Truth in Employment Act of 2005

Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the Safe Storage of Radiological Materials Act of 2005 to prevent sealed radioactive sources, which can be used to create ``dirty bombs,'' from getting into the hands of terrorists. This bill is similar to S. 1045, the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Act, which I introduced in 2003.

Since September 11, 2001, the Congress has faced the challenge of anticipating where the next attack on the United States will come from and in what form it will come. It is important to weigh where to invest precious security resources, knowing everything can't be protected. Many vulnerabilities deserve serious attention. Some can be addressed with relative ease.

Thousands of unwanted sealed radioactive sources are currently held by the private sector, research institutions, and medical laboratories where these sources are generally unprotected and accessible. An April 2003 report I requested from the Government Accountability Office, GAO, entitled ``Nuclear Proliferation: DOE Action Needed to Ensure Continued Recovery of Unwanted Sealed Radioactive Sources,'' stated that ``if these sealed sources fell into the hands of terrorists, they could be used as simple and crude but potentially dangerous radiological weapons, commonly called dirty bombs.'' Most experts agree that it would not require much scientific expertise or funding to cobble together a dirty bomb from radioactive material. In other words, the required materials are accessible and the assembly is relatively rudimentary.

The GAO report focused on greater-than-class-C, GTCC, sealed sources. GTCC radiological sources are the ``high end'' of the continuum of low- level radioactive waste. Class A, B, and C wastes can generally be disposed of at existing commercial disposal facilities. But wastes that exceed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's criteria for Class C, known as greater-than-class-C wastes, are potent enough that they cannot be disposed of at existing facilities. While GTCC wastes are not as dangerous as high-level radioactive waste and therefore are not considered the highest security priority, they are the most potent of low level waste and necessitate progressively more stringent disposal requirements.

The Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Amendments of 1985, P.L. 99- 240, required the Department of Energy, DOE, to provide a facility for disposing of all GTCC radioactive waste, including GTCC sealed sources that are no longer utilized by their owners. GAO found that little to no work had been done to designate a permanent disposal site. Although DOE has said that the facility will be up and running by 2007, it seems unlikely as they have only just begun the necessary environmental impact statement process.

In 1999, DOE created the Off-Site Source Recovery Project, OSRP, to recover unwanted GTCC sealed sources and temporarily house them at the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory. According to GAO testimony before the Senate Energy Committee in September 2004, approximately 10,000 GTCC sealed sources from about 160 sites across the U.S. had been recovered to date. However, approximately 8,000 sources still remained in

insecure facilities at the time of the hearing.

The job is not done, but the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the division within DOE responsible for the U.S. Radiological Threat Reduction, USRTR, previously the OSRP, has made great strides. Since I first introduced S. 1045, the Low Level Radioactive Waste Act, in May 2003, the prioritization of off-site recovery of GTCC sources has heightened. DOE received a $10 million supplemental for the program in 2003 and the President's fiscal year 06 budget proposes funding the USRTR at $12.75 million, up 69 percent from the fiscal year 05 enacted level of $7.54 million.

Earlier this month, NNSA called to let me know it intended to remove 100 sources of cobalt-60, which is GTCC, from the University of Hawaii.

The University had been trying to get DOE, the owners of the material, to dispose of the sources for years. The radioactive material was used in an irradiator and loaned to the University back in the 1960s for agricultural research. I am grateful that NNSA stepped up its recovery of unneeded radiological sources and helped to relieve the burden of guarding potentially dangerous material from the University administration.

The progress made by NNSA, while appreciated and laudable, is nonetheless a first step. Without the designation of a permanent disposal facility for GTCC waste, DOE will run out of temporary storage space. The Department already encountered problems finding a place to store strontium-90, cesium-137, and plutonium-239, all GTCC sources that have unique storage requirements. A permanent disposal facility that can accommodate all GTCC waste must be identified.

The Safe Storage of Radiological Materials Act of 2005 would require DOE to report to Congress on the current situation and future plans for disposal alternatives for GTCC radioactive waste and the cost and schedule to complete an environmental impact statement and record of decision on a permanent disposal facility for GTCC radioactive wastes. My bill would also require DOE to provide Congress with a plan for the short-term recovery of GTCC radioactive waste until a permanent facility is available. This legislation parallels the recommendations of the April 2003 GAO report, and I believe enactment of this bill is critical to securing sealed sources of nuclear material.

Twenty years is too long to wait for an agency to do its job. I urge my colleagues to support this important piece of legislation.

