Archive for the ‘Toxic Waste Dump’ Category

April 1, 2014

by Jim Malewitz
Texas Tribune

Photo by: David Bowser
An overhead view in 2012 of Waste Control Specialists’ low-level radioactive waste storage facilities near Andrews, Texas. The site is poised to get 420 truckloads of waste from New Mexico.

A storage facility in Andrews County, Texas has recieved its first truckload of transuranic waste from Los Alamos National Laboratory, the U.S. Department of Energy and the New Mexico-based Nuclear Waste Partnership said Wednesday in a news release.

The truck arrived safely, and as many as 10 shipments per week are scheduled over the coming months, the release said.

The private facility, operated by Waste Control Specialists, will be paid up to $8.8 million to store the waste for as long as a year.

Original story:

In a matter of days, a West Texas radioactive waste site is expected to start receiving up to 420 truckloads of radioactive junk — some dating back to the 1940s — from the federal government’s nuclear weapons program.

The waste was not originally meant to leave New Mexico, but a sequence of events headlined by a Feb. 14 radiation leak at a disposal facility near Carlsbad has left its handlers eyeing a private collection site in Andrews County, Texas.

The company, along with Texas and U.S. officials, say the waste will be stored safely — and temporarily. But the plan has stirred concerns among environmentalists who object to the state’s expanding radioactive footprint.

The transuranic waste — clothing, tools, debris and other items contaminated by radioactive elements, mostly plutonium — is currently stored at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which has been under pressure to remove the waste from its grounds since a series of wildfires raged dangerously close to its grounds in the summer of 2011.

Under a deal with the state of New Mexico, the laboratories promised to send the waste away by June 30.

The materials were destined for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant outside of Carlsbad, N.M. But that underground facility — the country’s only underground disposal site for transuranic waste — has been shuttered for more than six weeks after an above-ground release exposed 17 workers to radiation.

Now, the federal government is poised to send the waste to the site in Andrews County, just across the border, for storage until the repository reopens.

Chuck McDonald, spokesman for Waste Control Specialists, which operates the Texas site, said Monday that the truckloads would arrive "within the next week or two."

The company, formerly owned by the late Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons and one of few sites in the nation that is licensed to store low-level radioactive waste, has been storing contaminated items from shuttered reactors and hospitals since 2012.

"We are pleased that WCS is in a position to provide temporary storage for this waste while the WIPP is shutdown," Rod Baltzer, president of the company, said in a statement. "This will allow the Los Alamos National Laboratory to meet its goal of having this material removed by this summer so it can no longer be threatened by wildfires."

Baltzer said that all incoming canisters would be inspected to ensure that they are sealed. “WCS has a sophisticated inspection and monitoring system in the buildings where the canisters will be stored to ensure the safety of our employees and the environment," he added.

WCS said its grounds are ringed by asphalt and caliche roadways, protecting it from fires, and that the site has a sprinkler system and its own fire truck, adding that its workers are "well trained and experienced in handling this type of waste."

Citing uncertainty about when the repository will be ready to reopen, the U.S. Department of Energy has not proposed an end date for the waste’s time in Texas, but said it would last no longer than one year, according to the agency’s correspondence last week with Texas regulators.

In a March 21 analysis, the agency concluded that it could safely store the Los Alamos waste in West Texas and that the plan did not merit a new environmental review. There have been minor spills and leaks at the facility, the analysis said, but those had been localized and properly cleaned up.

"WCS has accumulated more than a decade of environmental monitoring data that show no member of the public or the environment has been affected by operations at the facility, including routine and accident risks," the analysis said.

Dale Klein, associate director of the University of Texas Energy Institute and the former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said the waste would probably be safely transferred and stored, but he questioned the logic behind moving the waste before it goes to the repository.

"Any time you have to handle the material twice, you’re exposing people unnecessarily," he said.

Environmentalists object to the idea of bringing more nuclear waste to Texas and say they would like to see further analysis of the proposal.

