Archive for the ‘Toxic Waste Dump’ Category

FEB 2010

By by Laray Polk
D Magazine

How will the Texas billionaire make his next billion? By burying hazardous waste in West Texas.

The windows of the new Winspear Opera House have a name: the Annette and Harold Simmons Signature Glass Façade. Ascending 60 feet, it was designed to create a seamless flow from the exterior park to the interior lobby. It is ironic that a monument to transparency would be made possible by a $5 million gift from a man like Harold Simmons, who, despite his enormous wealth, has managed to conduct his affairs in relative obscurity.

Simmons, 78, rarely grants interviews. He declined to answer questions for this story. The best intel on him comes from two places: an authorized (and thus sanitized) 2003 biography titled Golden Boy: the Harold Simmons Story and a very public, very ugly lawsuit brought against him by two of his daughters in 1997.

Simmons was born in rural Golden, Texas, where he grew up in a shack without plumbing or electricity. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from UT Austin, where he earned a master’s in economics. In 1961, he bought a drugstore across the street from SMU with $5,000 of his own money and a $95,000 loan. Twelve years later, he owned 100 stores that he sold to the Eckerd chain for $50 million.

After that first big payday, Simmons went on to amass a vast fortune by acquiring and selling a variety of companies, including Amalgamated Sugar, Lockheed Corporation, McDermott International, Muse Air, and many others. Simmons is often called a "corporate raider,"though he bristles at the term. In a video produced in 1990 during his effort to take over Lockheed Corporation, he said, "A corporate raider is destructive. That’s not my record at all. I’m a builder."

Today, through his holding company, Contran Corporation, Simmons controls a thicket of private and public companies. The largest subsidiary is called Valhi. Based in Dallas, the publicly traded Valhi, about 95 percent of which is owned by Contran, conducts operations in metals (Titanium Metals Corporation), chemicals (NL Industries and Kronos Worldwide), waste management (Waste Control Specialists), and precision ball bearing slides and locking systems (CompX International). In 2008, the revenues of the companies under the Contran umbrella eclipsed $4.3 billion. As an officer of many of the companies, Simmons took home about $10 million. Forbes pegs his worth at $3.7 billion. That’s down about $3.2 billion from the previous year, though it still puts him at No. 80 on the magazine’s list of richest Americans.

Simmons has been generous with his wealth. He has given away more than $300 million, including a $20 million endowment at SMU and $50 million to establish a cancer center at UT Southwestern Medical Center. But he has used his money in other ways that have drawn decidedly less favorable press.

His NL Industries has been the subject of continuous litigation. The most recent case involves plaintiffs who managed the company that cleaned up NL Industries’ environmental liabilities. They were also minority shareholders. In 2009, a Dallas County jury found NL Industries liable for not honoring contractual agreements and manipulating stock values. The plaintiffs were awarded $178.7 million in damages.

On a more personal level, before he sold out to Eckerd, Simmons and his second wife put their money in a trust for their daughters (he has four, two of which were born to his first wife). Simmons took the unusual step of naming himself the sole trustee, giving himself broad powers to spend and invest the money as he pleased. His wealth grew in those trusts without much attention until 1991, when the IRS began raising difficult questions. As the New York Times put it: "Why were his homes, his jet, even the jewelry his wife wore, accounted for as corporate purchases or expenses? How could he say that all his holdings formed one huge tax-exempt trust when he treated them as properties he still owned, managed, and enjoyed?"

The Times story arose in 1997, after two of his daughters sued Simmons over the way he was managing their trusts. Simmons had tried to restructure the trusts, a process that forced him to, in effect, file suit against his daughters and their children. His third daughter, Andrea Swanson, had just returned home from the hospital with her first baby, who’d been born three months prematurely. Simmons asked his daughter to drop the court papers into the baby’s crib.

The family squabble brought to light that Simmons had broken campaign donation laws. Swanson told the Times that her father gave her $1,000 for each blank political donation form she signed. Simmons said he gave the money not as a quid pro quo but as a way to show affection. In 1993, he was hit with a $19,800 fine for violating contribution limits. Five years later, he settled the lawsuit brought by his two daughters by paying them each $50 million. He no longer talks to them.

Which brings us back to the engine that has driven Simmons to this point. In his Forbes listing, after mentioning how much money he lost in the last year, it says this: "Planning to make it back with Valhi’s recently approved low-level radioactive waste disposal license."

Exploring the implications of that one sentence will reveal Harold Simmons’ real genius. In short, it appears that the "King of Superfund Sites,"as he’s known in some circles, has figured out a way to clean up a radioactive mess one of his companies made in Ohio by—according to some experts—creating another radioactive mess in West Texas. The best part: he’s gotten the folks in West Texas to support the plan and the federal government to pay for it.

