By Enrique Rangel
Lubbock Online - January 15, 2009

Content Source

AUSTIN - Unless environmentalists win an 11th-hour legal battle, it looks like Andrews County will finally become a nuclear waste disposal site in July of next year.

That became clear Wednesday when the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality issued the final license to Waste Control Specialists, a Dallas-based company, to bury low-level radioactive waste in the sparsely populated West Texas county."
"WCS and the citizens of Andrews and Lea counties and the Permian Basin have been waiting for this day for many years," Chief Executive Officer William J. Lindquist said in a statement. "The state of Texas will now be able to meet its obligations to the power plants, hospitals, universities, research institutes and other industrial generators in the Texas Compact to permanently dispose of their low-level radioactive waste.

"This final license combined with the recently issued byproduct material disposal license and our existing permits and licenses gives WCS the broadest range of capabilities of any commercial enterprise in the United States for the storage, treatment and permanent disposal of hazardous, toxic, low-level and mixed low-level radioactive waste and radioactive byproduct material," Lindquist added.

Civic and business leaders in the city of Andrews, the county seat and main city in the county of nearly 13,000 residents, have said they welcome the nuclear waste site because it will create jobs and bring needed revenue to the community.

But Cyrus Reed, spokesman for the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, said that although his organization and others opposed to the nuclear waste site have lost recent battles, they are not ready to concede defeat.

"Obviously, we're extremely disappointed," Reed said. "With their (2-0 and one abstention) vote, the commissioners approved the nation's largest commercial radioactive waste site even when basic facts about the waste are not fully understood."

However, "the law is on our side," Reed added. "We can decide to appeal to a state district court and we are looking into that."

The license approved Wednesday grants WCS the authority to bring in more than 28 million cubic feet - and a million curies - of low-level radioactive waste, the Sierra Club said in a statement.

"As such, the (Andrews) site would eventually become the largest commercial low-level radioactive waste site in the world, with wastes remaining dangerous for tens of thousands of years," the statement said.

But state Sen. Kel Seliger, R-Amarillo, whose Senate District 31 includes Andrews County, and WCS officials say the project does not represent a threat to anyone in Andrews County and in neighboring communities because it is safe and based on pure science.

"WCS has 10 years of experience disposing of hazardous and toxic waste and treating and storing low-level radioactive waste at its current site, and it will have at least a year's experience disposing of radioactive byproduct material by the time low-level disposal operations begin," said company President Rodney Baltzer.

"WCS personnel are highly experienced in the safe, permanent disposal of toxic and hazardous waste and will soon begin disposing of byproduct material according to stringent state and federal guidelines and oversight," Baltzer said. "They are also highly experienced in the safe handling of waste similar to that which will be taken for disposal under this new license. We are eager to apply our expertise to low-level radioactive waste disposal."