"They’re building a nuclear empire. It’s just one thing after another, and there’s no telling where this leads," Karen Hadden, executive director of the Sustainable Energy and Economic Development Coalition, said of the waste company, adding that state and federal regulators have rushed the decision to allow the waste transfer without using “the full and adequate science.”

Environmental groups have closely scrutinized WCS as it has expanded the scale of the waste it accepts. That includes the Sierra Club, which has challenged the site’s permits in court, saying the group was never given a hearing to voice its objections to the project — namely that groundwater would enter its disposal wells.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality granted the company initial licenses in 2007 after conducting geological studies of the area. Three staff members at the commission resigned in protest after the licenses were granted, saying they did not believe the area had been proved safe for waste disposal.

TCEQ said it would work with the Department of Energy to ensure that any material the WCS site accepts would meet state requirements.

When the Legislature paved the way for waste storage more than a decade ago, the facility was supposed to accept only waste from Texas and Vermont, but the Legislature has since expanded the site’s scope to accept waste from other states.

"It is so appalling,” said state Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth. "The way it’s evolved, Texas is going to be the sole repository, which means that decades from now, the state of Texas will be the fiscally responsible agent for dealing with the impacts of any mishaps."

Burnam, a fierce critic of WCS over the years, said he might seek a court injunction to halt the waste transfer. "That would have to come quickly," he said.

Disclosure: At the time of publication, the University of Texas at Austin was a corporate sponsor of The Texas Tribune. The Harold Simmons Foundation was a major donor to the Tribune in 2010, 2011 and 2012. (You can also review the full list of Tribune donors and sponsors below $1,000.)

REFERENCE MATERIAL
DOE to TCEQ Letter re: Waste Disposal
PDF (229.2 KB) download
TCEQ Letter to DOE re: Waste Proposal
PDF (504.8 KB) download
Analysis For Proposal to Temporarily Store Waste
PDF (295.4 KB) download

April 16, 2014

by Jim Malewitz
Texas Tribune

Photo by: David Bowser
John Ward, operations project task manager at Waste Control Specialists’ facility near Andrews, Texas, walks over to inspect concrete canisters that will house drums of nuclear waste.

A state appeals court has thwarted a challenge to a hazardous waste disposal site in West Texas – a ruling that signals growing difficulties for those trying to scrutinize the decisions of Texas environmental regulators.

Depending on whom you ask, such a trend would either rightly save companies time and money or unjustly bar citizens from fully sharing their environmental concerns.

The site, a 36-acre facility in Andrews County operated by Waste Control Specialists — a company formerly owned by the late Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons — is the final resting place for hazardous waste and slightly radioactive items from shuttered nuclear reactors and hospitals, among other places.

Both the company and state regulators have repeatedly called the site safe. But environmental groups have closely scrutinized the site as it has expanded the scale of waste it accepts, raising concerns about the effects on groundwater and other resources.

The Sierra Club has long argued that state regulators never gave the organization the chance to voice opposition to Waste Control Specialists’ permits through a contested-case hearing — a drawn-out process resembling a trial in which companies and their critics present evidence and testimony in front of an administrative law judge in the hopes of swaying regulators’ opinions.

Earlier this month, Texas’ 3rd Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s ruling that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality properly denied the group a hearing because none of its members met the threshold of being a "person affected."

At issue in that Sierra Club case was one of several permits the TCEQ has granted Waste Control Specialists. The permit enabled the company to dispose of high-purity uranium metal that originated at a long-closed U.S. Department of Energy Facility that is now a "Superfund" site.

The Sierra Club said that the waste site could negatively affect two of the group’s members who lived just across the border in Eunice, N.M., putting their air and water quality at risk. That included Rose Gardner, who operates a feed store just four miles from the waste site.

But the three-judge panel said the TCEQ — whose analysis showed that the disposal site would have minimal impacts — had the authority to rule that those members were not "affected."