Simmons has been generous with his wealth. He has given away more than $300 million, including a $20 million endowment at SMU and $50 million to establish a cancer center at UT Southwestern Medical Center. But he has used his money in other ways that have drawn decidedly less favorable press.

Cadillac Heights is a small enclave south of downtown Dallas, situated close to the Trinity River. About 200 small frame houses, most built in the 1940s, are hemmed in on three sides by various metal industries, a meat rendering plant, and a water treatment facility. Pit bulls roam freely on crowned narrow streets that are thinly paved. From street to yard, there are dirt ravines and no concrete curbs and few walkable sidewalks. The neighborhood floods frequently, evidenced by water lines on the bases of homes and debris clinging to fences.

For years, two lead smelters operated in Cadillac Heights, poisoning the people who lived there. One, Dixie Metals, remained in operation until 1990. It’s now a mounded landfill with a chain-link perimeter fence in the middle of a residential area. The other smelter closed in 1978, but remnants of it remain standing. It belonged to a company now controlled by Harold Simmons, NL Industries.

Peter Johnson, longtime community activist, remembers Cadillac Heights’ recent past: "It was a community that was poisoned; the earth had been polluted. And it stunk. Most of those people were sick with cancer and kidney problems. The children had birth defects. They were poor people. The city didn’t pay attention to their problems. Lead was a part of that community for a long time."

In smelters of the recent past, lead was reclaimed mostly from used vehicle batteries. The lead was melted down in furnaces to arrive at reusable product. The process also produced metallic refuse called slag. The slag and casing debris from the batteries would often be dumped in landfills both on- and off-site. It was also mixed with soil and used for ground cover in areas close to the smelter. In Cadillac Heights, casing debris was used as pavement for driveways.

In February 1997, the state of Texas announced it would fund a cleanup of Cadillac Heights with the possibility of suing NL Industries and Dixie Metals to recover costs. The state entered into negotiations with the companies, and by April, both had agreed to pay for the removal and replacement of lead-contaminated soil from the yards of 57 houses.

But of the neighborhood’s 230 properties, 62 tested for high levels of contamination. The state spent $180,000 to clean up the five properties that the companies claimed did not warrant their attention. The cleanup did not include particulate matter inside homes or contaminated soil in common areas such as alleys and ditches. And what lead remained in Cadillac Heights has no doubt been dispersed by the periodic flooding to which the neighborhood is subjected.

In Lopez, et al. v. The City of Dallas, counsel for the plaintiffs provided ample evidence that the city had continued a policy of discrimination by failing to provide flood protection to Cadillac Heights residents. Despite the significance of the U.S. District Court’s ruling in 2006, the construction of a levee has yet to materialize. According to a city spokesperson, "If funds become available, construction will start in 2012."The city of Dallas presently buys houses piecemeal from the remaining Cadillac Heights residents, the money coming from the 2006 bond election. Once Cadillac Heights is cleared of people and houses, the property will become home to the Dallas Police Academy.

Community activist Luis Sepulveda knows about lead contamination. He was a driving force in getting the EPA to designate part of West Dallas a Superfund cleanup site. To his mind, the prospect of rebuilding in Cadillac Heights causes concern for future occupants. "I’m not sure they’re [Police Academy] aware of what property that is being bought,"he says. "There is so much buried there. It will contaminate the water eventually. What if they [the officers in training] get sick? What if they have respiratory problems?"

Why would Harold Simmons become involved with an operation like NL Industries? He bought the company in 1986, long after the dangers of lead were known and the lawsuits had begun working their way through the court system. The answer, it seems, is that Simmons doesn’t mind a mess if there’s money to be made.

NL Industries’ history is lengthy and layered. In more than a century of continuous business, NL Industries’ operations have involved magnesium, titanium, and zinc; lead pigment and lead-based paint; lead smelters; lubricants and drilling equipment for oil fields; municipal and industrial waste disposal; the enrichment of uranium for nuclear weapons; and the production of projectile weapons using depleted uranium.

NL Industries sloughed off lead operations in 1974, a prescient move that predated the federal ban on lead-containing paint by four years. As litigation against the lead industry largely failed in the recovery of compensation, and titanium dioxide began replacing lead as a paint enhancer, NL Industries landed on its feet. Its subsidiary, Kronos, is currently one of the largest manufacturers of titanium dioxide pigments in the world.

But NL Industries has left a legacy of contaminated sites across the country. According to the company’s annual report from 1994, NL Industries and its subsidiaries, which included Kronos, had "been named as a defendant, potentially responsible party, or both … in approximately 80 governmental and private actions,"with many sites and facilities on the EPA’s Superfund National Priorities List or similar state lists.

