Archive for the ‘WIPP’ Category

March 27, 2014

Hudspeth County Herald

In an interview with the Herald last Wednesday, March 19, Loving County Judge Skeet Lee Jones talked about his county’s bid to become the final resting place for the nation’s spent nuclear fuel – and about how the project might move forward in the years to come.

Jones said Loving County officials began to consider the waste proposal when they were approached by representatives of AFCI Texas, an Austin-based company that is seeking to develop a long-term storage facility for high-level waste from the nation’s 100-plus commercial nuclear reactors.

The same AFCI representatives contacted Hudspeth County officials in November 2011; at that time, the company was considering a piece of state land near Fort Hancock for the project, a parcel the company had identified based on recommendations from the Texas General Land Office. Hudspeth County officials told the AFCI representatives, who included the company’s co-founder, Austin attorney Bill Jones, that residents here were unlikely to welcome the project.

AFCI’s pitch found a more receptive audience in Loving County.

Jones said that part of what had motivate his commissioners court to embrace the plan was the perception that high-level nuclear-waste storage was likely to come to the area, regardless of whether Loving County signed on or not. Loving County is situated at the edge of the existing "nuclear alley" that includes the Waste Isolation Pilot Project east of Carlsbad, N.M., the National Enrichment Facility at Eunice, N.M. and Waste Control Specialists’ low-level radioactive-waste site at Andrews, Texas. The Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance, formed of officials from those two New Mexico counties, is actively lobbying for the high-level, spent-fuel facility for New Mexico, must opposite the state line from Loving County.

"What got our attention was that there was a spot picked just across the state line, within rock-throwing distance of our county," Jones said. "Instead of just sharing the risk, we thought we should try to get a return monetarily for the county."

AFCI envisions storing the used nuclear rods – a total of about 70,000 tons of waste material – in heavily reinforced casks aboveground, on concrete pads that would be spread over about 1,000 acres. Jones said county officials are considering a site in the northern part of Loving County, near the state line, as a possible location for the facility. Jones said that portion of the county has been less impacted than other areas by the ongoing boom in oil-and-gas activity.

Before going public with their interest in the project, Jones said he and other county officials had spoken with some Loving County residents about the proposal. He said there was "not a lot of opposition," though he acknowledged that, "whenever you say ‘nuclear,’ it’s like saying ‘rattlesnake’ – people get scared."

After visiting with local residents, the county judge said that he and Bill Jones and another AFCI representative had traveled to Austin, to meet with Texas General Land Office officials, Gov. Rick Perry and others, and to Washington, D.C., where they met with Texas’ two U.S. senators and with Congressional representatives for the region. Jones said that all the officials with whom they spoke welcomed the proposal.

"There was no opposition from anybody," County Judge Jones said. "In fact, there was quite a bit of support from most of the people we talked to."

The United States has been struggling with where to store spent nuclear fuel since the late 1950s. For years, a site in Nevada called Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, was planned as a waste site. Local opposition to the project intensified – and the Yucca Mountain plan was effectively scrapped in 2009.

The U.S. Department of Energy will ultimately determine the site for the high-level waste, which, in the absent of a storage facility, is currently being held on site an nuclear power plants across the country. Besides Texas and New Mexico, other states – including Nevada, Mississippi and Idaho – are in the hunt for the facility.

Joe Straus, the speaker of the Texas House, has instructed the legislature to produce recommendations on state and federal action that would be needed to bring a waste-disposal or interim storage site for the spent nuclear rods to Texas. It is unclear whether waste from Texas’ four reactors could begin traveling to a site in Loving County or elsewhere before federal officials settle on a site.

If Loving County were selected be federal officials, it would likely be more than a decade before spent nuclear fuel would begin traveling from reactors in other parts of the country to West Texas. Public hearings and a permitting process would precede the construction of a storage site, and Jones said groundbreaking on a facility was not likely to occur any sooner than 2024.

In the wake of the dispute over the Yucca Mountain, federal officials indicated that local consent would be a prerequisite for a new location. A Loving County project would probably require support not only from within Loving County but from elsewhere in the region to move forward.

