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Research and development activities to support Yucca are permitted. This will ensure that we keep Congress in the driver's seat for nuclear waste policy.

We as taxpayers have put in well over $12 to $15 billion of investment in a repository for high-level nuclear waste... if we're ever to recoup that investment in the future... then we're going to need some money to reopen Yucca Mountain.

Yucca Mountain isn't pretty. And it also isn't large. From far away, the mountain's just a squat bulge in the middle of the desert, essentially just debris from a bigger, stronger mountain that erupted millions of years ago and hurled its broken pieces into piles across the earth.

For nuclear power to have a future, we'll either need more Yucca Mountains or a way to decrease the stuff we put there.

If Yucca Mountain had not been designated as a dumpsite for radioactive waste in 1987, it might easily have become a scenic overlook on the long drive between Tonopah and Las Vegas.

In shuttering Yucca Mountain, Obama makes it extremely likely that nuclear power in the United States will continue its long, slow, and extremely welcome death.

I have unbelievable support among Republicans.

Too many of my Senate colleagues overdid it. They stayed on too long - napping through committee hearings when they should have packed up and gone home.

Our Keystone legislation received strong bipartisan support in the Senate. Although it didn't receive the 60 votes necessary for passage, 56 senators - a majority - voted in favor of the bill. Despite President Obama's actively lobbying against the bill, we still won the support of 11 Democrats.

The House Republican leadership has simply run out of ideas.