The congressman representing a west Texas community that could one day play host to an interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel nabbed an assignment on the House’s primary nuclear-waste policy committee.
Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas), who represents the Lone Star State’s 11th district, was assigned Jan. 11 to the House Energy and Commerce Committee alongside nine new Republican members. Pfluger, elected in 2020, counts Andrews, Texas, among his constituents. He opposes Interim Storage Partners’ (ISP) proposal to build a spent-fuel storage depot there.
Pfluger in March sponsored the House-side version of a bill that, if made law, would have prohibited the use of federal funds for developing privately-operated interim storage facilities such as the ISP site.
When the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in September licensed the proposed Andrews project, Pfluger in a statement called the decision “a massive blunder.”
“The majority of folks who live and work in this community are vehemently opposed to this waste being stored in Andrews,” Pfluger said at the time.
ISP, a joint venture between Waste Control Specialists (WCS) and Orano USA, plans to build its interim storage site at WCS’s existing low-level nuclear waste disposal facility in Andrews. If built, the company has said that the site could store up to 40,000 tons of spent fuel — about half of the nation’s total inventory of fuel left over from civilian nuclear power generation.