In making that determination, the court cited two Texas Supreme Court decisions handed down last year — TCEQ v. City of Waco and TCEQ v. Bosque River Coalition. Both involved challenges to feedlots’ wastewater discharge permits.

Cyrus Reed, conservation director for the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, said he worried the appellate court’s recent ruling would have implications that extend beyond Andrews County, giving regulators more wiggle room to deny hearings they might consider burdensome.

"Our concern is that this ruling could be applied broadly and that it would make it very difficult for folks to be granted the right to a contested-case hearing," he said. "It could also eliminate the right of all Texans to present evidence and challenge the decisions of a state agency."

In an emailed statement, the TCEQ said it was "very pleased" with the court’s decision, and that the agency takes seriously "its obligations to uphold the law — as was done in this case."

Texas is one of just a few states that allow the public to request contested-case hearings, said Jeff Civins, an Austin-based attorney who has represented companies in such hearings. In most states, citizens are invited only to submit comments to regulators ahead of a vote.

Civins said it makes sense that regulators determine who should get a hearing, because they are the ones ultimately ruling on the permits and because the process eats up a lot of resources. The process can take up to a year and cost up to $1 million a project, he said.

Jim Bradbury, an environmental lawyer who has represented clients on both sides of such disputes, said the Sierra Club ruling confirms the TCEQ’s discretion to determine who gets a hearing, but doesn’t fully erode the process. Parties who live adjacent to or directly downstream from companies seeking environmental permits will likely still draw hearings, he said.

Over the years, the hearing process has been a useful tool for concerned stakeholders, Bradbury said, but it has also been abused by groups trying to advance policy or business goals by slowing down the permitting process.

"It’s a bit of a mess," he said. "This process is used by all sides to game the system."

Citing such criticism, some state lawmakers have pitched legislation trying to change the system. Last session, for instance, state Sen. Troy Fraser, R-Horseshoe Bay, wrote a bill that would have ditched the contested hearing process. That legislation failed, but Bradbury and others expect it to crop up again next session.

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club has another challenge to Waste Control Specialists pending in the same appeals court. That one concerns a license for disposal of low-level radioactive waste.

REFERENCE MATERIAL
Sierra Club v. TCEQ and Waste Control Specialists
PDF (138.9 KB) download

Disclosure: The Harold Simmons Foundation is a major donor to The Texas Tribune. A complete list of Texas Tribune donors and sponsors can be viewed here.

Oct. 21, 2012

by Nick Swartsell
Texas Tribune

Photo by: David Bowser
John Ward, operations project task manager at Waste Control Specialists’ facility near Andrews, Texas, walks over to inspect concrete canisters that will house drums of nuclear waste.

Rose Gardner inflated balloons for her grandson’s birthday party recently at her floral shop in Eunice, N.M., and talked about nuclear waste.

"I’m just really respectful of radiation and its effects," she said, a reason she became involved in the Sierra Club and its legal battle with Waste Control Specialists, which operates a radioactive waste site in nearby Andrews County, Texas. "Some people may say I’ve gone overboard, but I don’t think I have."

The Sierra Club is suing on behalf of Gardner and two residents of Andrews to have its claims heard in court. In legal action against WCS dating to 2007, the Sierra Club has challenged the company’s state environmental licenses because of the discovery of groundwater in some of the waste disposal site’s 520 monitoring wells.

But officials with the company, which is owned by the Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons, say the site is safe. And Andrews County has joined the battle, suing the Sierra Club in a bid to end its legal claims.

The 15,000-acre site began receiving radioactive material in April. It has multiple disposal areas, including one for waste producers involved in the Texas Low Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact, which encompasses Texas and 35 other states.

Cyrus Reed, the director of the Sierra Club’s Texas chapter, said the site’s hydrogeological status was still uncertain and that water in Waste Control Specialists wells might mean that having radioactive material there was dangerous. The site, he said, is close to the Ogallala Aquifer, a major source of drinking water, and there are concerns that radioactive materials could seep into it.

WCS officials say the Sierra Club is simply opposed to all things nuclear.