I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I commend the leadership.

I rise to address the Senate on the subject of sexual predators. We have certainly had our fill of these people who prey on children in the State of Florida. The Nation has recently joined Florida in mourning the deaths of two young girls murdered by registered sex offenders. In March, an attacker walked in to--

Certainly.

About 5 minutes.

I thank the distinguished Senator from Oklahoma. I know this is a subject that he is quite concerned with. The Nation was gripped with the news of this sexual predator who walked into the unlocked home of a 9-year-old, Jessica Lunsford, in Homossassa, FL, took her from her bed--I want the Senator from Oklahoma to listen to the emotion in my voice. He walked into her unlocked home, took her from her bed, raped her, and then buried her alive. The man who is charged is a registered sex offender, previously convicted of molesting a minor, but law enforcement had lost track of him. In fact, he was living within 150 feet of Jessica Lunsford.

To add insult to injury, he was working at an elementary school.

Unfortunately, it did not stop there. About a month later, 13-year- old Sarah Lunde was abducted from her home in Rushkin, FL, and she was murdered. Her confessed killer is her mother's ex-boyfriend, who is also a convicted sex offender.

In our State alone, we have over 30,000 registered sex offenders, and there are more than 300,000 nationwide. The Bureau of Justice Statistics has provided data showing that 70 percent of all the men in prison for a sex crime were men whose victim was a child.

In 2003, the Justice Department published a report on recidivism rates of sex offenders, and it has produced some disturbing statistics. The Department of Justice tracked 9,691 male sex offenders released from 15 State prisons, including Florida. They tracked them for a 3- year period and found that 40 percent of the sex offenders who re- offended did so within the first year, and within 3 years of their release from prison, 5.3 percent of those sex offenders were rearrested for another sex crime. Is this beginning to tell us a story? Half of the sex offenders tracked in this study included men who molested children, and within the first 3 years of their release from prison, 3.3 percent of these convicts were rearrested for another sex crime against a child.

In the wake of the two recent tragedies in Florida, of Jessica Lunsford and Sarah Lunde, the State legislature passed a law that will provide tougher sentences for child sex offenders, and aid law enforcement in effectively monitoring those sex offenders. This law will require sex offenders, released back into our communities, to wear a bracelet that will have a global positioning system track them.

I applaud the initiative by our State, and I believe now there ought to be an appropriate Federal response to be supportive of the States and local governments that want to address this problem. The technology is there, but it is expensive. To be effective, tough laws on these sexual predators of children must be properly funded, and I believe it is worth properly funding them to protect our children.

Today I am introducing this bill, the Sexual Predator Effective Monitoring Act, which will provide $30 million in grants to States that establish programs under their State law to get tougher on child sex offenders released back into a community and to get tougher on them with more effective monitoring and tracking. This bill directs the Attorney General to award grants to those States to assist them in carrying out programs to outfit sexual offenders with an ankle bracelet that will track them using global positioning systems.

In the first year, I am suggesting that this bill offer $10 million in grants. In the second year, $20 million, and then we would have to come back and readdress the issue. The Attorney General then would be directed to issue a report so we could go on with future extension of the bill. There are no silver bullets to stop these sexual predators from preying on our children, but I believe tough laws, such as the new Florida statute, are going to go a long way in preventing these sexual offenders from reoffending.

Nine-year-old Jessica Lunsford's confessed rapist and murderer was living only within 150 feet of her home, but law enforcement officers did not know where he was because he failed to notify them of his changed address. Law enforcement also did not know he was working in a nearby elementary school, nor did the school know they had a registered sex offender on school property.

GPS monitoring systems, when properly used, will assist law enforcement in knowing where these child sex offenders are and preventing them from going into restricted areas like elementary schools. We owe it to our children to do all we can to make sure that we keep them safe. That is why I am introducing this bill today.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the Truth in Employment Act, a bill I previously introduced in the House of Representatives to stem the harm done to companies by salting, a union tactic that is causing material economic damage to small businesses everyday in this country.

There is a basic disagreement over the definition of salting. While union supporters and the NLRB have defined the term as the ``placing of union members on non-union job sites for the purpose of organizing,'' it has been widely documented that the true motivation of many salts is simply to increase the cost of doing business for non-union contractors, regardless of the wishes of the employer's bona fide employees.

