fuel continues to linger in short-term, temporary storage.”
Shimkus said he would continue to push for a comprehensive solution to nuclear waste management that would move spent nuclear fuel to a permanent disposal site at Yucca Mountain in a timely manner.
Yucca Mountain has been under consideration as a site for the geologic disposal of used nuclear fuel and radioactive waste since the early 1980s.