The White House considers itself to be fighting for a principle, that the president ought to be able to receive open and candid advice without interference from others. That they should be able to make public policy decisions free from politics.

There's no question that the president and the vice president receive tons of private information to help them develop policy. Either one-on-one people come to see them, or from their staff after people come to visit with their staff.

But here it's a different situation. The president of the United States set up an energy task force to come up with an energy plan for the nation. He assigned as the head of that Cheney. You remember the bucket of tears they cried when Hillary Clinton was coming up with the healthcare policy and she was forced to turn over her records. You can't speak out of both sides of your mouth on this. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

It's totally different from information they receive to come up with the policy for Afghanistan. It's different than the policy as to what he's doing with the Cabinet and those meetings -- those are private. We understand that. But this is different, this is a task force.

An argument I've heard you make is that the action of shipping nuclear waste across the country -- requiring maybe 100,000 trucks going through 42 states -- is dangerous. But others argue that tons of high-level, highly radioactive nuclear waste have been shipped cross-country without incident. Have there been incidents that alarm you?

There are a number of examples of environmental groups following these trucks, knowing where they are, and they easily could have done something mischievous or something very bad to these trucks. Frankly I can't think of any incidents with high-level nuclear waste but we recently had one with low-level nuclear waste in West Wendover on the Utah-Nevada border. A truck was leaking nuclear waste; it just happens. And that example is one we know about; there are a number we don't know about because they keep 'em quiet. There was a serious incident they found with nuclear waste being shipped from West Valley, N.Y. So the answer is yes, I know of incidents.

And go back a few short months ago. There was a tunnel in Baltimore that caught fire and burned for a week. Trains go through that; that was a train tunnel. This will be 77,000 spent fuel rods going through the country. With Sept. 11, with terrorists looking for targets of opportunity, this will be thousands of trucks and thousands of trains and thousands of targets of opportunity. We know you can pierce one of these canisters with a military weapon, one that an individual can fire.

But is keeping the waste where it is necessarily any safer? There are 131 nuclear power plants in 39 states. "More than 161 million people live within 75 miles of one or more of these sites," Abraham said, arguing that it would be better to secure the waste in one location than in 131 different locations.

This guy's a Harvard Law grad; he should go work on his script a little better. He uses this argument, that we've gotta have it in one site instead of 130. But we're always gonna have those 130 sites - they're still producing energy! They're not going to go away. This is simply foolish.

Another thing these people, these Harvard lawyers, say is, "Well then what should we do with it?" Leave it where it is. These are dry cast storage containers that are easy to secure, and cheap to secure for the next 100 years. I'm confident that then the great scientific minds of America can determine something over the next few decades as to what to do with the spent fuel rods.

The one question you haven't asked me is, am I afraid of White House retribution. Of course I am but you do what you have to sometimes.

One last one then. Your state went for Bush in 2000. You think that will happen in 2004?

Not a chance. And we've got one more electoral vote now. He doesn't care; he doesn't need Nevada anymore -- I guess that's the reasoning. But he would not be president without having carried Nevada.

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