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December 24, 2009

By MATTHEW L. WALD
New York Times

WASHINGTON – When experts on power grid reliability asked themselves recently how a cleaner energy future would look, seven of eight regional councils imagined how their systems would work with 10 percent wind power.

Only one, representing the southeastern United States, chose a radically different option: doubling nuclear power capacity.

Thirty years after the American nuclear industry abandoned scores of half-built plants because of soaring costs and operating problems like the Three Mile Island accident, skepticism persists over whether the technology is worth investing in.

Yet the pendulum may be swinging back. The 104 plants now running have sharply raised their output, emboldening utilities across the country to make a case for building new ones.

And the industry is about to get a big boost. In the next few days, the Energy Department plans to announce the first of $18.5 billion in loan guarantees for building new reactors.

The guarantees were authorized in a bill passed by Congress in 2005.

It has taken four years for the department to set up a system to evaluate applications and determine how much the borrowers will be charged for the guarantees to compensate the government for taking the risk.

Industry experts think the first guarantee will go to the Southern Company to build two units at its Vogtle nuclear plant near Augusta, Ga.

The money will flow amid a national credit squeeze and intense jockeying among the nation’s wind, solar, geothermal and nuclear sectors. Each is trying to cast itself as an ideal "clean" energy option as the nation moves toward reining in the carbon dioxide emissions linked to global warming.

All of these sources could potentially benefit under a cap-and-trade system that is being considered in Congress as part of climate change legislation. Such a system would set a ceiling on carbon dioxide emissions and allow trading of pollution permits, handicapping the carbon-intensive coal and natural gas sectors.

Historically Republicans have been more enthusiastic than Democrats about nuclear power. So as the climate bill winds its way through the Senate, some Democratic members are seeking to add to the $18.5 billion in loan guarantees for the nuclear industry to attract Republicans and some industrial-state Democrats. (The House version passed in June, 219 to 212.)

Some of the foremost Congressional climate change campaigners are unenthusiastic.

Representative Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who has hounded the nuclear industry for decades over safety questions and who is a sponsor of the House bill, does not favor direct aid to the nuclear industry. He argues that a cap-and-trade system would give the nuclear sector the only boost it deserves.

If that system goes into effect, he said, nuclear power "will be able to compete more effectively in a new marketplace. How effectively they can compete is going to be the question."

Others see combining a cap-and-trade system with a nuclear aid package as a sensible tactic to get Congress to address environmental problems.

"One can argue it certainly is bringing about an unusual marriage of interests here," said Philip R. Sharp, an Indiana Democrat who served in the House of Representatives from 1975 to 1995 and led a House committee with jurisdiction over the electric system.

"It is one of the potential paths for actually getting real action and real legislation", said Mr. Sharp, who now heads the nonpartisan group Resources for the Future.

Economic issues have helped scramble alliances on the state and local level, too. Because new reactors create so many jobs and big tax revenue, the Democratic governors of Maryland and Ohio are working hard to get them built in their states.

State legislatures from Louisiana to South Dakota and local governments from Port Gibson, Miss., to Oswego, N.Y., are also on record favoring new reactors.

Peter A. Bradford, a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who is now vice chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, questions the wisdom of direct aid to the industry.

Unlike cap and trade, in which industries buy and sell the right to release carbon dioxide in a market-oriented system, he said, the loan guarantees finance projects that the private sector deems too risky.

The government would be "picking some winners and bestowing a lot of taxpayer support on them," he said.

By Mr. Bradford’s count, of 28 reactors that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission now lists as planned, half have had major delays, large increases in estimated cost or have been canceled.

If new plants built with government guarantees prove to be a commercial success, the program costs taxpayers nothing; if they prove too expensive to finish or are completed but cannot earn enough to repay the loans, the taxpayer is on the hook.

Complicating the challenge, the forthcoming loan guarantees amount to only $18.5 billion, and the nuclear industry says it needs tens of billions more.

President Obama’s energy secretary, Steven Chu, acknowledged that the sum was small. He said it could finance at most perhaps one plant for each new reactor design, making it hard to determine which design was most practical.

"If I were a power company, maybe one of each would not be helpful," he said. He suggested that the nuclear industry would need to build two or three of each.

But Dr. Chu insists that nuclear power will be an important piece of any climate solution.

"We have a dormant nuclear industry," he said. "We have to start it up in a way that gives the people who are going to make investments the confidence that this is economically viable."

