RadWaste, With Haste II
January 22nd, 2008 at 4:08 pm
For those of you brave and patient enough to dig deeper into this whole West Texas radioactive waste mess, it’s worth taking a closer look at some of the changes Waste Control is making to its license. (For background, scroll up to the previous post.)
Waste Control describes its comments as “alternative language … to ensure that [the draft license] more closely reflects the information and analyses” in their application.
“The WCS license application contains extensive hydrological, geological, meteorological, and ecological data from the site that have been collected over an approximately 15-year period to describe area and site characteristics. These data have undergone an exhaustive review by the staff of the TCEQ.”
Translation: We don’t like all these extra requirements and think our proposal is just fine.
The company wants the right to dispose of more radwaste than TCEQ is allowing in the draft license. The company proposes increasing or removing the cap on both volumes and radioactivity for each category of waste. State compact waste - all the leftovers from nuclear reactors in Vermont, Texas and future states - is bumped up from 2.3 million to 2.54 million cubic feet and radioactivity increased from 3.89 million to 4.68 million curies. Radionuclides with half-lives less than 30 days appear not to count towards the radioactivity cap.
WCS strikes the 30,000 kilogram cap on source material – uranium and thorium - altogether. “There is no regulatory requirement or health and safety issue that would suggest the need for this license condition,” WCS writes by way of explanation for the change.
The company alters the 350-gram limit on super-sensitive “special” nuclear materials plutonium and Uranium-235, both of which can be used to fuel a nuclear weapon. The reason for the 350-gram cap is to prevent “unity” – the threshold at which a critical mass is achieved and a chain reaction can occur. WCS’ rewrite would allow the company to dispose of as much special nuclear material as they could get their hands on. The 350-gram cap would only apply to “aboveground possession.” Once it’s in the ground, sky’s the limit. (McDonald, the WCS spokesman, said that there are no regulatory limits for below-ground limits.)
The license as drafted by TCEQ stipulates that failure to comply with any of the conditions of the license is a violation and “is grounds for enforcement action.” No problem. Mutatis mutandis - WCS circumvents this obstacle with a clever change of “is” to “may.” Now a violation “may” be grounds for enforcement action. This may seem like a small edit but the difference between “is” and “may” could be the difference between punishing potential lawbreaking and letting WCS slip away through a loophole.
Other changes would leave open the possibility of future disposal of high-level radioactive waste, uranium mill tailings, spent fuel, and hazardous and toxic wastes – this seems to include just about all radioactive material known to man, including the “hottest” stuff out there. One curious alteration in this vein: WCS removes a prohibition on disposal of depleted uranium. It just so happens that WCS’ next door neighbor in New Mexico is the National Enrichment Facility, a first-of-its-kind uranium enrichment plant currently under construction. The facility will enrich uranium for use in nuclear power plants and the byproduct of this process will be… depleted uranium.
The operator, Louisiana Energy Services, has pledged not to dispose of the depleted uranium in New Mexico, raising the possibility that they may be planning to send the waste a few hundred feet into Texas and the hands of WCS. Asked by the Observer if this was the plan, McDonald said that the license does not cover commercial waste outside the “compact” states of Texas and Vermont. The compact can be amended to include other states though there is no indication that that is in the works.
TCEQ’s version of the license contains detailed indemnity clauses, suggesting that the regulatory agency is trying to pass any liability for accidents or future environmental disasters completely onto Waste Control. TCEQ even wants to be held harmless for “Any claim against the TCEQ relating to its… regulatory enforcement or lack of enforcement of this license.” They also don’t want to take the legal rap for “acts or omissions of gross negligence of any TCEQ officer or employee.” This is clearly not an agency that thinks very highly of its own enforcement capabilities.
In the WCS version, the company sheds almost all of TCEQ’s language, narrowing the indemnification so that it appears to only apply to the federal portion of the landfill. Keep in mind that the current law allows WCS to walk away from the radwaste facility at the end of its 35-year operating life. TCEQ asks for $25 million from WCS in “financial assurance sufficient to address unplanned events that pose a risk to public health, safety, and the environment” after the disposal facility is closed. WCS makes a counteroffer - $2.1 million. This amount “reflects the amount included in our application,” WCS writes in their comments to TCEQ. McDonald added that “the law is very clear that liability” for future problems lies with WCS. The financial assurance, he said, “guarantees [WCS’] obligations.”
One of the big fears of the TCEQ staff has been that soil-like bulk waste, if not placed in containers, could be picked up by the wind and dispersed, contaminating “half of West Texas” in the words of more than one staff member. The license, however, generously allowed WCS to bury some bulk material as long as it was kept separate from the stuff in containers and only contained short-lived radionuclides.
Apparently that’s not good enough for WCS. First they expand the definition of “bulk material” to include rubble, construction debris, pipes, and other “dry, discrete solid objects.” Then they strike a requirement that this material be stored in containers until stability of the material can be proven. Commingling of soil and rubble/debris would be allowed. They suggest removing the ban on radionuclides with half-lives over 35 years. They ask to quadruple the allowable radiation dose at 30 centimeters from 25 to 100 millirem per hour. (The average annual dose Americans receive is 360 millirem.) WCS has long argued that the facility design, especially its depth of 30-120 feet, will prevent dispersion of radioactive soil out of the hole. EPA-recommended modeling has confirmed this assertion, McDonald said.
The number of changes WCS is proposing to its license are too numerous to catalog here. Whether TCEQ will let WCS punch its own ticket remains to be seen. But with these two different licenses in hand, we shall certainly be able to tell if the company succeeds in ghostwriting their own permit.
January 24th, 2008 at 10:23 am
One of the things not addressed at all in the permit is the issue of tumbleweed control. At the Hanford nuclear waste facility in Washington, they have spent millions of dollars checking for and destroying radioactive tumbleweeds. Here’s a couple of links for more information:
http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/033001/tec_124-1679.shtml
http://www.radioactivist.org/NPRTumblestory.pdf
Just last year, tumbleweeds blown by the wind wrapped around a valve on an oil tank at Hanford, and caused a 400 gallon oil leak.
http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/799422/oil_spill_caused_by_tumbleweeds/index.html
And of course, several years ago, they had radioactive fruit flies there.