The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) is scheduled next week to consider updating its regulations to reduce a specific fee for disposal of radioactive waste at a state-owned facility operated by Waste Control Specialists.
With approval from the commission, the curie inventory charge would be cut from $0.40 per millicurie (1/1000th of a curie) to $0.05 per millicurie for waste shipped to the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact facility in Andrews County.
That new amount would be the maximum paid by waste generators in the compact’s member states – currently just Texas and Vermont – and the minimum paid for waste shipped from any other state.
The request is intended to further increase Waste Control Specialists’ competitiveness in the national market for disposal of low-level waste – particularly after reductions in other charges expired last fall, according to the TCEQ notice for the March 20 request.
The rulemaking will be formally proposed during the April 8 meeting of the three commissioners, followed by publication on April 24 in the Texas Register and a potential hearing on May 18. The public comment period is planned for April 24 to May 26, with adoption of the new rule nominally on July 1.
The Compact Waste Facility has operated for eight years on Waste Control Specialists’ nearly 1,400-acre property along the Texas-New Mexico border. It is available for disposal of Class A, B, and C low-level wastes from Texas, Vermont, and 34 other states that are not members of a separate waste-disposal compact.
Texas is both the owner and licensor for the compact facility, with WCS the operator and licensee. From its opening through the end of September 2019 it received 121,744.83 cubic feet of waste from member states and 710,641.06 from nonparty generators.
Waste Control Specialists lost millions of dollars for its former owner, holding company Valhi Inc., before its January 2018 sale to private-equity firm J.F. Lehman & Co. The Dallas-based company’s earnings figures are no longer made public, but it has continued to look for opportunities to both reduce costs and increase revenue by attracting more customers.