While NL Industries’ operations in Cadillac Heights were never designated as a Superfund, another of its operations in Ohio was.

Then one day she got a call from her congressman. He said that three off-site wells had been contaminated, but the Department of Energy was telling everyone they were fine and below dangerous limits.

In early 1985, Lisa Crawford, a full-time working mother, lived directly across the street from an NL Industries operation in Fernald, Ohio, a rural area 15 miles to the northwest of Cincinnati. When she and her husband and 2-year-old son moved into the house six years earlier, they were looking for a quiet country community "away from the blacktop and cement,"as she puts it. The checkered water towers and signage at the facility had given her few reasons to question its operations. A large sign at the entrance of the 1,050-acre site featured an image of a little Dutch boy next to the words "National Lead of Ohio."Dutch Boy paint was a product line of NL Industries.

Then one day she got a call from her congressman. He said that three off-site wells had been contaminated, but the Department of Energy was telling everyone they were fine and below dangerous limits. A year earlier, in 1984, an accidental uranium release from the NL Industries facility had received media attention. The accident, along with the call from the congressman, led the Crawfords and other residents to worry about the facility they knew relatively little about.

Beginning in 1951, NL Industries contracted with the Atomic Energy Commission (then its successor, the DOE) to produce high-purity uranium. The facility made uranium products that were fed to other facilities within the nuclear weapons complex.

NL Industries performed similar work in New York. The facility in Colonie operated as a munitions plant beginning in 1958. In 1984, the New York State Supreme Court closed the facility because of excessive airborne releases of radioactive material. Cleaning up the site took two decades and cost $190 million.

In Fernald, Ohio, the story unfolded in a similar fashion. In 1985, after the accidental uranium release and the contaminated wells, NL Industries’ contract to operate the facility was canceled, and the facility was thrust into a struggle between the EPA and DOE over which agency had authority over operations. The EPA wanted an immediate cleanup of the site; the DOE, however, wanted the facility to remain operational. In 1986, the year Harold Simmons bought NL Industries, a congressional amendment to law required DOE to remediate the Fernald site under a Federal Facilities Compliance Agreement with the EPA. Cleanup didn’t start until 1991, and remediation wasn’t declared complete until 2006—at a total cost of $4.4 billion dollars.

NL Industries’ facilities at both Fernald and Colonie were provided substantial protection by having contracted with the DOE. In 1989, the DOE agreed to pay $78 million to settle claims with the residents who lived near the Fernald facility; the jury had recommended $136 million. The settlement is viewed as significant on two counts: first, it was an admission by the government that a weapons production facilit

y may have harmed nearby residents. Second, the suit had been brought against the contractor, but the government paid, absolving NL Industries of liability.

Crawford, one of the plaintiffs in the case, had initiated contact with the Ohio EPA and Ohio Department of Health soon after the phone call from her congressman. Both agencies provided testing but gave her conflicting advice about whether she should drink from her well. Crawford immediately knew what to do.

"We stopped drinking the water then and there,"she says. But her worries went beyond what she drank. "Every time you have to put your child in a bathtub full of water, you wonder,"she says. "And every time you wash a load of clothes, you wonder. And every time you do a load of dishes in the kitchen sink, you wonder."

Further testing at Fernald would prove that wells in proximity to the NL Industries facility were not the only water sources in Ohio subject to uranium contamination. In 2008, the DOE settled a lawsuit with the Ohio EPA for $13.75 million for radioactive contamination of groundwater, including the Great Miami Buried Valley Aquifer. Ohio officials estimate that radioactive contamination of the groundwater may persist for 100 years.

Fernald, Cadillac Heights, Colonie—NL Industries has, over the years, created quite a mess. As noted, much of that mess was made before Harold Simmons bought the company. But he clearly learned from its history.

In 1995, he bought a company called Waste Control Specialists (WCS), a hazardous waste disposal company. It is now on the lucrative end of Superfund cleanups. In 2009, for instance, WCS buried 390,000 tons of sediment contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, dredged from the Hudson River in Upstate New York. The waste is a result of General Electric Company’s 30-year discharge of PCBs into the water system.

Also last year, WCS buried 3,776 canisters of uranium byproduct waste generated by the NL Industries facility across the street from Lisa Crawford’s house in Fernald, Ohio.

One Simmons company made the waste. The other buries it. And it all comes to West Texas.

Ohio officials estimate that radioactive contamination of the groundwater may persist for 100 years.

