Archive for the ‘News’ Category

June 12, 2010

Shelley Childers
CBS 7 News

Andrews, TX – Two sides clash at a Waste Control Specialist meeting held in Andrews today, drawing crowds of supporters and protesters for the future dumpsite of low-level radioactive materials, just 30 miles west of the city.

Today the Compact Commissioners were meeting to discuss the wording of the import rule, as it stands now 36 states and possibly other countries will be allowed to dispose of their low-level radioactive materials at the Waste Control Specialists site, but protesters argue health and safety is an issue.

"We’re not technically against the people personally, but we’re against the company and what they’re trying to do, and what they want to bring," said protester and vice president of the group Promote Andrews, Elizabeth Wheeler.

In a project that is more than 15 years in the making, WCS and the City of Andrews is hoping to soon be importing low-level radio active waste from around the country, but not every resident supports the idea.

"That’s very scary that they’re wanting to bring this hazardous material into my county, via trucks and trains and bury it here, when there’s potentially aquifers and other hazards at risk," said Timothy Gannaway, the secretary of Promote Andrews.

"Water is money in West Texas, and if there were water on that site, somebody would be irrigating with it or using it for drinking water and it’s just not potable water," said Russell Shannon, a resident who supports the radio-active waste site.

Officials say they have been studying the geography of the land for over a decade, in preparation for this, and Andrews Mayor Robert Zap points out, much of our medical research produces nuclear waste.

"For instance, Alzheimer’s disease, one of our most accurate diagnostic tools is nuclear, without it where are we going to go to?"

That waste has to be disposed of somewhere, but wheeler says she fears human error. "History does repeat itself, there has been spills and accidents and I’m not saying it’s their fault, it’s just how it is."

"We’ve got to look at it from a big picture perspective, we need to find a solution to disposing of this in a proper way and we believe Andrews has the answer for that," said Andrews City Manager Glen Hackler.

By Cierra Putman
NewsWest 9

ANDREWS – A heated debated in Andrews County continues as once again as supporters and protestors of storing radioactive waste locally face-off.

"At the beginning, I was for it because I thought hey new jobs and everything," Promote Andrews Protestor, Francisco Salciao, said.

For Salciao and his fellow protestors say hundreds of temporary jobs and 75 permanent ones just isn’t enough.

At least, not if it means Waste Control Specialists can bring radioactive waste into Andrews County.

"This waste is going to be trucked and trained from all across the United States into our home town and that’s very scary," Timothy Gannaway with Promote Andrews, said.

The protestors fear water contamination, even though Waste Control Specialists said that won’t happen. Most of Andrews sided with the company.

"I think it’s a sad thing for them to come and I think they just want to stir up trouble," WCS Supporter and Employee, Quincy Cronenworth, said. "The government watches over it, they have lots of licenses they have to get, so I know it’s environmentally safe."

A sea of green WCS supporters packed a disposal Compact Commission Meeting to support the company’s plan.

Around town, more signs of support as could be seen as WCS supporters who couldn’t make it to the meeting showed their support with actual signs. They put them on the back of cars, in front of houses and even outside of businesses.

Still, protestors didn’t care they were outnumbered.

"Waste Control Specialists spent a lot of time and money to make this town look like it’s in favor of them," Gannaway said. "We feel that’s very misleading. If you look at our signs, we made our own signs, we made our own shirts, this is definitely a grassroots movement. Waste Control Specialists is a corporate movement from a billionaire in Dallas who owns the facility."

WCS supporters say the benefits outweigh the risks.

"It’s an industry that has to be monitored, but with proper oversight, with proper safety precautions and regulatory issues, we think those things have been mitigated," Another WCS supporter, said.

But until the plan is finalized, Andrew’s minority will keep fighting against the majority.

06/15/2010

By BETSY BLANEY / Associated Press
Dallas Morning News

A commission overseeing low-level radioactive waste disposal in Texas has withdrawn and will revise proposed rules that could allow 36 other states to send nuclear waste for burial near the New Mexico line.

Bob Gregory of the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission said Monday the panel voted unanimously Saturday to pull the proposed rules as initially published and repost them with some amendments and revisions.

A representative from the Texas Attorney General’s Office told the commission during a Saturday meeting it could not change the rules then because there was nothing on the agenda to allow it, said Chuck McDonald, spokesman for Waste Control Specialists, the company that operates the waste site about 30 miles west of Andrews in West Texas.