Mindful of the challenges posed by global warming, some environmentalists are cautiously evaluating their positions on nuclear power.

"There is an increasing number of people who have spent their lives as environmental advocates who believe that carbon is such an urgent problem that they have to rethink their skepticism about nuclear power," said Jonathan Lash, the president of the World Resources Institute, who puts himself in that category.

"But there are many people who are passionate environmentalists who are also passionate opponents of nuclear power, and remain so," he said.

Among the foes is Karen Hadden, executive director of the Sustainable Energy and Economic Development Coalition in Austin, Tex., which is fighting a nuclear project there that is in line for a loan guarantee. While she strongly favors carbon limits, she said, she opposes construction of reactors.

She warned that money for solar, wind and geothermal projects could get siphoned off "in these multibillion-dollar projects that may or may not ever get built."

Daniel L. Roderick, senior vice president for nuclear plant projects at GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy, a partnership between General Electric and Hitachi of Japan, said that a year and a half ago, there were expectations that more than 20 units would be under construction by now in the United States. "That number is currently zero," he said.

Nonetheless, G.E. and other companies have invested tens of millions of dollars in plans for reactors they hope to build around the world, including dozens in the United States.

December 15, 2009

Greg Harman
San Antonio Current QueBlog

Over the past few weeks, CPS Energy staffers have been finalizing some new figures on how much energy San Antonio will need and when. And, for anyone who has even casually been following the recent scandals at the City-owned utility, it comes as no surprise that they are significantly different from those trotted out again and again over the summer to support a nuclear solution.

Recently departed General Manager Steve Bartley and other staff members had been warning the community of a power shortfall coming in 2020, one that required the rapid expansion of the South Texas Project nuclear project outside Bay City. The expansion was to take a decade to license and build, and would gobble up, at a 40-percent ownership stake, $5.2 billion of our dollars.

However, in the first redraft of CPS’ Strategic Energy Plan since the spring, Chief Sustainability Officer Chris Eugster told the CPS Board of Trustees on Monday that a new source of power generation wouldn’t be needed until 2023 – that the amount of energy needed has dropped roughly by half.

"It’s really has given us another three years to make that decision," said Eugster. "We are going to seriously have to rethink our generation capacity over the long run."

Also, the power needed in the 2020s won’t be "baseload" power that runs all the time, like nuclear or coal. Instead, gas-fired peaking units that can be cut on and off quickly better suit the need of 2023. Natural gas is a great complement to renewables like wind and solar, as a current cover story in Solar Today, "Texas: The Next Solar Superpower?" points out.

Because of solar’s variability, many grid managers and utility operators expect that new solar installations will need auxiliary natural gas-fired capacity to function as backup firming power, with estimates varying anywhere from 0.5 to 1 MW of natural gas required for every 1 MW of solar power. In this regard, Texas is well ahead of the rest of the country. Over recent decades, Texas has installed a significant capacity of natural gas generators for baseload and peaking power.

…

Much of the natural gas capacity in Texas is underutilized, making it available to provide firming power when solar and wind resources are not available. Developers can then concentrate on building solar farms without also having to build natural gas plants.

However, in a strange twist of data, the reassessment also suggests nuclear expansion is still a better investment than natural gas, by a hair. Eugster said the City would still be able to afford the STP expansion if the ovenight costs were as high as $13.9 billion. That’s without financing. Previous estimates have suggested financing would tack another $3 billion on the total figure.

[In a conversation today, Eugster said natural gas would likely cost in the "upper eights" or around 8.8-cents per kilowatt hour, while nuclear power would be in the "lower eights," 8.2, 8.3-cents per kilowatt hour. "So it’s pretty close," he said, while stressing again that placing a price target on nuclear and natural gas is extremely challenging.]

But the heart of the message was decidedly not pro-nuclear.

"There are issues with the nuclear expansion that we had a hard time modeling," Eugster said. "One is the uncertainty of cost and the future escalation. I mean, what will the final cost of the nuclear plant be? There’s no way for us to model that.

"The expansion timeline is also not well aligned with when this city really needs this additional power. The plant comes online before our projected need. And increasingly, it looks like the lock-in to the long lead-time for the nuclear expansion may prevent capitalizing on new technology or pricing breakthroughs in renewables or energy storage."

CPS has been selling the city the nuclear expansion suggesting it would cost $13 billion with financing, a figure the local environmental community has dismissed from the get-go, placing the figure closer to $17 billion, and later suggesting it could climb to $23 billion.