Andrews County, in West Texas, is mostly flat and thoroughly punctured with oil and gas wells. For many people, the land offers a hardscrabble life broken into two rotating shifts, crews of six to eight men in F-350 duallys headed out to oil fields or coming back from them. They drive fast, as if by echolocation. Between shifts, the roughnecks spend their time in the cafes of the city of Andrews and at impromptu barbecues and card games held on sidewalks, outside doorways of dusty motels.

Waste Control Specialists is located 31 miles west of Andrews, on the Texas-New Mexico border. The facility sits on a 1,338-acre site, where it is licensed to service a wide variety of projects, from toxic and hazardous waste resulting from Superfund sites to various classes of radioactive waste from DOE cleanups.

How Simmons was able to obtain licenses from the state of Texas to dispose of nearly the full gamut of radioactive waste is more a story of politics and money than one of sound science. Critics have pointed out that the nation’s largest aquifer underlies the site and is in an earthquake hazard zone. As Simmons told the Dallas Business Journal in a rare interview in 2006: "It took us six years to get legislation on this passed in Austin, but now we’ve got it all passed. We first had to change the law to where a private company can own a license [to handle radioactive waste], and we did that. Then we got another law passed that said they can only issue one license. Of course, we were the only ones that applied."

Legislative changes and licensing have been one half of the equation. The other half has been the company’s successful assimilation into the region with little skepticism from residents and local media. Andrews County has one major population center of approximately 10,000 residents, the city of Andrews, and no interstate. WCS promises 60 permanent positions after the construction phase and a facility whose "operating costs will boost the region’s economic activity by about $75 million a year."

Reports in local media have misled residents about the nature of the waste being disposed of. In October 2009, WCS sponsored a tour of its facilities exclusively for local media outlets. At the time, the disposal of the canisters from Fernald was almost complete. Reports of the tour described the canisters from the Fernald site as a product of the WWII war effort. The Odessa American reported that the waste is a "byproduct from ore … used in the Manhattan Project during World War II."And the Fort Stockton Pioneer said, "According to WCS, the Fernald Project is the disposal of 3,776 canisters—20,000 pounds each—containing uranium production waste from the World War II Manhattan Project."

But that’s not true. Jane Powell, DOE Legacy Management site manager of the Fernald Preserve, says, "The waste in the canisters was not produced as a part of the Manhattan Project; the [NL Industries Fernald facility] did not begin operating until 1951. The content of the canisters is the result of Belgian Congo ore that was processed on-site. The ore was very high in radium and radon gas."The ore Powell refers to primarily came from one mine, located in what is now known as the Republic of Congo. Ore from the region has an unusually high concentration of uranium: 35 to 60 percent, compared to about 1 percent or less found in most American-mined ore.

So for whatever reason, the local press around Andrews has reported inaccuracies about material WCS is actually burying. The sort of work NL Industries did in Fernald produced highly radioactive residues, also known as decay-chain products or radionuclides.

Two events facilitated WCS’ ability to dispose of waste from Fernald. First, in 2004, Congress reclassified those residues as "byproduct material."The legislative downgrade of the highly radioactive waste made it possible for a private entity with the proper licensing to dispose of it, an activity formerly off limits to sites not overseen by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And then, in 2008, WCS received its byproduct material disposal license from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ).

A year later, the TCEQ issued WCS yet another license, this one for low-level radioactive waste (LLRW). The license allows WCS to "receive, possess, use, store, dispose, and transfer"three classes of LLRW. Materials covered by this new license include radioactive waste from research, industrial, and medical facilities; fission products from nuclear reactors; and nuclear weapons-related waste generated by federal facilities. The license stops short of the "hottest"waste, such as spent reactor fuel.

Since the beginning of Waste Control Specialists’ bid to obtain licensing for the disposal of radioactive waste, the central question has been whether the site sits atop an enormous water deposit like the one in Ohio that NL Industries polluted. Some experts have suggested that the hydrogeology of the Andrews site is sufficiently complex to halt development for further study. Others have recommended that the site is "irredeemably unsuitable"for the disposal of radioactive waste.

In 1999, the University of Texas’ Bureau of Economic Geology produced a report that reviewed hydrogeological data in Andrews County. It was prepared by Dr. Alan Dutton, who unambiguously called for further study: "Most of Andrews County is underlain by the High Plains Aquifer [Ogallala] … and the presence of this aquifer should be expected to pose a great deal of questions from regulators and the public for licensing a low-level radioactive waste repository. … WCS consultants indicate that saturated groundwater conditions do not occur at the WCS site. Additional scientific data would be needed to confirm or refute this conclusion and address site-suitability requirements for licensing."