Jones said there are several factors that make Loving County – and the region more generally – an attractive place for high-level radioactive-waste storage. Low rainfall is one of those factors, Jones said; if there were a leak from the site, the region’s aridity would reduce likelihood of water sources becoming contaminated. Loving County is bounded on the west by the Pecos River, and Jones said that, while the river’s proximity could be an issue of concern, the locations under consideration drain to the east, rather than towards the river.

Jones said that the spent fuel would have to be brought in by rail, and rail lines are another factor that situate Loving County well for the project. Also, the region’s sparse population is an asset for Loving County’s bid; Loving County is the least populous county in the nation – the 2010 Census recorded 82 residents – though the ongoing oil-and-gas boom has brought many temporary residents to the county in recent years.

Radioactive-waste storage elsewhere in the region has been a boon for local economies, and Jones said an interim-storage facility for the waste would create a "few hundred jobs" in Loving County. The county could also receive millions in payment from AFCI. The big economic development, however, would come if the spent fuel were to be recycled for subsequent use, Jones said.

Japan, France and other countries that rely heavily on nuclear power process and recycle spent fuel; though the recycling technology was developed in the United States, Jones said, recycling is not currently permitted here. AFCI believes that, at some point, that will change, and spent U.S. fuel could be recycled at the Loving County facility. That is part of the reason the company plans to store the waste in aboveground casks.

"The big money is in processing and recycling the spent fuel," Jones said. "Recycling would involve thousands of jobs, effecting counties across the region – you’d have people who would be driving out of Hobbs and Odessa-Midland to work here."

Whether or not the waste were recycled, Jones said the idea that a facility in Loving County or elsewhere would be an "interim storage facility," as state and federal officials sometimes suggest, was unrealistic. The weight of the material alone, he said, would mean that once it had been transported to a location, it would not be likely to be taken elsewhere.

Jones said that he believes that while the benefits of a high-level waste site outweigh the risks, it is inevitable that there will be an accident of some kind at such a facility. He said the county would need to aggressively prepare for such an event.

"Anyone that says there won’t ever be an accident – that would be a blatant lie," he said. "There’s inevitably going to be an accident – you have to be prepared. That’s the way it is with anything."

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.

Wednesday, April 02, 2014

ABC13/Associated Press

LUBBOCK, TX — Gov. Rick Perry is pushing lawmakers to establish a location in Texas for storing the state’s high-level radioactive waste.

Citing a report from the state’s environmental agency, Perry tells Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and House Speaker Joe Straus in a letter that Texas is suited to store spent nuclear fuel from the state’s four commercial reactors and that a solution is needed.

Texas waste is now stored on site by the utilities that operate the reactors. But Perry wants to develop a single storage location until a national repository for nuclear waste is established.

In Perry’s March 28 letter, the state’s longest-serving governor chided the federal government for its inaction on dealing with the issue of high-level waste.

"The citizens of Texas – and every other state currently storing radioactive waste – have been betrayed by their federal government," he wrote to the two lawmakers last week.

Perry was referring to Nevada’s conflict-ridden Yucca Mountain site, which utility companies in the U.S. have paid billions toward building. It doesn’t appear viable at this point, so spent fuel in the U.S. is currently stored in pools or in dry casks at the more than 100 commercial nuclear reactors. Texas’ share of those billions is about $700 million, the letter states.

The letter from Perry is the second time this year a high-ranking state official has weighed in on the topic. In January, Straus directed lawmakers to "determine the potential economic impact of permitting a facility in Texas."

Perry urged Dewhurst and Straus to relay the high-level radioactive waste report, which Perry asked for in September, by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to appropriate committees in the House and the Senate.

There is currently no disposal site in the United States for spent fuel rods from reactors across the country – including Texas’ four reactors at Comanche Peak in Glen Rose and the South Texas Project near Bay City. In November, a federal court ruled the U.S. government had "no credible plan" to permanently dispose of high-level waste. The court’s decision came after the federal government collected billions of dollars from utilities for decades to fund the Yucca site.

Texas is already home to a disposal site for low-level radioactive waste, which includes contaminated protective clothing, mops, filters, reactor water treatment residues, equipment and tools. Chuck McDonald, spokesman for Dallas-based Waste Control Specialists, which operates the low-level site in Andrews County, said the company is talking to officials there.