A new cost estimate from Toshiba, which had been operating by a figure $4 billion higher than the city’s mantra of $10 billion, is due by year’s end. CPS is expected to present the City Council two paths forward – one nuclear, one non-nuclear – in January.

One of the key points of Eugster’s presentation was the value of the time the city has gained before any expensive, involved decision must be made.

"The fact that we can wait five-plus years before a next generation plant is required would allow us to evaluate developments of the renewables, the energy storage, and evaluate the performance of [efficiency]. And the gas option, it’s not a decision we have to make today, it would be a good back-up if renewables or energy efficiency or energy storage don’t play out as quickly as people are saying."

Or, as he told the Current this afternoon: "With nuclear, we’ve got to go now, we’ve got to spend this huge amount of capital which there’s some unknowns about right now. Whereas with the gas option, we’ve got time to wait, and the value of that time to wait is hard to quantify. It’s like you got an option value on a house. There’s some value there to that. You can check it out, you can see if you like it, and you can go ahead and purchase it, and you can walk away."

So it feels an awful lot like the happy ending where we walk away together and follow the decentralized energy strategies CPS officials had been considering putting on ice to make way for nuclear’s cost.

Beyond nuclear, we can gussy up our "smart" grid and advanced metering systems, get our weatherization and renewable energy rebates on steroids, and keep those solar and wind pitches coming from a rapidly developing, pollution-free, low-carbon industry.

Is it too terribly unjournalistic to say "yippee"?

—

Oh, and someone requested we post the CPS investigation report to the Board of Trustees: Here’s the leaked draft version; here’s the sanitized version.

Happy reading!

December 11, 2009

Forrest Wilder
Forrest for the Trees
Texas Observer Blog

After two days of often-contentious hearings, the compact commission postponed a decision on rules governing the import and export of radioactive waste to and from Texas.

The decision to put the vote off for 30 days came this afternoon after dump opponents as well as two commissioners, Bob Gregory and Robert Wilson, expressed concern that the rules were being rushed.

For those of you just tuning in, the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission (try to say that all in one breath) is beginning to tackle the contentious issue of whether to allow Waste Control Specialists, a politically-connected company building a large radioactive waste dump near Andrews, to import radioactive waste from other states.

(Texas and Vermont are the only two states that have an automatic right to bury their radioactive waste at the Andrews dump.)

As commission chairman Michael Ford pointed out they’re only at the point of figuring out how that process will work; decisions about particular import petitions will be made at a later date. Still, Waste Control is eager to speed the process along, telling the commission today and yesterday that the financial survival of the company is at stake.

On the other hand, dump opponent Karen Hadden, executive director of the Sustainable Energy and Economic Development (SEED) Coalition, blasted the proposed language as "an open-ended invitation" to bury waste from around the nation.

Glenn Lewis, a former TCEQ employee, was even more expansive. "I would be reticent, I would be hesitant, I would be circumspect about allowing anyone to put radioactive waste in that hole," he said. "It will leak."

Lewis was one of several TCEQ employees who quit the agency over the upper management’s decision to issue licenses to Waste Control. As Lewis testified, the technical team reviewing Waste Control’s proposed site had concluded that the dump was perilously close to two water tables and was highly likely to leak.

But criticism from Commissioner Wilson was perhaps more unexpected.

Wilson said that comments made yesterday by Waste Control Specialists CEO Rod Baltzer that the Andrews dump was a "national solution" had upset him.

"I’m not at all sure that the state of Texas… bargained for that in 1993," said Wilson, referring to the year that the Texas-Vermont compact law was passed.

Indeed, Waste Control is already proposing to increase the capacity of the compact portion of their dump almost five times over, from 2.3 million cubic feet to 10.8 million cubic feet. Without a bigger landfill that could take radioactive materials from around the country, Waste Control has suggested they could go out of business.

Wilson said he didn’t appreciate being threatened.

"That puts an ungodly amount of pressure on us," he said.

NOTE: There were some other interesting developments at the hearing. I will have more early next week.

For Immediate Release:
December 10, 2009

Contacts:
Karen Hadden 512-797-8481 Sustainable Energy & Economic Development (SEED) Coalition
Diane D’Arrigo 301-270-6477 Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS)
Cyrus Reed 512-740-4086 Lone Star Sierra Club

Download press release in pdf format for printing.

