Huffington Magazine Issue 61 | Page 69

BILL CLARK/CQ ROLL CALL/GTTY IMAGES KENTUCKY’S KING rushed to Paducah for a tour of the facility. McConnell and Bunning requested a Government Accountability Office report on the situation at the plant, but the agency returned a scathing indictment of the senators’ own inaction. Since 1993, McConnell had served on the Senate Appropriations Committee -- the panel responsible for the government’s final funding decisions -- but according to the GAO, the Department of Energy hadn’t been given the money it had requested to clean up the Paducah site. “The funding available for cleanup had been much less than requested [by DOE],” the April 2000 report reads. “Cleanup at the site, including the removal of contaminated scrap metal and low-level waste disposal, was delayed because of funding limitations.” All told, there were roughly 496,000 tons of depleted uranium in storage, according to the GAO, along with 1 million cubic feet of “uncharacterized waste.” Drum Mountain had swollen to 8,000 tons of life-endangering scrap and stood nearly 40 feet tall. The feds suggested that the plant, so utterly compromised, could become its own spontaneous threat. “Some of HUFFINGTON 08.11.13 this waste and scrap material poses a risk of an uncontrolled nuclear reaction that could threaten worker safety,” the report reads. With a wave of press coverage focused on the Paducah plant, McConnell did something that few in Washington would expect from the fierce Obamacare opponent: He worked to pass what amounted to a new entitlement that allowed plant workers over age 50 access to free body scans and free health care. The program also provided $150,000 lump sum payments to McConnell speaks next to a tower of 20,000 pages of health care rules and regulations at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Md., in March 2013.