Wasted in West Texas
August 21st, 2008 at 5:28 pm
For four years the geologists at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality have struggled to answer a few basic questions about Waste Control Specialists‘ proposed radioactive waste landfills: How close will the buried radioactive waste be to the groundwater? What is the likelihood that the waste will come into contact with water over the lifespan of the dumps? And most important, has Waste Control proved that the radioactive material - all 30 million cubic feet of it - can be safely contained for tens of thousands of years, as the law requires?
After reading most of the voluminous environmental assessment released last week by TCEQ (a heroic task, if I do say so myself), the answers to those fundamental questions - again, four years into the process - still seem inconclusive, at best. And, on the balance, the potential for contamination looks worse than before.
What the agency specialists have determined is that two water tables “appear to be” within feet of the dump. One of the water tables is currently “everywhere beneath the bottom” of the proposed landfill and as close as 14 feet. Worse, because rainfall is expected to increase in the future, modeling shows that the groundwater is likely to expand into the disposal cells where the radioactive waste is contained, according to the assessment.
Tellingly, recent data submitted by Waste Control now show that several wells “previously dry now contain several feet of water” after a period of only slightly above-average rainfall. In TCEQ’s estimation the dry line - the boundary separating dry soil from wet - may be several thousand feet closer to the dump than previously thought. Nonetheless, the assessment makes clear that TCEQ is still uncertain exactly where water exists in relation to the dumps or what may happen in the future. Maybe everything’s hunky-dory or maybe the radioactive dumps will be a disaster. They just don’t know.
Nonetheless, the agency still saw fit to issue Waste Control a draft license. Their solution - if one can call it that - is to add “conditions” to the license. One of those conditions would require Waste Control to move the federal waste landfill fifty feet away from the dry line and make it ten feet shallower. Glenn Lewis, a former TCEQ employee who quit in disgust in December, said the decision to shrink the landfill was announced last year by then-Executive Director Glen Shankle, apparently without consulting the technical staff. “They don’t know where the water is,” Lewis told the Observer in March. “They haven’t made the applicant definitively assess where the water is so this was their strategy – we’ll just make it a little smaller, that ought to make it a little bit safer. There is no data in existence that justifies those decisions.”
Another license condition would allow for a 100-feet “buffer zone” around the landfills where the company could monitor for water seeping into the radioactive waste. Detection of water, the assessment states, “would trigger cessation of waste disposal operations and immediate notification of the Executive Director.” And then what? TCEQ is prepared to give Waste Control the green-light on building what is expected to become a de facto national repository for low-level radioactive waste and then cross their fingers and hope nothing goes wrong.
The environmental report also makes it clear that Waste Control’s hazardous waste dump, which has been open since 1994, is itself radioactive. Half of that dump - 450,000 cubic yards - is composed of waste containing radioactive material - 20,000-plus curies of tritium, cesium, radium, thorium, uranium and americium. The Department of State Health Services, which oversaw Waste Control until 2007, never required Waste Control to monitor whether these radioactive wastes are getting into the groundwater, the report notes. This must be - what? - Texas’ millionth regulatory failure. The health department licensed a hazardous waste landfill that’s turned into a radioactive waste landfill but somehow forgot to require the company to monitor the radiation.
The existence of radioactivity in the hazardous waste facility makes it difficult to establish the natural radioactive background at Waste Control’s property. As the reports notes, “there have been events of elevated radioactive measurements at the site,” including a leak of tritium in 2001 and the contamination of a septic system in 2005 with plutonium and other radionuclides.
The health department did require Waste Control to monitor for chemicals leaching into the groundwater. In 2000, according to the environmental assessment, “positive results were found for many of the constituents.” Amazingly, Waste Control doesn’t provide any explanation for the contamination. And there’s no indication TCEQ has asked for it.
More to come…
August 22nd, 2008 at 10:06 am
TCEQ is corrupt. People should be going to jail.
August 22nd, 2008 at 11:10 am
those red clays up there around andrews do have a good amount of radioactivity to them. next time you go over, try to check out injection well where oilfield norm wastes are shot back into the earth. where? who knows. fascinating business.
the tceq’s handling of this wcs license has been horrendous. really too awful to blame on incompetence. which leads one to the conclusion that those hefty campaign donations are paying out big time for simmons y co.
anyway, keep up the good work on this vitally important story.
August 23rd, 2008 at 2:16 pm
CNN’s commutator Glenn Beck said during August 8, 2008, interview with EX-CEO of Shell oil, John Hoffmeister (when refering to the proposed radioactive dump site in Nevada) Beck said: it could be accumulated and stored in an area about the size of a high school gymnasium. And Hoffmeister immediately agreed. http://www.glennbeck.com/content/show/2008-08-08/
I guess they don’t count these wastes: radionuclides, as mentioned in this article, that accumulate to vast amounts and remain as deadly to living organisms for time unimaginable. There must be a better way to boil water.
August 27th, 2008 at 12:00 am
google Harold C Simmons “Waste Control Specialists‘