Texas firm Waste Control Specialists shared an artist’s rendering of a potential new high-level nuclear waste storage site on Monday. Image provided by WCS
By Haley Hinkle
WASHINGTON– A Texas firm is seeking to open the country’s first facility for disposing of nuclear waste from commercial energy use, but opponents are concerned that the company is creating serious risks of radioactive exposure. The new facility would be a temporary storage place for high-level nuclear waste until it could be moved to a permanent location several decades down the road.
Some Texas citizens, as well as interest groups, have expressed serious concerns about the expansion of Waste Control Specialists’ operation, citing fears that the radioactive material could seep into the nearby Ogallala Aquifer in west Texas and taint its water supply.
Some groups also worry there are not sufficient safety measures to ensure people across the country are not exposed to radioactive material when the nuclear waste is transported to Texas. This new facility would storehigh-level radioactive wastes, which the Nuclear Regulatory Commission defines as materials and fuel wastes that were used inside of a nuclear reactor.
Since 2009, Waste Control Specialists has been licensed to store low-level wastes, which are typically materials that have been contaminated because of their proximity to nuclear reactions, though some of the stuff comes from inside reactors. The company in Andrews County, Texas is the only one in the country permitted to dispose of low-level materials.
The government has lost billions of dollars on its own past attempts to create nuclear waste repositories, including one at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
“Moving nuclear waste to a supposedly temporary consolidated storage place gives the delusion of a solution when in fact it will at least double the risks or de-facto create a permanent dump near one of the largest aquifers in the country,” said Diana D’Arrigo, radioactive waste project director at Nuclear Information Resource Service.
Her organization is one of several that have come together in a coalition against Waste Control Specialists’ planned expansion.
The company filed its intent to apply for a facility license with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last Friday.
On Monday, Beverly Marshall of the Nuclear Energy Institute, an organization that promotes nuclear technology use, said the Texas firm’s new facility is not a permanent solution to the waste problem, but is an important move toward the future.
Waste Control Specialists CEO Bill Lindquist addressed concerns that the new interim facility on 14,000 acres would become a permanent dumping ground for nuclear waste. Lindquist said interim storage for the purposes of the new facility is defined as a period of 60 years or more.
“Sixty years seems like a long time for a lot of people,” he said. “But I think everyone believes that it needs to be in a permanent, deep geological depository, which we’re not offering.”
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, there are 61 commercial nuclear energy plants currently operating in the U.S., with 99 total reactors. Four reactors were taken out of service in 2013. The Environmental Protection Agency says nuclear energy accounts for 20 percent of the country’s energy use.
Waste Control Specialists said it intends to obtain its license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by 2016 and begin accepting nuclear waste by 2020. Lindquist said it would first offer its services to Texas companies, then would turn to storing waste from nuclear energy facilities no longer in use around the country.
Creation of the new facility would involve the expansion of the company’s existing complex in Andrews County, Texas, just north of Midland, close to the New Mexico border.
