Reality Of Andrews County Radioactive Waste Disposal Not What Was Advertised With HB 1567

[There is a quick update at the bottom.—VL, 4:55 p.m.]

Back in 2003, the Texas Legislature passed–with the wheels of lawmaking significantly greased by contributions from the company who expected to open the first facilities under the bill–HB 1567, which would allow for the disposal of low-level radioactive waste in Texas.

The funny thing is that the bill, authored by the late State Rep. Buddy West (R-Odessa), was sold to the people of Texas, and the Legislature, as something that Texas had to have. In fact, a picture was painted at the time that essentially every medical procedure that uses radioactive elements from x-rays to biomedical research would grind to a screeching halt if Texas didn’t have somewhere to dispose of its own waste. From the House Research Organization’s analysis of the bill in 2003:

With one of only two disposal sites available to Texas generators scheduled to close in five years, the state needs to move ahead with developing a waste-disposal facility in Texas.
Only two disposal sites in the nation — in Barnwell, S.C., and Clive, Utah — accept low-level radioactive waste from Texas generators. Beginning in 2008, the Barnwell site no longer will accept waste from Texas, nor from any states outside its regional compact. The Utah site accepts only the least radioactive class of low-level waste. Without a facility in Texas, many users of radioactive materials could find themselves forced to store radioactive waste on site indefinitely, stop using radioactive materials, or move to a state where a disposal facility was available.

Radioactive waste is a byproduct of many beneficial activities. Texas has more than 1,700 licensed users of radioactive materials that could generate low-level radioactive waste. Medical and scientific research, life-saving medical procedures, and nuclear power generation all produce low-level radioactive waste. Radioactive particles also are used in consumer products, such as smoke detectors, computer disks, and indicator lights in kitchen appliances. Currently, low-level radioactive waste from these processes and products is stored at nearly 60 sites across the state.

Establishing a facility to dispose of Texas’ low-level radioactive waste would improve homeland security. Although security at the current temporary storage sites is adequate, it would be far safer to dispose of the waste permanently in a single facility. Moreover, containing all of Texas’ low-level radioactive waste in a single facility would allow isolation and disposal away from the state’s population centers. [Emphasis added]

So, lawmakers (with the Republican majority already significantly lubed up with campaign cash from waste disposal advocates) get scared shitless that M.D. Anderson will have to shut its doors and move to New Hampshire (or some other Yankee place) because it can’t dispose of x-ray waste. Or, at least, they want you to think that. Because it is likely they knew what would really happen all along: the Texas sites would get some of the nastiest and most undesirable waste from all over the nation, because, hey, it’s Texas and nobody installed by the governor at the myriad of regulatory agencies that have to permit these things really gives a shit about what may be seeping into our groundwater.

As a result, we get this, wherein not only is nuclear waste coming to Texas, but a myriad of other waste which–surprise, surprise–isn’t nuclear but is just as bad is coming to the dump sites the state has permitted for nuclear waste:

Ever wondered what’s at the bottom of New York’s Hudson River? Andrews, a small West Texas town 350 miles west of Dallas, is about to find out.

Last month, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality approved an application to allow the disposal of low-level radioactive waste in a site just outside of Andrews. Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons, who controls Waste Control Specialists, the company that applied for the permit and owns the site, has been waiting for this moment for years — and, as a recent D CEO article suggests, stands to reap some fat financial benefits from the deal. But before WCS gets any radioactive waste, its Andrews site will have the privilege of housing some of New York City’s worst pollutants: millions of cubic yards of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), a carcinogenic compound.

For three decades, General Electric legally dumped PCBs into the Hudson River. In 2002, the EPA declared the river a Superfund site and ordered GE to dredge it and remove the toxic compounds. GE was then responsible for finding a place to dispose of the contaminated sediments; in 2007, it chose the WCS site in Andrews. GE rep Mark Behan tells Unfair Park dredging and sediment transport (via railroad) will begin this May and last through October. Though this isn’t WCS’s first contract to store PCBs, it will be its largest — and possibly most lucrative.