"We would certainly take a hard look at it," he said of a high-level storage site.

An interim storage site likely would keep the high-level waste for numerous decades before it eventually would be buried permanently at a yet-to-be-determined geological repository.

Officials in Loving County in West Texas are interested in having a high-level waste storage site, as is the Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance LLC, which is made up of officials in Carlsbad and Hobbs, and Eddy and Lea counties in southeastern New Mexico.

"We have no choice but to begin looking for a safe and secure solution" for high-level waste in Texas," Perry’s letter states.

Cyrus Reed with the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club said there is no rush in Texas to store spent rods. The four reactors still have ample storage capacity, he said. And were Waste Control to build a storage facility for Texas’ high-level waste, that could change.

"It can evolve into the national solution," Reed said, referring to how Waste Control went from taking only low-level waste from Texas and Vermont, members of a compact, to accepting it from dozens of other states after lawmakers voted to allow it.

(Copyright ©2014 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

Apr 3, 2014

BY JOSEPH L. KOLB
Reuters

(ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico) – Inspectors ventured into an underground nuclear waste disposal vault in New Mexico on Wednesday to begin an on-site investigation of a radiation leak nearly seven weeks ago that exposed 21 workers and forced a shutdown of the facility.

The mission by experts from the company that manages the site marked the first time since the mishap that workers have been sent deep into the salt caverns of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, where drums of plutonium-tainted refuse from nuclear weapons factories and laboratories are buried.

The unexplained leak of radiation, a small amount of which escaped to the surface, ranked as the worst accident and one of the few blemishes on the plant’s safety record since it opened in 1999.

Located about 25 miles east of Carlsbad, New Mexico, in the Chihuahuan Desert, the facility is the nation’s only permanent repository for the U.S. government’s stockpile of nuclear waste, much of it left over from the Cold War era.

The waste, including discarded machinery, clothing and other materials contaminated with plutonium or other radioisotopes heavier than uranium, are sealed in chambers carved into salt formations more than 2,100 feet beneath the desert surface.

The plant has been closed to further deliveries of waste since February 14, when an air-monitoring system detected an unexplained release of radiation underground.

Although an alarm automatically switched the ventilation system to filtration to keep radiation from spreading, trace amounts of manmade isotopes such as americium-241, a byproduct of nuclear weapons manufacturing, were measured at the surface.

Testing of workers at the site, all of whom were above ground at the time, showed that 21 were contaminated, though managers of the plant said the level of exposure was too low to pose any health risks.

SOURCE OF LEAK UNDETERMINED

The U.S. Department of Energy and the contractor that runs the repository, Nuclear Waste Partnership LLC, have said there was no threat to the public or environment.

The source of the radiation leak has not been determined, but a DOE spokesman at the agency’s Carlsbad office, Ben Williams, said one theory is there might have been a structural collapse at one of the storage compartments, or panels.

Experts suspect the release was most likely to have originated in one compartment, Panel 7, where material had recently been added, Williams said.

The mishap came two weeks after a truck caught fire at the plant in an accident in which several workers suffered smoke inhalation. Plant officials have said the two incidents were not related.

Additional radiation sensors lowered into access shafts of the cavern since early March indicated no further radiation leaks in the surrounding air, paving the way for the re-entry by inspectors on Wednesday afternoon.

An eight-member inspection team consisting of radiological and mine-safety experts descended by elevator to the underground interior of the plant to establish a base of operations and measure radiation levels, DOE spokeswoman Carrie Meyer said.

They found there was no airborne contamination, the DOE said in a news release. A second team went underground 30 minutes later, the agency said.

Inspectors were dressed in protective gear and special lapel monitors to measure personal exposure for their limited time spent in the storage facility.

“Today’s efforts were a critical first step toward future entries that will expand the clean base of operations and allow workers to travel further into the mine to identify the suspected source of the radiological release,” Williams said.

In the meantime, nuclear waste that had been due for shipment to the repository from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, about 300 miles across the state, is being shipped instead to a privately run facility in Texas for temporary storage there, Williams said.

(Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman; Editing by Cynthia Johnston, Alex Dobuzinskis and Jeremy Laurence)