TCEQ’s Latest Radioactive Move
August 12th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
It appears that more radioactive waste will be dumped in West Texas.
We’re the first to report that Waste Control Specialists, Harold Simmons’ radioactive waste outfit, received a key license today from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The agency didn’t even bother to put out a press release on this important regulatory decision. I learned about it from a Waste Control press release picked up by MarketWatch. To their credit, Waste Control posted the license on their Web site — something TCEQ inexplicably failed to do.
Waste Control has been angling for years to build a national radioactive waste dump near Andrews, Texas. You might remember that TCEQ’s own experts stated in internal memos — and later to the press — that the landfills were “highly likely” to leak into the groundwater. In May, TCEQ issued a final license for one of the landfills, the so-called byproduct rad-waste dump. Waste Control will begin construction of that landfill shortly.
Today, the agency issued what it terms a “final draft license” for the larger and more radioactive of the two landfills - the “low-level” radioactive waste facility. The license as it’s written now would permit Waste Control to dispose of 2.3 million cubic feet of waste from other states and a whopping 26 million cubic feet of federal rad-waste, largely from the Department of Energy’s Cold War-era weapons programs. Those volumes are unchanged from the “initial draft license,” an earlier version which TCEQ shared as a “courtesy” with Waste Control last December. Along with the license, TCEQ issued a voluminous (382 pages) environmental assessment. Sources close to the agency say the TCEQ engineers and geologists have been under tremendous pressure from their bosses to produce a sanitized environmental report.
I haven’t had time to read either the license or the environmental assessment in any detail yet, but one thing did catch my eye. As noted, the issue of whether radionuclides will eventually leak into the groundwater has been a major point of contention. Waste Control has said the “redbed” clays underlying the landfill are virtually impermeable. The staff have pointed out that the company’s own data show that groundwater is within fourteen feet or less of the sides of the landfill. Not too comforting considering the agency must consider the flow of water 50,000 years into the future. The environmental assessment, one would assume, would make a final determination on this matter.
No such luck, it seems.
In the assessment, the author merely notes that “predictive modeling” must be relied upon to “demonstrate” that groundwater will not leak into the dump over the next 50 millennia. The license requires Waste Control to “predict” future hydrological conditions to “assure” that the landfills remain dry. [Italics mine]. Shouldn’t this sort of modeling have been done already? Isn’t the whole point of a regulatory review - especially a gargantuan environmental report — to determine risks before a license has been issued that would allow for more radioactive waste?
More to come.
August 21st, 2008 at 5:28 pm
[…] four years the geologists at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality have struggled to answer a few basic questions about Waste Control Specialists‘ proposed […]