nuclear-news

After the release of Perry’s financial statement last week, Texans for Public Justice reported that three of the 37 companies in which Perry has stock holdings received public money from the governor’s job-creating Texas Enterprise Fund.

State Rep. Lon Burnam of Fort Worth, a leading opponent of Simmons’ nuclear waste application, also uses the term “crony capitalism” to describe the years-long regulatory and legislative effort that ultimately gave Simmons a monopoly over low-level nuclear waste disposal in Texas. Legislation passed this year allows up to 36 states, including Texas, to dump their nuclear refuse in a red-clay landfill at the 1,388-acre site just inside the Texas-New Mexico state line.

The successful outcome of the licensing effort – the nation’s first nuclear waste site to be approved in three decades – was another stunning business coup for Simmons, an 80-year-old investor whose net worth was $9.3 billion as of September…….

Three staff members of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality quit in protest in 2007, saying that higher ups in the agency ignored their concerns about possible groundwater contamination. TCEQ executive director Glenn Shankle, who recommended approval of one of the licenses, later became a contract lobbyist for the firm…….
Opponents, including Burnam, the Texas Office of Public Citizen and the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, requested an investigation by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency, saying that TCEQ “blatantly disregarded” staff warnings about environmental and health hazards….
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/09/25/2424572/perry-is-hounded-by-charges-of.html
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/09/25/2424572_p3/perry-is-hounded-by-charges-of.html#ixzz1Z5xchkvI

Simmons has donated $1.2 million to Perry’s campaigns for governor since 2001 and is Perry’s second-largest individual contributor, according to Texans for Public Justice, a state watchdog organization. He also has given $100,000 to an independent political action committee that sought to wage a write-in candidacy for Perry in the Iowa straw poll this year.

Perry’s connections with powerful Texas business interests during his nearly 11 years as governor have emerged as an issue in his presidential race, drawing charges from opponents that Perry’s time as Texas governor has been marked by a pattern of “crony capitalism.”

Simmons’ political influence is most apparent in his home state. Since the mid-1990s, Simmons’ Waste Control Specialists has successfully lobbied the legislature to privatize nuclear waste disposal – once a function of state government – and prevailed in the long regulatory battle to license the West Texas facility. In the 150-member state House of Representatives, 77 of those who voted in May to allow additional states to use the facility received Simmons’ donations totaling $138,350, according to Texans for Public Justice…..