The following interview with WCS President Rod Baltzer was performed last week by RW Monitor Reporter Jeremy L. Dillon on the sidelines of the 2014 Waste Management Symposium in Phoenix, Ariz.
WCS appears to have really made some changes this year with the recent announcement of receiving approval for exempt waste bulk disposal in its RCRA facility. Can you talk a little about that and what that does for WCS?
Yes, absolutely. It has been a very good year. So for the exempt waste, we basically got authorization where we can accept exempt waste up to 10 percent of the Class A limit, and put that into our hazardous waste landfill. That will help with disposal costs. Obviously, we don’t have the concrete liner, the concrete canisters in there, but this waste is very low activity and we actually ran through our state performance assessment that we did for our low-level facilities for our hazardous waste facility and it more than met all the regulatory requirements. It’s a very robust facility for all that kind of waste.
Have you been able to line up work yet for that new capability?
It’s been received well. We haven’t taken our first shipment yet. We expect that to happen soon. But we just got the authorization in January, so we had to kind of start working through contract issues and things like that—putting it out in the market. Over the next couple months we should start taking that waste and putting it in the landfill.
Where do things stand with WCS getting new Type-B shipping casks delivered?
We’ve got the first one delivered. The second one will be here the first part of April and the third one will in the first part of May, so kind of boom, boom. All of the trailers are here, just waiting on the certificate of compliance from the NRC. We understand that process is going well, and we should get that shortly.
When you get those up and running, what will those casks mean for WCS?
Well, then we will have our own transportation piece so there won’t be anybody between us and our customer, and we can take it seamlessly from the customer’s site to our facility.
Where do things stand with WCS getting authorization to accept depleted uranium on-site?
What we did was file a major amendment back in August and TCEQ [the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality] has reviewed that. It’s administratively complete. We think it will go to technical notice soon. We put 400,000 cubic meters of depleted uranium in the performance assessment, which we think represents most of DOE’s inventory. And, it looks like our site is fine, and we can put all of that in our federal facility.
Texas’s Speaker of the House, Joe Strauss (R), recently came out with a charge for the House to look at the potential of high-level waste disposal in Texas. How involved has WCS been in that process?
It was an interesting charge when that came out. We didn’t have anything to do with it. I think it shows Texas and how forward thinking they are. Obviously, they have been very engaged with low-level waste for many years as we’ve gone through the legislative process and the regulatory process. I think they are comfortable with radioactive waste in general. Looking at low-level, they have seen some of the benefits of low-level disposal as we write checks every quarter to the state and Andrews County so I think they are taking the next step and seeing that there is a need. The federal government hasn’t really moved forward with interim storage — the Blue Ribbon Committee recommended it.
Texas has six reactors—two at STP, two at Comanche Peak, and one at Texas A&M and one at the University of Texas—and I think they are looking at what we have to do for our guys. Is there something we can do as a state to step up? And see where it goes from there as well. It will be interesting. We are definitely keeping our finger on the pulse. When you start talking about Texas and radioactive waste, our name gets brought up whether it’s low-level or something else.
With Harold Simmons’ passing back in December, there have been some rumors spreading around that WCS may potentially be up for sale by Valhi. Can you comment at all about that?
Yes, I have definitely heard lots of rumors, but I haven’t heard anything from Valhi about that. Harold was 82 and had had kidney transplants about six or seven years ago I guess, and obviously had a lot of succession plans in place and preparing for such an event for a long time. His core management team had been with him for about 30 years, each of them, and you saw some them nominated to the board after his passing. So, there’s nothing going on at Valhi. They aren’t looking to sell off the company or anything. They like the assets and holding they have.
They’ve got part of the enterprise is the Harold Simmons Foundation. They give a lot of money away to charity, a wide range of them. His daughters have been very involved with that and run that foundation. The company and its dividends helps funds that organization and allows them to do charitable giving. I think they would like to keep that together and keep moving forward. You saw Bill Lindquist, the CEO of WCS, added to the Valhi board so I don’t think they have plans for us to go anywhere any time soon.
So, what’s next for WCS?
Hopefully, we take a breath. We have all our landfills operating, new authorization for a lot of them. We have the new transportation services coming on. We’ll start taking some of the larger components of things later this year. So it’s just kind of a growth opportunity for us. And then, just talking to our customers to see what other needs there are. I’m sure there are some other things out there that we have not thought of, but we’ve got the full spectrum from hazardous waste exempt, A, B, C , storage of Greater-than-Class-C, transuranic waste, and now discussions in Texas on high-level waste. There’s always something to keep us from getting bored.