"Their point, that those wells are saturated, doesn’t really matter," said Rodney Baltzer, the company’s president. "Any of the water they’re talking about out there isn’t groundwater; it’s infiltration from rain, and it’s not connected to the Ogallala Aquifer or some kind of well someone is drinking from. The red-bed clays underneath are like concrete."

This layer of red-bed clay, 25 to 40 feet below ground level, is the key to the disposal process, Waste Control Specialists officials say. Pits are dug in the clay and lined with concrete to contain waste, which is stored in concrete cylinders. The pits contain a water-management system that pumps rain and groundwater away from the materials into a water treatment plant, then to a man-made pond.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality granted the company initial licenses in 2007 after conducting geological studies of the area. Three staff members at the commission resigned in protest after the licenses were granted, saying they did not believe the area had been proved safe for waste disposal.

Terry Clawson, a spokesman for the commission, said the licenses were issued in compliance with Texas law and contained measures to protect health and the environment. The commission declined to comment on current legal battles between the Sierra Club and WCS

In August, Andrews County sued the Sierra Club, seeking to end its legal claims and public statements against the site. The county says the Sierra Club’s actions have scared off potential business from waste producers and have disrupted a valuable revenue stream for the county, which receives 5 percent of the company’s gross receipts. WCS made its first payment (about $620,000) to the county in August.

In a recent deposition, Andrews County Judge Richard Dolgener, who heads the county’s commissioners court, said the company had told the county it was losing money because of the Sierra Club’s actions; its lawyers met with county officials before the county sued.

Baltzer said WCS had no role in the county’s decision to sue. "They want to make sure their revenue source is safe," he said of Andrews County. "I think they could see that Sierra Club is just doing whatever they can to stop this."

Sierra Club lawyers say Andrews County’s action amounts to a strategic lawsuit against public participation, or a SLAPP suit, which is illegal in Texas.

"We’re just acting within our rights, as any citizen can, when you feel someone is acting against yours," Reed said. "The Sierra Club doesn’t exist so that Andrews County can make money."

But Lloyd Eisenrich, the president of the Andrews Industrial Foundation, which has joined the lawsuit against the Sierra Club, said the suit was about residents of Andrews County, not about the county or Waste Control Specialists trying to silence the group.

"To my knowledge, this isn’t WCS against the Sierra Club," he said. "This is the community saying, ‘We’re fed up.’ "

Photo by: Nick Swartsell
Rose Gardner inflates balloons in her floral shop in Eunice, N.M., five miles from the radioactive waste site operated by Waste Control Specialists, on Oct. 7, 2012.

Gardner said Eunice residents had no say in the site’s location. "Waste Control Specialists has been described as a remote location. Remote from Dallas? Okay. Remote from New York? Okay. But it’s right here. It’s close to my town."

Eunice, the town closest to the WCS site, is five miles from the site’s location on the Texas-New Mexico border in an area some call the Nuclear Corridor. Urenco, a uranium enrichment plant, sits next to the Waste Control Specialists site, and other nuclear facilities occupy the region.

Gardner said she worried that more nuclear-related facilities would locate near Eunice. She has undergone radiation treatment for thyroid problems, she said, and is concerned about further exposure.

The WCS site is the only one in operation to serve the Texas compact. Examples of waste at the site range from mildly irradiated bodies of rats used in medical testing at Texas A&M University to radioactive components of nuclear power plants.

Chuck McDonald, a spokesman for WCS, called the rats an example of the site’s importance.

"The rats were in the basement of a medical research facility there in Houston," McDonald said. "They had their flood several years ago, and you literally had 55-gallon drums of radioactive waste floating around, including a lot of dead, radioactive rats. There was no place to dispose of them for years."

There are things WCS does not accept, including liquid waste, John Ward, an operations project task manager at the company, said of the stereotype of nuclear waste as green ooze. "That’s a Homer Simpson thing,"he said. Ward said the site also did not take highly irradiated material like fuel rods.