Austin, TX Today the SEED Coalition, Public Citizen, Lone Star Sierra Club, and Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) called for action to prevent West Texas from becoming the nation’s radioactive waste dump. The Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission is holding a stakeholder meeting today. Texas and Vermont are the only two states in the Texas Compact. Prime on the meeting agenda are rules for importing “low-level” radioactive waste from states outside the Compact to the Andrews County site in West Texas owned by Waste Control Specialists (WCS). The draft import/export rule released to the public yesterday essentially invites with open arms radioactive waste from the rest of the country and possibly the world.

“Strong controls must be adopted now that will prevent Texas from becoming the nation’s nuclear dumping ground,” said Texas State Representative Lon Burnam. “Next session, I will sponsor a bill to close the loophole in the Compact Law allowing any state to dump radioactive waste on Texas without approval by the Legislature.”

“Allowing the eight member Texas Compact Commission, six of whom are appointed by Governor Perry, to approve importation of radioactive waste into Texas is undemocratic,” said Representative Burnam. “Turning Texas into the nation’s radioactive dumping ground so that WCS can make millions of dollars is irresponsible, especially since it will endanger public health and vital groundwater resources for thousands of years to come.”

This won’t be the first time WCS has used its influence to benefit from political decisions. WCS, and owner billionaire Harold Simmons, got state law changed to allow a private company to become licensed for the disposal of radioactive waste, as opposed to requiring disposal by the state.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) technical team reviewing the “low-level” radioactive waste disposal license application unanimously recommended denial of the license because the site was unsafe for disposal of “low-level” radioactive waste. In a rare move, the TCEQ team recommended against issuing the license. Profit won out over safety concerns when TCEQ Commissioners issued the license anyway, ignoring its own scientists’ findings.

“All of the TCEQ scientists working on the license determined the geology of the site to be inadequate because of the possibility of radioactive contamination of our aquifers and groundwater,” said Glenn Lewis, technical editor for the TCEQ team that did a four-year review of WCS’ application. “Groundwater is only fourteen feet below the bottom of the radioactive waste dump trenches. Fourteen feet is not an adequate safety margin for a site that is supposed to isolate radioactive waste for tens of thousands of years, but there was pervasive political pressure throughout the entire process to issue a license to WCS regardless of how unsafe the site was.” Three TCEQ employees quit over the decision to issue the license.

Another of these employees was Encarnacion (Chon) Serna Jr., a chemical engineer reviewing several sections of the application, who resigned after it became apparent that the licenses were going to be granted by TCEQ no matter what. Serna indicated “that even after a third (only two allowed by state rule) notice of technical deficiency was granted to the Applicant WCS, the application was still extremely deficient in what it proposed vs. what was required by state rules, not only in the areas of geology and hydrology, but also in the areas of financial assurance, engineering design, operating procedures and radioactive dose rate assessments.”

“WCS’ own data shows groundwater in and near the proposed site,” said Lewis, “If water intrudes into the landfill radionuclides could escape confinement and permanently contaminate groundwater.”

The leakage possibility is not unique to the West Texas site. “All six of the so-called ‘low-level’ nuclear dumps in this country have leaked or are leaking, often costing the states in which they are located millions of dollars,” stated Diane D’Arrigo, Radioactive Waste Project Director at Nuclear Information and Resource Service. “One of the now closed nuclear waste dumps with supposedly ‘impermeable clay’ threatens the water supply downstream and is projected to cost in the range of $5 billion to ‘clean up.'”

The draft import/export rule discusses the so-called “positive fiscal effects” from taking radioactive waste but fails to even acknowledge liability and the possible negative fiscal impacts from clean up costs that would result from radioactive leaks.

“It’s important to understand that when it comes to nuclear power and weapons waste, ‘low-level’ is not ‘low-risk,'” D’Arrigo said. “Much of the waste is dangerous now and stays dangerous for literally millions of years. Unshielded exposure to some radionuclides could kill a person in 20 minutes. Exposure to radiation causes cancer, genetic defects, reduced immunity and other health problems.”

“TCEQ rushed into a risky deal by approving a faulty application to dispose of some of the most dangerous radioactive waste known,” said Cyrus Reed, Conservation Director of Lone Star Sierra Club. “And they’ve done it without giving members of the public who are at risk a chance to prove that the application is faulty. That’s why the Lone Star Sierra Club appealed to the State District Court, asking that a hearing be required.”

“Now WCS wants to make their nuclear waste dump the nation’s radioactive waste dump,” said D’Arrigo. “The dump was only meant to take waste from five nuclear reactors in Texas and Vermont, but if the Compact Commission adopts a rule allowing ‘out of compact’ waste into Texas, the site could take waste from over 100 nuclear reactors, operating and proposed. WCS stands to profit while Texas is stuck with the long term liability and environmental devastation.”