The law requires the commission to republish the rules with the changes and then consider them at a future meeting, Thomas Kelley, a spokesman for the attorney general’s office, said in an e-mail.

"Significant changes were made to the rules and the law requires re-publishing under those circumstances," Kelley’s e-mail stated.

The commission’s agenda Saturday did not include a vote on the rules that were published in February.

It was not clear Monday when the new rules would be published in the Texas Register. Texas law requires the rules be posted for 30 days, followed by a minimum 30-day comment period, before a vote can be taken.

Gregory said he had as many as 30 pages of revisions he wanted considered, and another commissioner wanted to add an amendment.

"I’m pleased that additional time is being given for a much more thorough discussion and consideration and revisions that were certainly needed, in my opinion," he said.

If adopted, the rules would allow low-level material from 36 states’ nuclear power plants, hospitals, universities and research labs to be buried at a site near the New Mexico border.

McDonald said Waste Control Specialists wants the commission to do its job.

"We had no objection to the delay," he said Monday.

Karen Hadden, executive director of the Sustainable Energy and Economic Development Coalition, said she was pleased. Her group opposes letting states other than Texas and Vermont bring nuclear waste to West Texas. The proposed rules would change a pact initially made between Texas and Vermont.

"Basically, we gained a delay," Hadden said. "I think it’s a good thing. I hope they take their time. These rules are really important."

Hadden and other opponents of the huge dumping ground say the waste will pollute groundwater and harm the environment. Waste Control Specialists contends it’ll be safe, and many local residents applaud expansion as a way to bring more jobs and prosperity to the West Texas scrubland.

Proponents in Andrews outnumber those against the low-level dump site, which has not yet been built. Approval of its design and precise location is pending from the state environmental regulators.

___

Online:

Waste Control Specialists LLC: http://www.wcstexas.com

Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission: http://www.tllrwdcc.org

Texas Commission on Environmental Quality: http://www.tceq.state.tx.us

Nuke Free Texas: http://www.nukefreetexas.org

June 9, 2010

Environmental News Service

SAN ANTONIO, Texas, June 9, 2010 (ENS) – San Antonio is creating a research institute devoted to sustainable energy with a $50 million infusion of capital from the city-owned power utility, CPS Energy.

Located on the campus of the University of Texas at San Antonio, UTSA, the new institute will investigate sustainable technologies applicable to the local area.

The creation of the Texas Sustainable Energy Research Institute was announced Tuesday by Mayor Julian Castro together with the CPS Energy Board of Trustees and UTSA officials.

"This is a bold step," said Mayor Castro, who serves as an ex-officio member of the Board of Trustees. "Ratepayers will get a more efficient utility, the city will get the economic development value of robust research and development in San Antonio, and the university will spiral ever more quickly to Tier One status."

The agreement calls for CPS Energy to invest up to $50 million over 10 years in the institute. The first two years’ investment will be $3.5 million, from funds currently allocated to research and development.

Future funding will be developed by the scope of the projects defined by the partnership and subject to annual approval by the Board of Trustees.

"The strength of the agreement with UTSA comes from the partners working together to set the agenda," said Charles Foster, chairman of the Board of Trustees.

"CPS Energy gets localized research, and UTSA gets a real-world laboratory by partnering with the community-owned utility. We will need this kind of information as we change with the energy industry," Foster said. "If we can help to develop it in our own community, based on our customers and our weather, then the information better serves our customers."

CPS Energy officials called it a strategic move that will help the utility invest ratepayer money wisely as utilities across the country are working to implement sustainable technologies.

"As we make the transformation from a traditional utility to one that is focused on providing competitively priced power in a sustainable way, we will look to the institute to help us develop a secure smart grid and to understand how our customers will interact with that new technology," said CPS Energy Acting General Manager Jelynne LeBlanc Burley.

UTSA President Ricardo Romo said, "We welcome this partnership with CPS Energy as it will not only make San Antonio one of the nation’s leaders in sustainable energy innovation, but also provide a significant boost to UTSA in its steady growth toward a research intensive university of Tier One status."

Energy policy expert Les Shephard, who this year joined UTSA from Sandia National Laboratories, will head the new institute.