WCS claims its safety precautions make its site the most secure in the country for disposing of low-level radioactive waste. But Gardner said the Sierra Club’s suits were meant to put everything in the open.

"Where’s my public hearing to voice my concerns?" Gardner said. "I don’t do this just for me. I have two girls who have their own little kids at home. They need someone to speak up for them."

Workers at the Waste Control Specialists facility in Andrews unload a shipment of ‘transuranic waste’ that arrived for temporary storage on April 2 from New Mexico.

April 13, 2014

by Corey Paul, cpaul(at)oaoa.com
OA Online

In a meeting with Andrews civic leaders, Waste Control Specialists representatives recently floated the idea of storing high-level radioactive waste at their local collection site, if the community approves.

"It is something that if we had the community support of, at WCS we would be interested in being a part of that," said Chuck McDonald, a spokesman for the company.

The conversation is in early stages, and company officials have sought none of the federal permits that would be required for the significant expansion of the sort of waste it handles, McDonald said. He said the company wants to temporarily store spent nuclear fuel rods, a high-level nuclear waste. Temporarily could still mean decades, but that is opposed to permanently disposing of the waste by burying it for millennia.

The topic first came up at a March closed-door meeting of the Andrews Industrial Foundation, a non-profit economic development group, attendees said.

One of them was Andrews County Judge Richard Dolgener, who said "we are moving very slowly" and that conversation focused mostly on political and industry context instead of support for the possibility of bringing the waste.

"We are trying to get all our facts really more than anything before you start saying this or that," Dolgener said.

The dialogue begins amid two other developments involving an expanded radioactive footprint in Texas, a prospect that concerns environmental groups but also some who advocated for bringing WCS to West Texas as a low-level collection site, such as Rep. Tryon Lewis.

The first development is a series of proposals by state leaders: Gov. Rick Perry at the end of March wrote a letter to leaders of the state House and Senate that stated "We have no choice but to begin looking for a safe and secure solution for [high level waste] in Texas. . ." accompanied by a 48-page report from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality that lays out some historical background about storage attempts and options.

Perry’s letter used the phrase "Texas solution," which happens to be the slogan of Waste Control Specialists. But Perry recommends no specific storage site, and others in West Texas have also expressed interest in storing higher-level radioactive waste, such as officials in Loving County.

The governor’s letter follows a charge by House Speaker Joe Straus to the House Committee on Environmental Regulation to study bringing high-level radioactive waste, including the rules and economic impact, and then "make specific recommendations on the state and federal actions necessary to permit a high-level radioactive waste disposal or interim storage facility in Texas."

Another development is the radioactive waste that began rolling into Andrews County earlier this month from New Mexico. That waste is called "transuranic waste" that WCS was already licensed to handle, but the DOE requires that it must be handled more cautiously than the low-level waste WCS was designed to mainly deal with.

Most of the transuranic waste consists of items like clothing, tools, rags and soil contaminated with radioactive elements during decades of nuclear research and weapons production in New Mexico.

The temporary storage of the transuranic waste results from of a series of mishaps at New Mexico facilities, but it also expands the scope of the sort of waste WCS anticipated dealing with, McDonald said.

"Certainly it doesn’t hurt the case that this would be a good place to take care of some of the spent nuclear fuel storage capabilities that are now becoming a pressing issue," McDonald said.

In an announcement of the first transuranic waste shipment on April 2, the Department of Energy reported up to about 100 more shipments will be sent to West Texas in an initial ramp up with as many as 10 shipments arriving per week before the June 30 deadline to remove the waste from the Los Alamos National Laboratory as part of an agreement with the state.

At first, the waste was meant to go to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, N.M., known as WIPP. But those plans were scuttled by a shutdown at WIPP after a small above-ground leak on Feb. 14 that reportedly exposed 17 workers to radiation.

WCS, a private collection site, became the next option. WCS will be paid up to $8.8 million to store the transuranic waste, the DOE reported.

