Archive for the ‘WCS’ Category

Apr. 15, 2012

BY ANNA M. TINSLEY
atinsley(at)star-telegram.com
Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Huge numbers of trucks carrying low-level radioactive waste from dozens of states will soon travel highways nationwide — including those in the Metroplex — on their way to a remote disposal site in West Texas.

Shipments from up to 36 states will head to a dump in Andrews County near the New Mexico border, owned by Dallas billionaire and generous Republican political donor Harold Simmons, despite concerns from environmentalists and others worried about potential accidents or contamination once the loads are left at the Waste Control Specialists facility.

"Texas is going to become a nuclear waste dump if everything happens under their plans," said state Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth, an opponent of the facility. "We will be the major route for nuclear waste.

"I am absolutely concerned about the transportation of the materials, about the high volume of nuclear waste traveling on our interstates through areas such as Fort Worth and Dallas," he said. "I think it’s a really bad idea to have that much nuclear waste rolling down our interstates unguarded."

The first shipments, possibly this month, will likely come from the state’s two nuclear plants, Comanche Peak near Glen Rose and the South Texas project in Matagorda County. Truckloads of contaminated waste from other states, which require a formal application process and approval, could start by summer.

Officials aren’t publicly outlining the shipment routes, although many say loads are likely to cross major highways in North Texas as dangerous materials already do.

In the past eight years, 72 incidents nationwide involving trucks carrying radioactive material on highways have caused $2.4 million in damage and one death, the Transportation Department’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration says.

Workers at the Andrews County site say various shipments, including contaminated sludge from New York’s Hudson River in 2009, have arrived without incident.

"We have been successfully and without any incidents at all transporting this material for quite some time," said Chuck McDonald, a spokesman for Dallas-based Waste Control Specialists. "Transportation of low-level radioactive waste is highly, highly regulated, requiring specified types of containers and vehicles.

"It’s going to be addressed and is addressed by appropriate government entities."

A ‘win’ for Texas?

In the early 1980s, the federal government encouraged states to build low-level nuclear waste landfills either by forming compacts with other states or on their own. Texas and Vermont teamed up to create a compact to dispose of waste from the two states and federal sources. Last year, state lawmakers approved the Andrews County site; the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission recently agreed to let as many as 36 states ship waste there.

The Texas Compact Disposal Facility, the nation’s only commercial facility licensed to dispose of certain types of low-level waste, formally opened last year in a sparsely populated area about 350 miles west of Fort Worth. Waste Control Specialists spent millions to build and open it.

Shipments of Class A, B and C waste sent there will include medical materials and hospital equipment such as beakers, test tubes and X-ray machines, as well as items that have come in contact with radioactive material such as gloves, shoe covers, trash, rags and dirt.

Those items will be placed in steel and concrete containers that will then be placed in other steel and concrete containers built into red bed clay. When the main container is filled, the entire area will be sealed, McDonald said.

Texas shipments will be first.

"We’re going to take radioactive materials out of Texas urban centers and dispose of them in an arid, isolated location that we believe is a good location," McDonald said. "We believe it’s a win for the state of Texas."

Nebraska may be among the first of the other states. Officials with a public power district are close to a $3.1 million agreement to dispose of long-stored low-level waste such as radioactive filters.

The company has a 15-year license to collect and dispose of the material, with options to renew for two 10-year terms. State lawmakers have banned materials from foreign countries at the site.

Environmental concerns

Environmentalists have complained about the site for years, worried that the waste might contaminate groundwater.

Opponents say they believe that Simmons’ political clout prompted the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to give favorable treatment to the project, despite environmental questions, and later led the 2011 Legislature to permit limited amounts of waste from other states that were not part of the original Texas-Vermont compact.

Three staff members of the environmental agency quit in protest in 2007, saying that higher-ups ignored their concerns about possible groundwater contamination.

"We continue to have concerns about the site itself and whether or not there is enough protection … and whether there will be contamination of the water," said Karen Hadden, executive director of the statewide SEED Coalition environmental group. "Once radioactivity gets into groundwater, it’s a difficult thing to clean up and it can get into the millions and billions of dollars."

Waste Control officials have said they have responded to concerns through the licensing process and have conducted tests that show the site to be safe.

"We have taken core samples around the site so we know exactly what the geology looks like," McDonald said. "It’s not going to impact any drinking water supply in any way.

"It’s an ideal site."

SEED has asked state officials for an independent audit system to do spot-checks and random audits to make sure that safety procedures are followed, shipping procedures are accurate, and limits on volume and types of radioactive waste are met.