Salting is much more than someone seeking employment for the purpose of union organizing. It is an attempt to interfere with business operations, harass employees, and cause economic harm through illegal activities and frivolous legal complaints against employers. Union organizers who fail to convince employees to organize will use salting to shut down non-union companies, often going to extreme lengths, including preventing deliveries to job sites and destroying building supplies.

In my own State of South Carolina, salting has resulted in the loss of hundreds of jobs. In Sumter, South Carolina, the Yuasa Exide battery plant was targeted by a union.

Union salts infiltrated the plant, and when employees there did not unionize, the union retaliated by sabotaging product, causing work slow downs, making verbal threats and threatening phone calls, and putting nails in people's tires. Union leaders threatened to shut down the plant and they did just that. Six hundred and fifty people were laid off because the Yuasa Exide plant could not afford the increased cost to

the business of defending itself and its employees from the union salting campaign. Yuasa Exide, which was the first tenant in Sumter's industrial park, had been there since 1965 and provided high-tech, good-paying jobs in a rural area, was forced to close its doors because of salting.

The impacts of salting are felt by many. Companies see increased costs from having to defend themselves against labor relations complaints as well as lost hours of productivity from having to fight these charges. Consumers are impacted by salting when they experience increased costs and higher prices. Moreover, Federal agencies spend untold sums to investigate claims that are later found to be without merit, forcing taxpayers to effectively subsidize union activity.

To put it bluntly, salting is a job killer. At a time when we are working in Congress to enact policies which will spur job growth and ensure future economic prosperity, salting abuses stand directly in the way of these goals. We can no longer allow American jobs to suffer at the hands of Washington labor bosses.

To prevent salting abuses from causing more harm to employers, I am introducing the Truth in Employment Act which amends section 8(a) of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) to make clear that an employer is not required to hire any person who seeks a job in order to promote interests unrelated to those of the employer. This bill in no way infringes upon any rights or protections otherwise accorded employees under the NLRA. Employees will continue to enjoy their right to organize. The bill merely seeks to alleviate the legal pressures imposed upon employers to hire individuals whose overriding purpose for seeking the job is to disrupt the employer's workplace or otherwise inflict economic harm designed to put the employer out of business. This bill in no way infringes upon any rights or protections otherwise accorded employees under the NLRA, or any other employment statute.

I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, in Montana, when someone does something to hurt someone else, they make it right. Not just because it is the right thing to do, but because in this State we shoot straight and take responsibility for our actions that's why I'm working to bring some of that Montana ethic to Washington to get the Federal Government to make amends for actions that have caused too many Montanans great pain and suffering.

Nuclear testing in Nevada during the 1950's threw blooms of radioactive Iodine-131, I-131, high into the atmosphere. Those who were affected are sometimes referred to as ``Down Winders'' because the wind carried the poisonous iodine north to Montana where gravity finally kicked in and the radioactive material settled to the ground. It eventually got into the milk supply--one of the primary sources of Iodine 131--and disproportionately affected milk drinkers. And who drinks milk? Children and babies, who are the most vulnerable in society.

Iodine-131 is absorbed by the thyroid--the organ of the body that uses iodine to produce important hormones. It can take between 20 and 40 years, but eventually the damage caused by Iodine-131 manifests itself as thyroid cancer. I've had cancer, and I understand the physical, mental and emotional pain that follows this terrible disease. I know the pain, and it is time that the government made right the harm it has caused to people in my State of Montana.

In 1990, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act or RECA was signed into law. This measure provided financial compensation for victims living downwind of the Nevada Test Site to the tune of $50,000 per person. The law covered select counties in Nevada, Utah and Arizona. Later, this Act was amended to include compensation for uranium miners in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

However, Montana, with 15 of the 25 counties with the highest dosage, Meagher, Broadwater, Beaverhead, Jefferson, Powell, Judith Basin, Madison, Fergus, Gallatin, Petroleum, Lewis and Clark, Blaine, Silver Bow, Chouteau and Deer Lodge, single most affected county in the United States, Meagher, is the only State in the affected region to receive no RECA compensation at all. If that doesn't sound right, it's because it's not.

Montanans have experienced unbelievably high rates of thyroid cancer. Between 1989 and 2003, the national rate of thyroid cancer increased by 38 percent. In that same timeframe, Montana's rate increased by a whopping 127 percent. And yet, Montana is the only State in the region that is excluded from RECA. In 2000, the rate of reported thyroid cancer in Montana was 17.5 times greater than the national rate. And yet, Montana is the only State in the region that is excluded from

Will the Senator yield for a question?

Could I inquire as to how long you would like to address the Senate in morning business.