Legislation in Texas’ Senate amended this week to expand annual imported curie capacity at Waste Control Specialists’ disposal site to 300,000 came under fire from other senators at a Natural Resources Committee meeting yesterday. Sen. Robert Duncan (R) questioned the proposed legislation’s requirement that Class A radioactive wastes from in-compact states Texas and Vermont be exported. “The reason we built this facility in the first place was to accommodate the compact and low-level waste, which is primarily Class A,” Duncan said. “We still need to have this volume capacity for Class A waste … for compact generators, for the folks we built this site for in the first place. So if we’re going to encourage the importation of more curies, with regard to class B and C waste, then we’re basically going to limit capacity for Class A waste.”
But Sen. Kel Seliger (R), who drafted this legislation as well as the 2011 bill that allowed WCS to accept imported waste, defended the move to encourage exportation of Class A waste. State statute already limits how many curies the site can take overall, Seliger said, and statute also reserves 70 percent of the site’s overall capacity for in-compact states. “There are alternative disposal sites for Class A waste, but there is not for B and C. So the conscious decision was not to take as much Class A waste, to take more Class B and C, which would then be volume reduced,” Seliger said yesterday. “Is there an economic motive? Absolutely. There’s more money for Class B and C waste, there’s also no other place for it to go.”
Additionally, Sen. Glenn Hegar (R) questioned raising the cap on fees being charged to WCS to bulk up a cleanup fund from $500,000 to $150 million. “I’m not opposed to raising the cap, let me be clear, I know some other states have a much higher cap than the state of Texas,” Hegar said. “My question is do the combinations of mechanisms, do we need it to be as high as $150 million?” Seliger said that the Department of Energy’s Hanford cleanup site is a good example of why that amount may be necessary to have, just in case. “Experience tells us that in places like Hanford, Wash. and at the Idaho National Laboratories in Idaho, that any sort of remediation is enormously expensive,” Seliger said. “When we look at Barnwell S.C., their current fund is at about $163 million and in [EnergySolutions’ Clive disposal site in] Utah it’s $98 million. Substantial funds. … This is what insulates the taxpayers of Texas in one form or another from bearing the full brunt of expenses should there be some exigency way off in the future.”