Disposal of radioactive waste is a national and global problem, and all voices need to be heard. Texans aren’t the only ones that could be affected, as the dump is right on the Texas/New Mexico Border. “The residents of Eunice, New Mexico have been shut out of the TCEQ licensing process,” said Scott Kovac, Operations and Research Director with Nuclear Watch New Mexico. “As the closest community to the WCS site, residents of Eunice must also be included in the process.” Eunice is five miles from the radioactive waste dump.

The two parties in the Compact, Texas and Vermont, have expressed a need to dispose of at least 6 million cubic feet of radioactive waste in the next 50 years. Yet this volume, estimated by the Texas Compact Commission, is nearly three times more than the capacity of the site. The WCS license limits the total volume to be disposed at the Compact Facility to 2.3 million cubic feet. “If there isn’t room for Texas’ and Vermont’s waste, how can we even consider importing waste from out of the Compact?” said Eliza Brown, Clean Energy Advocate for the SEED Coalition. “Why should Texas be at risk of becoming the nation’s nuclear dumping ground? The Compact Commission should develop a ‘Don’t mess with Texas’ approach to radioactive waste dumping.”

WCS sought $75 million in bonds from Andrews County taxpayers, which it says it needs to begin construction of the radioactive waste dump. A lawsuit was brought by local residents, challenging the May 9th vote which was paid for by WCS. Until the questions regarding the validity of 90 ballots are resolved the county money cannot be transferred to WCS to begin construction on waste dump.

“Low-level” radioactive waste is defined as everything radioactive in a nuclear power plant except the high-level reactor fuel core. Pipes that carry radioactive water, filters and sludge from the water in the reactor, the entire reactor itself when it is dismantled (thousands of tons of contaminated concrete and steel) can all be dumped. None of the radioactive elements in high-level waste is prohibited from being included in “low-level” waste. In fact, not a single radionuclide is barred from being dumped at the West Texas site.

“We now know how the original licensing process was rushed, with a multitude of unresolved deficiencies and issues,” said former TCEQ engineer ‘Chon’ Serna. “In light of what is currently being considered by the Texas Compact Commission, it is imperative that the old unresolved issues along with the ones that were resolved as adverse to the granting of the license, be revisited, reconsidered, and resolved by an Agency Team and a Team of Experts without the political pressure of legislators and Agency Directors. If unable to resolve these issues or if further studies and investigations determine the existing site is not suited for its ‘low level radioactive waste disposal purpose,’ waste disposal on the existing site should stop immediately, existing licenses should be revoked, and no more licenses or expansions should be granted for this site.”

Texans and safe energy advocates are calling on the Compact Commission to exercise its power and authority to prohibit ‘out of compact’ waste as other compacts have done. The Commission should not allow Texas to become the nation’s radioactive waste dumping ground.

###

Despite its own scientists’ objections, state regulators are greenlighting a massive nuclear waste dump in West Texas.

April 04, 2009

Forrest Wilder
Texas Observer

In February, hundreds of government regulators and businesspeople gathered in Phoenix for "Waste Management ’08," the annual radioactive waste industry confab. Amid the swag and schmoozing, industry insiders appraised the state of their business. The good news: The nuclear industry appears to be rebounding in the United States, providing potentially huge new radioactive waste streams as planned reactors come online. The bad news: The number of landfills for burying low-level radioactive waste is dwindling. One of the oldest sites, in Barnwell, South Carolina, will close to all but a handful of states on July 1. That will leave 36 states, including Texas, with no place to send the radioactive waste generated by their nuclear power plants, universities, hospitals, and companies.

Since 1980, when the federal government delegated to the states the task of dealing with low-level radioactive waste, not a single new landfill has opened. Ten attempts have been made by states to develop one. The congressional Government Accountability Office estimates that the failed efforts in developing sites cost a combined $1 billion.

The industry largely blames public opposition. "We just didn’t get kicked out of South Carolina," said Steve Creamer, CEO of Utah-based EnergySolutions Inc., the company that runs Barnwell. "We got brutalized and kicked out of South Carolina."

Creamer estimated that the United States’ 104 commercial nuclear reactors would generate 117 million cubic feet of waste over their collective lifetimes. Federal nuclear facilities under decommissioning orders will produce millions more. Where will it all go?