The controversy surrounding the presence or absence of the Ogallala Aquifer at the WCS site is ongoing because there is no means for establishing consensus between state and federal agencies that deal with mapping. So far, the TCEQ and WCS have been able to dominate the discussion on the boundaries of the Ogallala and other hydrogeological features of the site.

In 2009, Lubbock’s NewsChannel 11 interviewed David Barry, EPA spokesperson for Region 6. When asked about the boundaries, he replied, "Yes, the facility [WCS] does sit above the Ogallala Aquifer. It sits on the southern end of the aquifer."But strangely, in a phone interview a few months later with D Magazine, Barry seemed to reverse his opinion, saying, "It is the agency’s position that the WCS site is not above the aquifer. A portion of the site sits on top of the Ogallala Formation, a non-water-bearing part of the Ogallala."

WCS’ position statement on the aquifer (posted at savetheogallalaaquifertruths.com) claims: "In the last 18 years, WCS … [has] spent tens of millions of dollars to verify the subsurface properties of western Andrews County and, as a result, have further delineated the boundaries of the Ogallala Aquifer. As a result of the data developed from these efforts, the Texas Water Development Board [TWDB] remapped the Ogallala Aquifer in late 2006 to definitively show that the boundary does not extend to WCS’ property. The current State of Texas aquifer maps show a more accurate depiction of the proper location of the aquifer."

In other words, WCS says its data convinced the TWDB to redraw the boundaries of the Ogallala. But the TWDB denies that it used WCS’ data. "The TWDB technical staff initiated the change,"says Leslie Anderson, the board’s spokesperson. "The impetus for the change was work on a groundwater model that included the Pecos Valley Aquifer. Our revisions were not based on WCS’ data. The change was based on our modeling work, past TWDB boundaries, and the USGS [U.S. Geological Survey] boundary."Anderson adds that the changes reflect "the boundary between two aquifers. When we changed the boundary for the Pecos Valley Aquifer, it also affected the boundary for the Ogallala Aquifer."

So it’s not the Ogallala that underlies the WCS site; it’s the Pecos Valley Aquifer. The revised hydrology maps, in fact, show this.

When D Magazine asked WCS about the presence of the Pecos Valley Aquifer under its site, spokesperson Chuck McDonald first replied, "I don’t understand the question. There is no aquifer beneath the site."He then offered to review the maps and call back. Later, McDonald explained: "The area where WCS is located is part of the Pecos Valley system. However, that does not mean that there is potable water at the site. The nearest water underneath the site is a brine formation, the Dockum, and it’s separated by 500 feet of red-bed clay."McDonald added, "Those regions designated [on TWDB maps] as aquifers doesn’t mean they have water underneath. … If you drill a hole [at WCS], there is no water there."

McDonald was then asked if the Dockum, a minor aquifer, is hydraulically connected to other aquifers. He responded, "I don’t know. I can’t answer that question. … Keep in mind, the site has been one of the most characterized sites there has been. A great deal is known. That is why we are where we are."

Andrews County, according to the TWDB revised maps, is underlain by four aquifers. In addition to the Dockum, there are three major aquifers: Ogallala (or High Plains), Pecos Valley (or Cenozoic Pecos Alluvium), and Edwards-Trinity Plateau. The TWDB and USGS websites both state that the Edwards-Trinity Plateau Aquifer is hydraulically connected to four major aquifers, including the Ogallala, and several minor aquifers, including the Dockum.

To recap: first the boundary dispute involved one aquifer under the site. Then the revised maps showed it was another aquifer. Then WCS said no, it was actually a third, and it was briney. But both the state board in charge of aquifers and the USGS say there is interchange among the aquifers. If there is hydraulic communication between aquifers in Andrews County, then disputes over the boundaries of the Ogallala Aquifer at the WCS site are beside the point.

WCS spokesman McDonald disagrees. He says the matter has been settled. "The TCEQ oversight has been intense. Every step of the program has been well documented and thorough. It has been extremely closely scrutinized for years and years,"he says. "We must accept that the state has done its job."

But there are questions, too, about how the state did that job.

To obtain final approval for both licenses, WCS endured a five-year review process. A TCEQ team comprising scientists, engineers, and a technical writer reviewed permit applications. Many times, the team required WCS to produce more data or resolve inconsistencies in previous answers.

But then as now, the final decision to grant a license rests with three TCEQ commissioners who are appointed by the governor. And Simmons has been a major campaign contributor to Governor Rick Perry. Registered donations put the amount at $620,000. (It should be noted that Simmons gives generously to many Republican causes and candidates. In the 2004 election cycle, he gave $3 million to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which helped defeat John Kerry by calling into question his service record in Vietnam.) During WCS’ application process, three members of the eight-member review team quit: engineer Encarnación "Chon"Serna Jr., geologist Patricia Bobeck, and technical writer and team spokesperson Glenn Lewis.

