Waste Texas

Waste Texas The Texas Observer 7 March 09 Peggy Pryor grew up the poor daughter of a roughneck, maligned as “oilfield trash,” but she prides herself on having good horse sense. For more than a decade, this feisty West Texas woman has seen something terribly wrong with plans to turn a former ranch near her hometown into the final resting place for massive amounts of radioactive and hazardous waste. Not too many years ago, Pryor could be found raising hell trying to stop the dump. These days, she’s more or less resigned to the inevitable.

“I still protest every once in a while,” she says. But in the end, “I don’t think I did anything other than scream and yell, and cause them to have a little headache.”

The corporation Pryor tried to fight, Waste Control Specialists LLC, owned by Dallas billionaire and major Republican donor Harold Simmons, has spent the last 20 years pulling political, business, and regulatory strings to do what no other company in the nation has been able to do in three decades: license and build a new radioactive waste dump. Waste Control has lobbied successfully for a change in state law to privatize radioactive waste disposal, muscled out more experienced competitors, beaten back environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists, and—perhaps most remarkably—turned the majority of Andrews’ citizens into the dump’s fiercest boosters.

The company now has in hand—a technicality or two notwithstanding—two licenses to bury about 60 million cubic feet of low-level radioactive waste at a site near the Texas-New Mexico line 30 miles west of Andrews. Much of the waste will be radioactive for millions of years; projected profits have been estimated in the billions…………………………..Waste Control prevailed. In 2003, after several failed attempts, the company finally convinced the Texas Legislature, lubricated by campaign contributions and a team of lobbyists, to change state law to allow a private outfit to handle radioactive waste. With that accomplished, Waste Control spent the next five years navigating an environmental and safety review by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality that Waste Control President Rod Baltzer calls “one of the most rigorous reviews in the history of mankind.”That process is now almost complete. Andrews is on its way to becoming the nation’s preeminent radioactive waste destination. Still, the company is chafing at the limitations imposed by the disposal licenses.
For Pryor, the idea of letting a for-profit company handle, transport, and bury waste that will remain dangerous for tens of thousands of years is crazy at best. State engineers and geologists largely agree. (See “Good to Glow,” April 4, 2008) They’ve publicly predicted the landfill will contaminate groundwater and pose unacceptable risks to residents. At least three state experts have quit the environmental commission in the past two years to protest what they see as politically motivated fast-tracking of Waste Control’s licenses.

Waste Texas by Forrest Wilder – The Texas Observer