A subsidiary of Dallas-based conglomerate Valhi Inc., Waste Control Specialists LLC was in Phoenix to make the case that it was on the verge of doing what no other company has been able to do-license and build a massive radioactive waste landfill.

"Considering our political support, considering our local support, if a new facility cannot be licensed in Texas, it probably can’t be licensed anywhere," said Bill Dornsife, a Waste Control vice president.

By early 2010, Waste Control officials told the conference-goers, the company hopes to begin disposing federal and state radioactive waste at two adjacent Texas landfills in Andrews County. All the company lacks are two final licenses from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. One, known informally as the "byproduct license," would authorize the disposal of 3,776 canisters of radioactive waste from a closed, Cold War-era processing plant in Fernald, Ohio, as well as mill tailings from the Texas uranium mining industry. TCEQ has issued a draft license for the byproduct dump.

The second license would allow the company to bury low-level radioactive waste from federal and state sources, including nuclear reactors, weapons programs, and hospitals. With both licenses, Waste Control could bury more than 60 million cubic feet of waste over the span of 30 years, more than half the volume of the new Dallas Cowboys stadium.

If Waste Control can repel legal challenges by environmental organizations and secure final approval from TCEQ for the second license, its remote site in Andrews County would become the repository for commercial nuclear waste from Texas, and also Vermont as part of a "compact" between the two states. A loophole in state law, however, allows the state compact commission, an oversight board appointed by Gov. Rick Perry, to contract with other states and compacts for waste disposal. "For political reasons, we don’t want anyone to come knocking on the door until we get this up and operating, but I think there are some capabilities there," Dornsife told his Phoenix audience.

Federal radioactive waste, mostly the leftovers from the U.S. government’s atomic weapons program, is the most lucrative of the waste streams contemplated by the company. In 2003, as part of Waste Control-backed state legislation that authorized privatized radioactive waste disposal in Texas, the Legislature granted companies like Waste Control the right to dispose of Cold War-era federal waste as well as waste generated by states.

"[W]e just had to get the state law changed," said Rod Baltzer, Waste Control president, at the conference. It probably didn’t hurt that Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons owns Waste Control through Valhi. Simmons is one of top campaign contributors to the state’s Republican leadership.
The new landfills would join Waste Control’s expanding waste portfolio, all of which are clustered on the company’s 1,338-acre site in Andrews County, near the New Mexico state line. The company’s radioactive waste treatment and storage plant opened in 1997. The license for that facility is "very unique," Dornsife said, because it allows for "unlimited storage time, and we could go to unlimited [radio]activity."

There’s also the hazardous waste landfill. Half of that dump is actually filled with radioactive waste, material the state has deemed "exempt" from radioactive disposal standards. The company’s efforts to broaden the exemptions are ongoing. "[D]isposing of radioactive material at [hazardous waste] pricing is extremely cost-effective," Dornsife said.

In their conference presentations, Baltzer and Dornsife failed to mention the problems the company has encountered with worker exposure to radiation. And while Baltzer admitted that the licensing process has been "brutal," he didn’t detail the rift it has created within TCEQ between scientists and engineers, who stridently object to Waste Control’s plans, and agency upper management that wants to approve the licenses.

In March 2005, Waste Control began processing radioactive waste from the Rocky Flats plant, a site in Colorado that manufactured plutonium triggers for the United States’ Cold War-era hydrogen bomb program. On June 2, 2005, while processing this waste, a worker known in state documents as Number 67 at Waste Control’s mixed waste facility was wounded on his leg by a piece of contaminated metal. The company tested the worker’s urine and feces, and found elevated levels of two plutonium isotopes, as well as americium-241. Later in June, an independent expert determined that the worker had probably inhaled the radionuclides. Over the next few months, as processing of the Rocky Flats waste continued, the investigation expanded to include eight of Number 67’s co-workers. All but one tested positive for low levels of radionuclides, including one employee who hadn’t worked at the mixed waste facility for three years. On September 22, Waste Control management decided to suspend operations at the mixed waste facility and expand the testing to virtually all employees.

In all, 43 individuals had been exposed to plutonium and americium, company testing showed, according to documents uncovered by the Observer. According to Waste Control, a ventilation system wasn’t working properly, allowing plutonium and americium particles to escape into the lunchroom and adjacent hallways.