Lewis, the only one of the three who would speak on record, says professional advisories regarding the unsuitability of the site were ignored by upper management in the rush to grant licenses. The team’s concerns largely centered on the proximity of the WCS site to two aquifers and the high possibility of radioactive waste leaking into groundwater. "Issues about the unsuitability of the site were never limited to concern about the Ogallala,"Lewis says. "They were first and foremost about any groundwater present at the site. Any groundwater at the site is unacceptable. Water to a radionuclide is like the Autobahn. It’s a very fast path."

In 2008, the TCEQ commissioners voted 2 to 1 to grant WCS a byproducts materials license. Commissioners Buddy Garcia and Bryan Shaw voted in favor, and Larry Soward voted against. Soward said at the time that a hearing should be allowed to fully air arguments regarding the safety of the site. In 2009, the commissioners voted 2 to 0 on the LLRW license, expanding WCS’ customer base. Commissioners Garcia and Shaw voted to approve the license. Soward abstained. Less than a year later, Soward stepped down from his post.

TCEQ executive director Glenn Shankle, who served as the liaison between the review team and the commissioners, left his position shortly after the issuance of the byproduct material license in May 2008. Records obtained by the Texas Observer reveal that Shankle had several meetings with WCS officials, attorneys, and lobbyists during his tenure. He was visited at his office at least once by Kent Hance, a WCS investor and chancellor of the Texas Tech University System. Six months after leaving TCEQ, Shankle became a lobbyist for WCS.

If things go as planned, Simmons’ nuclear waste dump in West Texas will exist on a scale that is hard to imagine.

There is one more element of Harold Simmons’ business plan, a flourish that shows his real genius: he might actually get the citizens of Andrews County to loan him money to develop his waste disposal site. In a May 2009 bond election, Waste Control Specialists won the right to borrow $75 million from the county. The election was decided by just three votes (642 for, 639 against). The argument made by WCS was that credit markets had dried up, and the money was needed to keep construction on pace. With the county getting 5 percent of WCS’ revenue (and the state another 5 percent), WCS estimates that the county this year will receive $3 million to $4 million. The bonds are in limbo right now only because two sisters, Melodye and Peggy Pryor, have filed suit in El Paso contesting the election.

Finally, it appears Harold Simmons may benefit from a bit of good luck. Despite giving $2.8 million to the American Issues Project in the 2008 election cycle to fund attack ads linking Barack Obama to William Ayers and the Weather Underground, Simmons will likely benefit from Obama’s initiatives. To date, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 has allocated the largest direct federal contracts to the DOE. The DOE will use $6 billion in federal stimulus money to clean up sites within the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. Radioactive materials retrieved from those cleanups will need off-site locations with the proper licensing for permanent disposal.

If things go as planned, Simmons’ nuclear waste dump in West Texas will exist on a scale that is hard to imagine. Waste Control Specialists is currently licensed by the state of Texas to accept up to 57 million cubic feet of low-level radioactive waste from federal sources. Waste Control Specialists has the space to expand its facility to more than 20 square miles.

Research support for this story was provided by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

May 22, 2011

Nick Lawton
KWES NewsWest 9

ANDREWS – More and more truck traffic coming to Andrews has sparked the now controversial proposed truck reliever route debate there.

The project planning was started back in 2007 and is now poised to take off this year if the funding comes through.

The 13-mile route circling the city will have two lanes going opposite directions for large trucks to travel with a narrow turn lane in the middle.

It’s meant to keep them off of the main city streets.

"We’ve had a 60-80% increase in truck traffic in Andrews in the last five years," Andrews City Manager, Glen Hackler, said. "That means about 1,000-1,200 trucks a day on Main St."

Andrews officials said that can be a safety hazard to other cars just making their errands around town.

The project will cost $6 million and the city will have an election in May to raise the sales tax by a quarter to help pay it off.

If it’s approved, the city will issue $6 million dollars in bonds for a period not exceeding 20 years in the Fall and construction on the route will begin in January 2012.

But there’s a stretch of homes on the North side of town on County Road 2500, about a quarter-of-a-mile long, where the route is cutting too close.

One Andrews family in that area has the route coming within 14 feet of their front lawn and said it’s too unsafe for them.

"You’re gonna have those trucks passing by every day within 40 feet of my son’s room where he’s gonna be asleep," 15-year Andrews resident, Justin Johnson, said.

For the Johnson’s, they don’t want their children to be in danger just by playing out in the front yard but Andrews officials said there will be measures in place on that stretch to protect those homes.

