RadWaste Plan Inches Forward
March 18th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
Yesterday, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality issued a “revised” draft license to radioactive waste outfit Waste Control Specialists. The permit would allow Waste Control to bury about 1.17 million cubic yards of “byproduct” waste - mostly uranium mill tailings and radioactive leftovers from the Cold War - in a landfill at its Andrews County facility in West Texas. (Background here.)
The license is virtually unchanged from its previous iteration, despite voluminous comments filed by Waste Control as well as the Sierra Club and eleven New Mexico residents opposed to the project. TCEQ executive director Glenn Shankle rebuffed the protestants’ calls for a public meeting and rejected out-of-hand their criticisms of Waste Control’s proposal. Shankle argued that conditions on the license “increase the overall safety” of the radioactive landfill.
Cyrus Reed said the license, even with the conditions imposed, can always be amended. “Once you say go, it’s hard to say no,” Reed said.
Agency staff have warned that the landfill could be situated dangerously close to two water tables. In August 2007, two state geologists went so far as to write to their bosses that the proposed landfill did not meet the requirements of state law.
“[H]ydrogeologic uncertainties and unknowns and modeling that shows water encroachment into the byproduct material landfill shows that the application lacks the requirements to demonstrate compliance with the rules” governing byproduct materials, they wrote. Waste Control has said that recent borings conducted at the site have proven that water is not anywhere close to the proposed landfills.
Waste Control sought to strip out a number of license conditions that would require further extensive study of the site’s geology and hydrology, but the TCEQ executive director rejected almost all the proposed changes. Waste Control also asked TCEQ to allow for disposal of “bulk waste,” soil-like stuff that state engineers worried could escape the landfill and contaminate the surrounding area. The executive director preserved the ban on such waste in the license.
Waste Control had also asked TCEQ to replace whole sections of the agency’s environmental analysis with text written by their own experts. The agency’s analysis raised questions about the presence of water in the proposed landfill and criticized the proposal for being inconsistent and incomplete in spots. However, the executive director decided to stick to his staff’s analysis.
On balance, it seems Waste Control won this round. Their shoot-for-the-moon strategy of trying to get TCEQ to tailor the license exactly to their liking failed, but they still got a license. The company certainly declared victory.
“This is a great accomplishment for our company and we are pleased that the Executive Director and his staff have recommended the issuance of the license to the TCEQ Commissioners after an exhaustive and thorough review of our application and our site,” said Rodney A. Baltzer, President of WCS, in a press release. “This license will allow us to safely dispose of the 3,776 canisters of by-product material received from the Fernald, Ohio site remediation currently in storage at our site as well as provide a more economical disposal facility for uranium miners in Texas and New Mexico.”
Meanwhile, the Sierra Club and the other protestants will have to hold out hope for a contested case hearing. The three Gov. Perry-appointed commissioners will decide soon whether opponents get a shake at overturning the permit in a hearing.
Late Update: A reader pointed out in an email that the other pending Waste Control license, for low-level radioactive waste, does allow for disposal of soil-like bulk waste. The same potential problems with wind dispersal of radioactively-contaminated soil would apply to the low-level landfill as the byproduct dump. Rod Baltzer, Waste Control president, told the Observer today that their modeling shows that a person standing in the middle of the byproduct area during a wind storm would receive a dose of radiation far below the legal limit.
March 23rd, 2008 at 5:34 pm
[…] shortfalls, Texas is gallumping along the path to opening a new national “low-level” radwaste dump in West Texas in spite of dubious site analysis, and the Department of Energy is on the brink of […]