Karen Hadden, executive director of the Sustainable Energy and Economic Development Coalition based in Austin, opposed moving the transuranic waste to WCS and said it seems like a step toward higher-level waste storage.

"It’s kind of never-ending," Hadden said, describing the federal and state decision as rushed and then criticizing the potential for higher level waste. "There is higher potential for accidents. They are not frequent but they do occur and you don’t want that to happen . . . It’s incredibly dangerous material."

Lewis, whose term as representative expires in January, said he has "no problem at all" with the transuranic waste storage. At an Odessa Chamber of Commerce event earlier this year, he also described his work helping to bring WCS to Andrews as one of his proudest legislative accomplishments.

But Lewis also serves on the the House Committee on Environmental Regulation, and he says he opposes depositing high-level waste in Texas and that even storing it long-term is a bad idea.

"I don’t think that is what that site is meant for," he said, even though he said the site and its workers could probably handle the waste. "Just to make money I don’t think it’s worth it to do that. Hey, let’s make a quick buck. I don’t think it’s worth it because you never know."

Instead, Lewis said the spent fuel rods from the country’s 104 nuclear power plants should be buried deep in a geological repository, at the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada. The federal government designated Yucca Mountain in 1987 and after decades of controversy abandoned development before Congress finally cut off funding in 2011. More than $15 billion had been spent.

McDonald said federal licensing and construction to store higher-level radioactive waste at WCS could happen in as little as seven years but that would all depend on community support.

Lewis said he worries an attempt to even temporarily store radioactive waste at WCS could turn into such a boondoggle as Yucca Mountain. But if it happens, he said, there should be intensive review and consultation with locals.

The county judge said so too: The first time around the community embraced the plant because they saw evidence of safe storage, but it is hard to predict sentiment now because so many have moved to the booming area since then.

The county sees a windfall of 5 percent of gross revenue from low-level waste at the storage site, where space inside runs up to $10,000 per cubic foot. The state’s is about 25 percent.

Storage of higher-level radioactive waste would probably bring more money to the county as well as skilled workers and greater economic diversification, say the judge and Westley Burnett, director of economic development at Andrews Economic Development Corporation who also attended the meeting with WCS.

But Dolgener also said higher-level storage would bring other issues such as security and more deadly material.

"It’s like having a milk plant and somebody wants to come and make ice cream because you’ve got a plant right there," Dolgener said. "But that’s really a big statement, because you’ve got to take science and law and 15 million other things into account to make that work."

Contact Corey Paul on Twitter @OAcrude on Facebook at OA Corey Paul or call 432-333-7768.

March 22, 2014

By Associated Press

CARLSBAD, N.M. — Employees at the federal government’s troubled nuclear waste dump in southeastern New Mexico are preparing to enter the facility’s underground mine for the first time since a radiation leak contaminated workers last month.

The U.S. Department of Energy announced Saturday that 35 workers have undergone training simulations at a Potash mine before re-entry next week into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP).

Employees went through a two-hour underground session using protective gear and air-breathing units, officials said.

Workers spent this week training for various scenarios that could occur in the mine.

According to the Department of Energy, the plan is for workers to set up an operating camp near a salt-handling shaft and then check for a secondary exit in the shaft that controls air flow. After that, they will focus on finding the source of the radiation release.

The repository near Carlsbad stopped taking all waste shipments after an underground truck fire on Feb. 5. Nine days later, a radiation release shuttered the plant. A series of shortcomings in maintenance, safety training, emergency response and oversight were cited by a team that investigated the truck fire.

The New Mexico Environment Department withdrew a preliminary permit this week for the dump’s request to expand its facility, citing the fire and the leak.

It is unclear, however, if the two incidents are related.

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant is the nation’s only permanent underground repository for low-level radioactive waste, including things like plutonium-contaminated gloves, tools and protective clothing, from nuclear weapons facilities.

With the nuclear waste dump shuttered, operators for the plan made an agreement with Waste Control Specialists to ship radioactive waste from Los Alamos National Laboratory to rural west Texas.

Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.