"We want to make sure shipments are right when they arrive — that they are the correct material, packaged properly, don’t have water in the disposal pit," Hadden said. "We want to make sure it’s put in the right place and marked properly."

Accidents happen

In February, an Arlington train derailment blocked traffic for hours. Only corn syrup was spilled, but it could have been much worse: More than a dozen train cars that did not derail were filled with dangerous chemicals including flammable crude oil, sodium hydroxide, liquid chlorine and sulfuric acid, reports said.

While the Arlington accident involved a train, and low-level radioactive shipments will be moved by truck, local emergency management officials say they are prepared for an emergency, partly because of training received for special events such as the Super Bowl.

"I-20 has been a designated radioactive shipment corridor for some time," Arlington Assistant Fire Chief Jim Self said. "We’ve had training over the years … and this is not a foreign idea to us.

"The Arlington Fire Department is prepared for any kind of radioactive-related emergency," Self said.

Local officials say they don’t know when these shipments will pass through the Metroplex.

"We will make sure our first responders are aware of the different types of materials out there," said Juan Ortiz, Fort Worth’s emergency management coordinator. "The response, planning and training is not completely new to us.

"We have a lot of the capabilities in place," he said. "But this is a challenge that most communities will have to figure out how to overcome."

In case of an accident, standard procedure is to contain spilled materials, make sure they don’t get into waterways and prevent people from coming into contact with them, officials have said.

But many communities may not be as prepared, especially small Texas towns that might lack emergency management teams or personnel trained to respond to hazardous-material emergencies, Hadden said.

"Shipments can go through any major city, any major highway, and you have no way of knowing when you see an accident if there are radioactive materials involved," Hadden said. "There has really been no analysis of the best transportation routes or of emergency preparedness."

Anna M. Tinsley, 817-390-7610

Twitter: @annatinsley

March 28, 2012

The QueQue Blog
San Antonio Current

In 1992, an earthquake measuring 4.7 on the Richter scale struck Lea County at the Texas-New Mexico border, a stone’s throw from today’s radioactive waste dump operated by Waste Control Specialists in western Andrews County. While a Eunice dispatcher reported "minor damage to structures, but nothing major," a Texaco gas plant outside Eunice, New Mexico, was knocked offline, according to an Odessa American story at the time. Earthquakes are only one of the reasons to be concerned about the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission‘s vote last week allowing Waste Control Specialists to receive radioactive trash from across the country.

The site sits uncomfortably close to the Ogallala Aquifer (some say on top of the aquifer, but the company disputes this), the nation’s largest aquifer that stretches all the way to South Dakota. It was this liquid proximity, and the multitude of application rewrites the company of Governor Perry’s million-dollar donor Harold Simmons was allowed, that led to some within the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to resign in protest.

Even after the application was finally approved, WCS was allowed to slip a key provision regarding financial assurance should things go wrong. It’s a point Karen Hadden, executive director of the SEED Coalition, brought to the TLLRWDCC meeting in a letter signed onto by a number of other groups, including Austin Physicians for Social Responsibility, Public Citizen, Environment Texas, and San Antonio’s Esperanza Peace & Justice Center and Southwest Workers Union. "Serious environmental contamination problems have occurred at many existing low-level radioactive waste facilities and clean up cost will run into billions of dollars," Hadden wrote. Yet strangely, the TCEQ allowed WCS to exchange stock in a sister corporation, Titanium Metals, in exchange for financial assurance for its first five years of operations. Worse still: Liability related to the dump’s waste reverts to the state of Texas after only 30 years. If only radioactive waste were as short-lived.

Hadden’s letter notes that the history of radioactive waste disposal in the United States, marked by an untold number of leaks, includes instances where spent fuel rods — known to include some of the most toxic and longest-lived radionuclides, including Uranium-235‘s 700 million-year half-life — were illegally buried. In spite of the risks, the Commission’s decision was a unanimous one. Perhaps because Perry re-stacked the commission and booted Bobby Gregory, who had voted against expanding the compact in the past, in exchange for a favorable vote cast by one of the Commission’s newest members, former CPS Energy CEO Milton Lee.

Friday, March 23, 2012

By Jim Vertuno, The Associated Press
Austin American Statesman

AUSTIN, TEXAS — Radioactive waste from dozens of states could soon be buried in a Texas dump near the New Mexico border after Texas officials gave final approval Friday to rules allowing the shipments.

Texas lawmakers in 2011 approved the rural Andrews County site to take the waste and the Friday’s unanimous vote by the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Compact Commission cleared a major hurdle to allow the waste burial.