"Putting curb and gutter that would help slow and calm the traffic in that area, a masonry decorative fence with some sound baffling, reducing the speed limit to 35 along that quarter-of-a-mile section," Hackler said.

The Johnson’s said they’ve yet to hear from a city official. They fear there won’t be a safe alternative, and if the sales tax is approved and the route built, they might have to move.

But officials said there wasn’t a better place to put the new route and now the wait is on to see if the funding will be voted in.

"There’s no perfect route," Hackler said. "What we’ve done is three or four years of study, evaluation and work and brought it to this point. Now it’s up to the voters to decide."

"Take a minute to put themselves in my shoes," Johnson said. "And how would they like 600-800 trucks a day passing within 40 feet of their home where their children play out in their yard."

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Dallas Morning News

The old saw "Politics makes for strange bedfellows" was in evidence today as apparently unlikely allies–environmental and consumer groups and the Tea Party, represented by former GOP gubernatorial candidate Debra Merdina–spoke out against legislation that would allow nuclear waste from all over the country to be shipped to a West Texas disposal site.

The billionaire "King of Superfund Sites" wants to open a giant radioactive dump in West Texas…what could go wrong?

CHUCKage/Flickr

Tue Mar. 29, 2011

By Josh Harkinson
Mother Jones Magazine

The nuclear crisis in Japan has provided a vivid reminder that one of the biggest conundrums of atomic power is what do do with all of the resulting radioactive waste. Harold Simmons believes he’s found an answer. The Texas billionaire and corporate raider is opening a nuclear waste dump in West Texas, despite objections from environmentalists and the state’s own experts. One of the Lone Star State’s largest donors to Republican causes, Simmons expects his that privately-owned site will become the nation’s most sought after radioactive waste repository.

The reclusive, litigious 79-year-old made his personal fortune from garbage collection, drug stores, metals, and chemicals. His net worth is valued at $5.7 billion, making him the 55th richest American, according to Forbes. He’s shared his money—more than $10 million of it—with conservative politicians and causes, bankrolling attack ads against John Kerry and Barack Obama and giving Republican Texas Governor Rick Perry at least $1.2 million. He has been fined for violating campaign donation limits and outed by one of his daughters for paying her to let him make political contributions in her name. He’s been called the "King of Superfund Sites" for his work disposing of hazardous waste. Last year, D Magazine named him "Dallas’ most evil genius."

Much of Simmons’ genius resides in how he’s leveraged his political investments. In 1995, he bought a hazardous waste disposal company, Waste Control Specialists, and set about converting an isolated spot in Andrews County into a nuclear waste dump. After six years of lobbying the state legislature, WCS convinced it to pass a law authorizing private companies to be licensed to handle radioactive waste.

Two licenses sought by WCS would allow it to accept a total of 60 million cubic feet of low-level radioactive waste from federal and state sources, including nuclear reactors, weapons programs, and hospitals. (That’s roughly enough waste to fill half of Cowboys Stadium.) The licenses didn’t need detailed approval from federal nuclear regulators because the dump wouldn’t handle the highest grades of radioactive waste; unlike the proposed Yucca Mountain dump in Nevada, for example, the 1,338-acre WCS dump can’t accept spent nuclear fuel rods.

Concerned that radioactive material from the dump could contaminate groundwater, three staffers at the state environmental commission quit rather than approve its license.

State engineers and geologists strongly objected to licensing the the dump. Concerned that radioactive material could contaminate groundwater, three staffers at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality resigned rather than sign off on the licenses. In a 2007 memo, four TCEQ engineers and geologists concluded that the site’s proximity to the water table "makes groundwater intrusion into the disposal units highly likely" and suggested that it not be approved. One of the resigned staffers, an engineer named Encarnacion Serna, told the Texas Observer’s Forrest Wilder that the site’s geology made it unfit for storing nuclear waste. Nevertheless, he explained, "I started getting the idea that these people are going to license this thing no matter what. I felt that in clear conscience I couldn’t grant a license with what was being proposed."

In 2008, TCEQ executive director Glenn Shankle quit the agency only to become a $150,000-a-year lobbyist for WCS. The company’s licenses to store radioactive waste were approved in May 2008 and September 2009. "Even the mafia was more circumspect than this," Glenn Lewis, one of the TCEQ whistleblowers, told the Observer at the time. "It just shows that…big money and a lot of political power won once again."

WCS has defended the science behind its plan. "The site is the ideal location for disposing of low-level radioactive waste—its arid climate and unique geologic formation make it perfectly qualified," CEO William Lindquist wrote early last year in response to an investigative piece in D Magazine. Linidquist stated that the site is separated from the nearest aquifer by 400 feet of nearly impermeable clay. "Put simply, no contamination of this aquifer from the WCS site is possible." (WCS did not return a call from Mother Jones.)