Waste Control maintains that the radiation exposures were not dangerous. The highest calculated dosage to any employee was "less than 10 percent of the regulatory limits," according to a January 2008 Waste Control report. "We did find a handful of employees that were over our planned exposures; they were below regulatory concern," said company president Baltzer in an interview with the Observer. "We are very fastidious about applying ALARA-as low as reasonably achievable-principles. … We did note that we had some ways to improve our program. Partially as a result of this, we changed out our general manager … We think some of the employees were not as thorough in their conduct, in their operations, as they should have been."

A TCEQ audit of the company’s incident report questioned Waste Control’s dosage calculations and its handling of the situation. Waste Control officials assert that the workers were exposed to plutonium and americium-241 over a six-month period covering the summer of 2005. In contrast, the TCEQ audit, completed in spring 2007, posits that the exposures "might have been going on since 2002, at least intermittently at a minimum." The audit suggests that the company underestimated the number of batches of radioactive waste that were processed. If that were the case, the actual doses might be much higher than company reports indicate.

The audit notes that a preliminary review by John Poston Sr., a professor of nuclear engineering at Texas A&M, "suggested WCS employee doses were … seven times greater than the WCS-assigned employee doses, but still below regulatory [limits]." The agency has declined to release Poston’s complete findings.

The TCEQ audit also criticized Waste Control for waiting months to suspend operations after it learned employees had been exposed. "It is my opinion that WCS management did not act in a timely manner in their decision to suspend operations until the source of the intakes could be identified," wrote Sheila Meyers, a TCEQ chemist who authored the audit report. Baltzer said the company began testing workers as soon as possible, and temporarily closed the facility once conclusive lab results were received.

The radioactive contaminations were in large part preventable, the audit noted. Waste Control acknowledged in a report on the incident that testing employee fecal samples could have caught the exposures sooner. That failure to test may be partly the fault of state regulators. In 2003, the Department of State Health Services dropped a requirement that Waste Control test employees’ feces annually for the presence of radionuclides. Instead, the analysis could be "performed at the discretion of the [company’s] radiation safety officer."

Four male workers tested positive for radionuclides in 2007, according to TCEQ documents. One employee told inspectors in an August 2007 interview that "the air vents at the mixed waste treatment facility had not been fixed completely."

In August 2007, Susan Jablonski, the head of TCEQ’s radioactive materials division, provided her boss, Deputy Director Dan Eden, with a written update on the review of Waste Control’s two license applications. In the memo, which is stamped "confidential," she identified "radiation protection" as one of four major outstanding problem areas. "The radiation protection issues appear not to be under control at the larger site," she wrote. "The apparent loss of control of radioactive materials also impacts the ability to establish true background [radiation] at the site." Background, or natural radiation, is necessary as a baseline so that leaks can be detected.

TCEQ would not make Jablonski available for an interview. The agency did not respond to written questions before the Observer went to press.

The TCEQ hasn’t issued any violation notices to Waste Control for the radiation exposures.

There have been other accidents involving radioactive material at Waste Control’s facilities. In October 2005, two state inspectors visited the site in Andrews to investigate a string of contamination events, including the worker exposures. Their report notes three other "cross-contamination" incidents that had occurred in as many years: one involving tritium; one involving radon gas; and a leakage of americium-241 and plutonium-239 into a septic system. This string of problems "reflects either defects in ventilation scheme or inadequate administrative controls to prevent cross contamination of facilities," the inspectors wrote.

Recently, Waste Control agreed to pay $151,000 in fines to TCEQ for contaminating septic systems on two occasions, and for elevated levels of heavy metals such as arsenic, lead, and mercury at a railcar unloading area.

So far, the accidents have not derailed the company’s activities. Yet stiff resistance from TCEQ personnel in charge of reviewing Waste Control’s proposals has put the company on the defensive. One of the company’s fiercest critics, Glenn Lewis was brought on at the TCEQ’s radioactive materials division to manage any controversies concerning the application. He quickly soured on the process. "It was obvious from the beginning that the enabling legislation was written for the benefit of, and largely by, this applicant," Lewis said. "That raised immediate concerns about how objective a review of the application could possibly be." In December, Lewis left TCEQ after serving 25 years in Texas state government.

In all, three former TCEQ employees who worked on the Waste Control license applications said they left the agency because of frustration with the licensing process. All three came to the conclusion, after years of working on the applications, that Waste Control’s site is fundamentally flawed. "After years of reviewing the application, I submitted my professional judgment that the WCS site was unsuitable," said Patricia Bobeck, a hydrogeologist who worked on the byproduct application. "Agency management ignored my conclusions and those of other professional staff, and instead promoted issuance of the licenses."