Texas already had a compact legal with Vermont to take its waste. Environmentalists have argued against expanding the program to 36 more states, warning it could result in radioactive material rumbling through the state on trucks with few safeguards in case of an accident. They also say a problem at the waste dump could lead to potential underground water contamination.

Dallas-based Waste Control Specialists, which owns and operates the site, insists it will be safe. The waste would be entombed in concrete about 100 feet underground in an area with densely packed clay. The site still needs final approval from state environmental regulators, and company president Rod Baltzer said it could happen as early as next week.

Applications to bury waste at the Andrews site must be approved by the compact commission on a case-by-case basis. At least three have already been filed, Baltzer said. If they are approved, material could start arriving in May.

Waste Control Specialists officials say accidents are infrequent when low-level radioactive waste is moved. Data from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration show that, from 2003 through 2011, there were 72 incidents involving trucks with radioactive material traveling on highways. One person died and the accidents caused $2.4 million in damages.

That compares with almost 64,000 incidents involving flammable/combustible liquids — the leader in hazardous materials accidents in the nine-year span. Seventy-six people have died in those incidents, which caused $319.5 million in damages.

Texas officials say there is no requirement to notify law enforcement of which routes trucks carrying low-level waste will take.

Karen Hadden of the Texas SEED Coalition, an environmental group, warned the commission that many rural counties don’t even have professional fire departments to respond in case of an accident.

"The magnitude of risk here is huge," Hadden said.

Hadden also said the commission should require independent audits of the shipments to make sure only low-level material is coming in. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has an on-site inspector to monitor shipments and Baltzer said the facility won’t take materials it’s not licensed for.

"I’m not sure you can ever do enough to satisfy some people with the number of audits in place," Batlzer said.

Waste Control, which stores, processes and manages hazardous wastes at the site, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to open the dump. In 2009, the state issued two licenses to the company to bury low-level radioactive waste, making it the nation’s only dump for all classes — A, B and C — of nuclear debris and the first low-level site to open in 30 years.

One license pertains to the compact between Texas and Vermont that allows for disposal of radioactive materials such as uranium, plutonium and thorium from commercial power plants, academic institutions and medical schools. In 2011, lawmakers approved expanding that to 36 other states.

The other license deals with similar materials from sites run by the U.S. Department of Energy, such as Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Hanford Site in Washington state and other federal facilities.

Waste Control Specialists’ majority owner is Dallas billionaire and heavyweight GOP political donor Harold Simmons, who has given millions of dollars to Republicans, including Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

___

March 23, 2012

Mose Buchele
KUT Austin

Low-level radioactive waste will be on trucks crossing Texas before long.
Photo courtesy mark gallagher at flickr.com/markgallagher/

State officials have given final approval to a plan allowing radioactive waste from across the country to be brought to Texas for storage. For StateImpact Texas, KUT’s Mose Buchele reports that the waste has people watching its transportation and storage closely.

We also want to make sure that it’s packaged properly, and that somebody is looking at all of those aspects.

Listen to the news story at KUT.

February 24, 2012

By Nicholas Confessore
The Caucus Blog New York Times

A Texas political action committee controlled by the nation’s pre-eminent Republican donor asked more than a dozen state lawmakers to return campaign contributions they received from the PAC last year, acknowledging that the contributions had violated state law.

The PAC, known as WCS-Texas Solutions, gave $65,000 to 18 Republican and Democratic candidates in 2011. But all of that money came from a single donor: Harold C. Simmons, a wealthy Texas businessman who is one of the top donors to Gov. Rick Perry and has emerged as the top donor to Republican "super PACs" in the presidential race this year.

Texas law requires that a state PAC have at least 10 donors, a provision designed to ensure that such committees are not used as shell organizations for donors wishing to hide their identities. Texans for Public Justice, a watchdog organization, filed a complaint on Thursday with the Texas Ethics Commission alleging that the contributions by WCS-Texas Solutions PAC violated that rule. Waste Control Specialists is a Simmons-owned company that stores radioactive and other hazardous waste.

The PAC quickly acknowledged the violation and said it would ask the lawmakers to return the donations while it brought itself into compliance with the law.

"The PAC did commit a violation by exceeding the contribution amount allowable prior to securing 10 contributing members," said William J. Lindquist, the group’s treasurer and a senior executive at one of Mr. Simmons’s other companies, Valhi Inc. "As the treasurer of the PAC, that oversight was my responsibility. We are working with the Ethics Commission now to get into full compliance."

The decision was reported on Friday by The Texas Tribune and The Dallas Morning News.

Craig McDonald, the director of Texans for Public Justice, said in a statement, “quot;We can only pray Simmons is exercising more caution in handling his nuclear waste than he is handling campaign contributions."