Allen Benson Quotations

When you want to stop something you'll find every excuse you can to question it, but what are the alternatives (to Yucca Mountain)? ... Nobody is coming up with any realistic or valuable alternatives.

We did intensely study this, and when you stand on Yucca Mountain the cinder cones are moving away. The youngest one is 80,000 years old so if any new ones develop they're moving south and away,

We're giving credence to these because we referred them to Inspectors General of Department of Energy and the Department of the Interior,

simply instruct the contractors what they should be looking at for the coming year and come back to us with what their plans are.

We're in the process of putting a new organization in place, which is going to take a few weeks. There will be significant organizational changes.

We have a letter from the director of the U.S. Geological Survey to the Energy Department supporting the site recommendation. It supports going ahead.

We're not sure we need the full 20 years. All we're getting out of it is the right of way to be able to build the rail line.

We found these issues and we made them public, so I don't know what kind of cover-up others are talking about, ... And in a Congressional hearing the principal architect of the e-mails testified under oath that he falsified no information (about the mountain or its safety).

Everything in there is old. This is a safety issue.

Even though you get five to six inches of rain each year and we're in a desert environment, some amount of moisture will penetrate the mountain and over the millennia we might want to make sure we'll use a drip shield,

Everything would be convoyed safely, ... We've been moving this kind of material around country for a very long time, and we're confident in our ability to safely transport this material.

Everybody gets different guidance depending on what their function is,

And we did look at it, ... We studied it, characterized it and in February of 2002 the (DOE) secretary recommended it to the president who recommended it to Congress.

Yucca Mountain was recommended by the U.S. Geological Survey because of the attributes the site possesses including a stable geology, a deep water table, no one lives there, it's a desert environment and ... it's remote,

Yucca Mountain was formed 10 to 15 million years ago, and it's not a volcano; it's the result of volcanoes,

This is a tough response, when you tell a contractor they no longer have the authority to submit work they are contractually required to submit because they are not following procedure.

This is the most overseen project in the history of the government. We're trying to make the organization better fit the mission to develop a license application and submit it to the NRC for a permanent deep geological repository at Yucca Mountain.

It's an evaluation of what we are doing and a question of should we be doing it.

The farm lab helped me a lot with a job now. Learning to irrigate and working on the tractors in the farm lab helped in my job last summer. Without Mr. Fink and that experience, I would have had no idea.

In an earthquake, the motion is at surface, ... Back in '92 there was a 5.6 or 5.7 earthquake not far from Yucca, and there were scientists in a tunnel near the epicenter and they didn't even know an earthquake happened.

In terms of these e-mail issues, a couple of people were involved in venting, if you will, and my comments to the press at the time when all this came out, were this was water cooler chatter,

Clearly that's going to be a major part of the program. It's going to be a flatter organization. You go to a more direct relationship with the management. ... We're also going to eliminate the distinction between East and West.

All facilities will be built to withstand a 6.5 level earthquake at Yucca Mountain, and the University of Nevada will monitor seismic activity,