With the Nuclear Regulatory Commission moving toward updated regulations on disposal of both low-level waste and Greater Than Class C waste, the governor of Texas is reluctant to allow the latter in his state.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) in a May letter to the head of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality said his administration remains “cautious” about disposal of any Greater Than Class C (GTCC) waste in Andrews County or elsewhere in the Lone Star state.
In February, Andrews County Commissioner’s Court adopted a resolution banning GTCC waste at the Waste Control Specialists site in Andrews County.
Disposal of GTCC waste in Texas’ low-level radioactive waste disposal facility “is currently prohibited,” according to the existing Texas Commission on Environmental Quality rule, Abbott said in the May 24 letter to the commission’s executive director, Kelly Keel.
“Caution remains the watchword with respect to GTCC, for nothing I have learned about this issue to date has changed my views in exercising its regulatory authority over the Andrews County facility,” Abbott said.
“On April 23, 2019, I sent a letter to NRC and the U.S. Department of Energy to ‘oppose any increase in the amount or concentration of radioactivity authorized for disposal at the facility in Andrews County, Texas,’ which would include GTCC waste,” the May Abbott letter, viewed by Exchange Monitor, says in writing.
Abbott goes on to reiterate his opposition to Consolidated Interim Storage of spent nuclear fuel in Texas. House Bill 7 effectively blocked the project in Texas, Abbott said. He said he has pressed DOE to expedite removal of stranded transuranic waste from the Waste Control Specialist site in Andrews County.
GTCC waste may include transuranic radionuclides, for example, isotopes of plutonium, which contaminate nuclear fuel cycle waste. It also includes canisters of waste, akin to transuranic waste, currently stored at the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York, according to DOE.
In 2018, DOE issued a final environmental assessment looking at the practicality of using the 1,300-acre Waste Control Specialists site as an alternative for GTCC disposal. This came after a 2017 report to Congress in which DOE said the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., is the preferred alternative for GTCC waste, but commercial sites should be considered given WIPP’s reduced throughput following a February radiological accident that shut WIPP for three years.