Encarnación "Chon" Serna, Jr. an engineer, said he quit in June 2007 when it became apparent that a license for the low-level radioactive waste landfill would be issued despite staff objections. At the end of the staff’s technical review in August 2006, Serna and other staff members decided the application was "very, very deficient" and couldn’t be approved. Nonetheless, TCEQ mangers decided to move forward, giving the company until May 2007 to address some problem areas. "Around that time I started getting the idea that these people are going to license this thing no matter what," said Serna. "I felt that in clear conscience I couldn’t grant a license with what was being proposed."

Serna said that when he left, there were still "thousands of questions in every area of review." For example, he had trouble determining accurate calculations of radiation doses workers might expect to receive when handling soil-like "bulk waste." In 2006, Serna wrote in an internal e-mail that he’d come across 57 scenarios in Waste Control’s plan in which workers would be close to radioactive waste. "I think there could be potential exposures to significant doses of radioactivity," he wrote.

His overarching concern, shared by the other former staffers, relates to the site’s physical location. Serna said he is convinced that the geology of the site is unsuitable for containment of radioactive waste for thousands of years.

That view was echoed in an August 14 memo prepared by two TCEQ engineers and two agency geologists. The proximity of a water table to the disposal site "makes groundwater intrusion into the disposal units highly likely," the four wrote. Their memo stated that "natural site conditions cannot be improved through special license conditions" and recommended denial of the license. The next day, Susan Jablonski conveyed those concerns to Deputy Director Dan Eden, who reports directly to Executive Director Glenn Shankle. Waste Control "states the second water table is no closer than 14 feet from the bottom of the low-level landfill," read her memo to Eden, which is stamped "confidential." A staff analysis, she wrote, "shows that the water table may be closer than 14 feet."

Company president Baltzer told the Observer that the former staffers’ fears are outdated and overblown. Once Waste Control heard that staff had lingering concerns about the groundwater situation, the company began drilling new boreholes and wells to verify that water wasn’t present in or near the landfill. Waste Control has spent $3 million on the drilling and found no water, Baltzer said. "WCS’s license application demonstrates that the site will protect human health and the environment and that water will not intrude into the proposed disposal units under any credible scenario," he said.

In September, the two TCEQ teams working on Waste Control’s applications gathered to rehearse a presentation they would be giving Executive Director Shankle later that day. "The entire gist was to communicate the impossibility of licensing either facility," said Lewis, who resigned in December. "As we were adjourning, [Deputy Director] Dan Eden remarked to [TCEQ attorney Stephanie Bergeron Perdue], ‘We have to find a way to issue a byproduct license.’ This was after an hour-long presentation on why it would be unwise to issue a license for either the byproduct or low-level application."

As staff opposition grew, Waste Control took its case to the agency’s upper management. Lobbyist and attorney Pam Giblin, who represents Waste Control, met with Shankle once in September and twice in November, according to agency records. Baltzer left nine messages for Shankle and four for Eden between July 2007 and January 2008, according to phone logs that reflect only missed calls. Eden met with Waste Control officials at least five times during that period. Former Republican Congressman Kent Hance, a Waste Control investor and chancellor of the Texas Tech University System, paid a visit to Shankle’s office in early November. Cliff Johnson, a principal in Textilis Strategies, an Austin-based firm that lobbies for Waste Control, visited with Shankle in September. Shankle also met with Giblin, Baltzer, and Mike Woodward, a Waste Control lobbyist and attorney with Hance’s law firm, during that period.

The TCEQ higher-ups were in a bind: Their own technical experts had unequivocally recommended denial, and two members of the team had left in disgust. Yet the agency’s managers still wanted to push the licenses forward.

"In late October, Susan Jablonski acknowledged in writing to senior management in the agency that faulty site conditions exist and that they cannot be corrected through license conditions," said Lewis, the former staffer. "What is baffling is that Ms. Jablonski-at the same time acknowledging the inherent impossibility of correcting a bad application-still pledged to support whatever nonsensical recommendation her boss may decide to pursue."

By late October, Waste Control had a draft license in hand for its byproduct dump. TCEQ Executive Director Shankle had chosen to deal with his staff’s objections by adding stipulations to Waste Control’s licenses, including a requirement that the company conduct further studies on erosion, groundwater, and possible fractures. In March, he rebuffed the Sierra Club’s call to rescind the license. A draft license for the low-level landfill is currently being written.