And the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club is begging the EPA to stop sending them to West Texas.

Exporting environmental problems is hardly unprecedented, but the Sierra Club’s Neil Carman says there was an alternative: neutralizing the toxic compounds before they even left the Hudson.

“The technology has existed for 15 years to neutralize PCBs,” Carman says. “There’s no reason in the world we should be shipping them elsewhere.”

But according to Behan, dredging, not neutralization, is all the EPA ordered. And in the EPA’s view, there is a reason.

“The most cost-effective way to proceed was shipping sediments to [an out-of-state] storage facility,” says Kristen Skopeck, the EPA’s community liaison for the Hudson cleanup. “We’re trying to do it as quickly, as expediently, as [possible].” Which does nothing to soothe the Sierra Club.

Medical waste? I think not. Is it really necessary to bring all of this toxic waste to Texas? Not really:

“All they’re doing is relocating toxic waste,” he tells Unfair Park. “They’re moving a problem from one location to another [and] creating problems for future generations to solve.”

And, if that isn’t enough, check out what these PCB’s really are:

PCBs, unlike nuclear waste, don’t degrade over time; they’ll be just as toxic hundreds of years from now. But their container drums will at some point have to be cleaned and replaced. Carman also says earthquakes in nearby New Mexico and sensitive aquifers underneath the storage site could lead to groundwater contamination. An SEC filing from Valhi (the Simmons-owned parent company, which owns 90 percent of WCS) in 2002 insists that “based on  extensive drilling by the oil and gas industry in the area, Waste Control Specialists does not believe there are any underground aquifers or other usable sources of water directly below the site.”

How’d this happen? Well, nuclear waste kingpin Harold Simmons is smart. Very smart. He got the state to pass a law to allow him to truck in nuclear waste and then got the same site permitted by the EPA to do something different in addition to taking nuclear waste–something the state has no control over:

But TCEQ spokesman Terry Clawson says the waste storage permits WCS holds are granted by the EPA, under the Toxic Substances Control Act — “for which TCEQ has no jurisdiction,” Clawson wrote in an e-mail sent to Unfair Park Friday. He writes, “At present, the TCEQ may not require an Environmental Impact Statement for the WCS facility.”

You could make a documentary on bad public policy about this. Oh, and Waste Control’s claims that there are no aquifers, etc. in the area? Even the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which under the leadership of a string of flat-earth-loving political appointees would have trouble declaring that a four story champaign fountain slopping crude oil into the Sabine River was a hazzard to anyone’s health, wasn’t satisfied that the crap Waste Control plans to truck to Andrews County on the nuclear side of the business won’t contaminate groundwater–groundwater, mind you, that Waste Control maintains does not exist (thank God nobody sent Harold Simmons to find oil at Spindletop, or we’d be using candles and slate boards):

For example, WCS has been unable to conclusively show that the waste will not come into contact with groundwater, raising the specter of radioactive contamination of the Ogallala Aquifer and the smaller Dockum Aquifer. As a fix, TCEQ has put into the license requirements that WCS monitor water elevations during excavation of the landfill, among other conditions.

We talk a lot about “bad public policy” on this site. Here, you have a prime example. The Texas Legislature passed a bill to rectify a percieved (ok, we’ll say, for the sake of argument, “an actual”) problem: there was nowhere in Texas to dispose of our own nuclear waste. So, to fix the problem, they craft a bill to benefit a single corporation without a provison to say, require that other waste that isn’t nuclear be stored on the same site just so Harold Simmons can make a profit, and you have not one but potentially two serious environmental disasters on your hands.

UPDATE: John McClelland, who ran for state house against Myra Crownover last cycle, reminds us of one of his campaign television commercials, which addressed this very issue:

Crownover, of course, isn’t the only Republican who is guilty (see links earlier in the story), but this commercial is probably the only TV commercial ever aired in Texas actually seeking to hold one of the Republicans who took cash from Simmons & Waste Control’s PAC and then voted for the legislation, so it is worth noting–and remembering.

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