"In the last two years UTSA has been aggressively hiring experts in the area of green energy research and this new agreement will accelerate the acquisition of top quality talent to San Antonio," said Mauli Agrawal, dean of the College of Engineering at UTSA, who was instrumental in persuading Shephard to join the university.

Shephard says the wealth of energy resources present in Texas makes San Antonio an ideal place for energy-related research and development, attractive to experts from around the nation, and poised to become a green energy research center.

In addition to CPS Energy, the San Antonio Water System has a conservation track record, Shephard observed. Other local academic and research entities with green programs include the Southwest Research Institute, as well as the Mission Verde Center, a city partnership with the Alamo Colleges and Texas A&M University’s Texas Engineering Experiment Station.

The San Antonio-based Southwest Workers’ Union, which campaigns for clean energy and environmental justice, has concerns about the selection of Shephard to head the new research center.

Because the low income communities of color the union represents are often the most impacted by dirty energy production in San Antonio and across the United States, the union’s climate justice organizer Marisol Cortez says, "We welcome UTSA and CPS’s joint efforts to research and implement alternatives to the city’s historical reliance on polluting industries like coal, oil and gas, and nuclear energy."

"Also for this reason," Cortez told ENS, "we have serious concerns about UTSA’s choice of Les Shepard to head the Texas Sustainable Energy Research Institute, as the former vice president of the Energy, Security, and Defense Technologies Division at Sandia National Laboratories."

"Given the legacies of environmental racism promulgated by the nuclear industry – from the bombing of the Western Shoshone nation to the sickness and death caused by uranium mining in the Southwest – Shepard’s selection unfortunately suggests UTSA and CPS’s very corporatized, militaristic, and technocentric vision of ‘green energy,’" she said.

Cortez says the union is "hopeful that the University of Texas at San Antonio will also organize a center on campus for community-based environmental justice research, bringing together students, faculty, and community members in collaboration on solutions that are as socially just as they are environmentally sustainable."

Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2010. All rights reserved.

06/12/2010

By BETSY BLANEY
Associated Press/Dallas Morning News

Residents worried about environmental damage from nuclear waste and those eager for a way to bring jobs to the region spoke Saturday to a commission considering a plan to bury nuclear material from 36 other states in West Texas.

Rose Gardner, who lives just over the state line in Eunice, N.M., told the commission she found the plan "very scary." Gardner lives about 5 miles from where material from nuclear power plants, hospitals, universities and research labs could be buried. She told the commission she worried about her water well and pointed to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as the kind of disaster that could happen.

"We all know it’s the human error" that can’t be predicted, said Gardner, 52. "I want you to remember, I’m just across the state line."

The plan calls for workers’ clothing, glass, metal and other materials used at nuclear facilities to be disposed of at a site 30 miles west of Andrews. Currently, facilities store the waste at their own sites.

Opponents say the huge dumping ground will pollute groundwater and harm the environment. Dallas-based Waste Control Specialists, the company that runs the site, contends it’ll be safe, and many local residents applaud expansion as a way to bring more jobs and prosperity to the West Texas scrubland.

One longtime Andrews resident said the city did an independent study on the site’s geology and found it adequate.

"We believe in the project, the company," said Russell Shannon, who’s lived in Andrews for 28 years. "Don’t let rumor and innuendo overshadow fact and evidence."

Another resident said talk of Waste Control Specialists duping uninformed county residents was wrong and people understood the issues.

"We’re not a bunch of cowboys out here," private engineer and Andrews resident Chad Tompkins said.

A small group of protesters carried signs before the meeting at the town’s high school. One read, "Think about our future."

Most of the about 150 people who attended the hearing were residents of oil-rich Andrews County and nearly all wore green T-shirts the town’s chamber of commerce provided that read, "We Support WCS".

Proponents in Andrews outnumber those against the low-level dump site, which has not yet been built. Approval of its design and precise location is pending from the state environmental regulators.

The Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission, which includes six members from Texas and two from Vermont, had been scheduled to vote Saturday on a proposed rule that would have allowed 36 other states to bury low-level radioactive waste near Andrews. But two weeks ago, several commissioners, both from Vermont and Texas, expressed concern about hearing public comment and voting at the same meeting.

One said he was concerned a vote was being rushed.

"This is a big deal worthy of careful consideration," said Bob Gregory. "I wanted to make sure we had plenty of time to discuss."

A date for the commission’s next meeting has not been scheduled.