With his license to operate in hand, Simmons began an audacious campaign to expand the dump site from a mostly local operation into one that could eventually become the largest of its kind in the country. A huge market for radioactive waste disposal was just waiting to be tapped: 36 states lack a permanent place to store their radioactive cast-offs. This has long been an obstacle for building new nuclear power plants; some have had their permits held up over the issue. Only Vermont had a deal to dispose of its nuclear waste in Texas, so Simmons began lobbying to amend the nearly 20-year-old compact with the Green Mountain State to allow other states to also send their radioactive waste to the WCS site.

The decision to alter the compact rested with the seven members of the obscure Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission, six of whom had been appointed by Gov. Perry, one of the largest recipients of Simmons’ campaign cash. A peculiar legal loophole in the Texas-Vermont compact allows the commission, by a majority vote, to allow radioactive waste imports from other states. Despite opposition to that idea from everyone from Bass Unlimited to the NAACP, in January the commission approved a process for accepting the out-of-state nuclear material. Any state can now petition the commission to have its radioactive waste buried in Texas.

There’s another big reason why this was a huge win for Simmons: The compact allows him to get paid for burying other states’ nuclear trash while outsourcing much of the risk to Texas taxpayers. Though the state will receive a cut of disposal fees and $36 million to cover "corrective action" and "post-closure" expenses, it will have to bear any other cleanup costs on its own. According to a report by the Texas Sunset Advisory Commission: "Potential future contamination [from the waste] could not only have a severe impact to the environment and human health, but to the State, which bears the ultimate financial responsibility for compact waste disposal facility site."

The Sierra Club and other environmental groups have sued to overturn WCS’s nuclear disposal licenses. But the controversy that surrounds the deal hasn’t stopped the nuclear power industry from getting behind it. "This is a major milestone," Ralph Andersen, the Nuclear Energy Institute’s senior director of radiation, safety, and environmental protection, told the Wall Street Journal. "It’s going to provide much needed space."

Josh Harkinson is a staff reporter at Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. Email him with tips at jharkinson (at) motherjones (dot) com. To follow him on Twitter, click here. Get Josh Harkinson’s RSS feed.

January 7, 2011

Editorial – Dallas Morning News

All Texans should be concerned about the questionable process through which Waste Control Specialists, controlled by Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons, won approval last week for its West Texas site to store low-level radioactive waste from around the country. Far too much about this process stinks of the influence that one very rich person wields as a million-dollar campaign contributor to Gov. Rick Perry, whose appointees granted the approval.

The need to deal with the nation’s growing stockpile of radioactive waste is a significant issue. The waste must go somewhere, but decisions about the venue must include a transparent process in which financial interests don’t appear to hold ultimate sway. Waste Control is in business to make profits, and its bid to expand interstate disposal at its 1,300-acre Andrews County site will help maximize those profits.

"It’s a state-of-the-art Cadillac of a landfill," Waste Control CEO Bill Lindquist says. "It’s very expensive, and the waste generated in Texas and Vermont is not enough to offset those costs."

Company President Rodney Baltzer says private and public generators of radioactive waste would pay higher prices if other states couldn’t help offset the bill. But when Waste Control got into this business, it knew that Texas and Vermont were the sole members of the Low Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact authorized to send radioactive waste to Texas. The public impression when the compact became effective in 1993 was that it was a two- or three-state deal.

Last week’s decision allows 34 other states to access the site.

Yes, the requisite public hearings occurred, but Texans’ welfare doesn’t appear to have been the chief factor in the decision to make part of West Texas a multi-state, radioactive dumping ground.

Significant public health issues cannot be ignored. This newspaper questions the wisdom of concentrating so much radioactive waste in a single location, particularly one abutting the important Ogallala Aquifer, a crucial source of water to eight states. Since 2004, the Waste Control site has received six notices for minor violations. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality gives Waste Control a high compliance rating.

Still, the risk factor now rises significantly. Trucks loaded with this waste will be crisscrossing state highways. Over the next 35 years, an estimated 5 million cubic feet of radioactive junk will have been dumped in Texas. That’s the space of 56 Olympic-sized swimming pools, the contents of which can remain toxic for centuries.

Baltzer says the facility is designed to last "thousands of years." He says winning approval was more difficult because of the political ties between Simmons and Perry. Commissioners went overboard to demonstrate their independence. But he acknowledges there’s a public perception problem.

We agree, and it should have been addressed more effectively before the commission’s decision came down.