A rulemaking now underway at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality would reduce certain charges for disposal of radioactive waste at Waste Control Specialists’ facility in West Texas in hopes of driving up business at the financially struggling company.
The state agency in late 2017 initiated the rulemaking to amend a number of segments of Title 30 of the Texas Administrative Code, which covers environmental quality regulations. The process is expected to cover much of 2018.
Among the components to be revised is Section 336.1310, which requires that disposal fees charged to the members of the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact be no more than fees listed in the administrative code. Non-member states that send their waste to the compact facility must be charged more than the listed disposal fees.
Vermont and Texas are the only members of the agreement, but other states send their low-level radioactive waste to the designated compact disposal facility, which is owned by Texas and operated by Dallas-based Waste Control Specialists at its waste complex in Andrews County.
“Waste Control Specialists … has requested rulemaking to reduce the number and price of surcharges in order to increase the waste they receive from out-of-compact generators,” Charles Maguire, director of TCEQ’s Radioactive Materials Division, wrote in a Nov. 15, 2017, letter to the agency’s commissioners.
The amendment to Section 336.1310 would reduce the minimum rate for waste generators outside of the compact and the top rate for Texas and Vermont, Maguire noted. That could reduce disposal expenses for all waste generators, he stated in the letter.
Under the LLRW disposal compact, waste generators are charged volume and radioactivity fees for material shipped to the WCS site for disposal, along with a number of surcharges. If the commission approves the rulemaking, the following fee and surcharge changes would take effect: the weight surcharge of $10,000 per container weighing 10,000 to 50,000 pounds would be eliminated, as would the cask-handling surcharge of $2,500 per cask; the $350 biological waste charge would also be scratched, along with the carbon 14 inventory charge of $1 per millicurie and special nuclear material charge of $100 per gram;; nearly all surface dose rate surcharges would go, not including an amended $400 surcharge for containers with a surface dose rate of greater than 500 roentgens per hour.
A formal proposal is due by April 4, followed by a public comment period on the rulemaking from April 20 to May 21. The updated rule would go before the commission on Sept. 5; assuming it is adopted, the revisions would be published in the Texas Register on Sept. 21 and take effect on Sept. 27.
It was not immediately clear whether there is any estimate on the degree to which the successful rulemaking might increase Waste Control Specialists’ business. A TCEQ spokesman said specifics would be discussed during the rulemaking process.
The rulemaking comes on top of fee reductions the Texas Legislature approved last year for shipments of waste to the WCS compact facility. The updated fee system, in place through Aug. 21, 2019, reduces the gross revenue fees for customers within the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact from 10 percent to 5 percent, while fees for non-compact customers dropped from 31.25 percent to 16.25 percent.
Waste Control Specialists operates one of four sites in the United States licensed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for disposal of low-level radioactive waste. From April 2012 to August 2017, the WCS compact site disposed of 90,847.9 cubic feet of LLRW from out-of-compact generators and 21,787.3 cubic feet from in-compact generators, according to the latest figures from the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission.
Waste Control Specialists is a wholly owned subsidiary of holding company Valhi Inc., and has been a drag on its owner’s profits for years. It posted a $167 million loss for the third quarter of 2017, though that was due to a long-lived asset impairment charge related to its canceled merger with Salt Lake City-based rival EnergySolutions.
The $367 million deal was announced in 2015, but the U.S. Justice Department in November 2016 sued to block the merger on the grounds that it would undercut competition in the LLRW disposal industry in 36 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia. EnergySolutions operates two of the other licensed LLRW disposal sites, in Utah and South Carolina.
Following a two-week bench trial in spring 2017, a federal judge last June blocked the WCS acquisition. The companies canceled their merger rather than appeal the ruling. Since then, Valhi has been looking for another buyer for Waste Control Specialists, though no official agreements have been reported.
Waste Control Specialists’ plan to build and operate a consolidated interim spent fuel storage facility at its disposal complex also remains in limbo. The company filed its application for a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license in April 2016, but asked the agency a year later to suspend its review of the application ahead of the then-pending buyout by EnergySolutions.
“Uncertainty remains” on the future of the application, Marc Dapas, director of the NRC’s Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards Office, said Thursday during a presentation to the commission.
The facility would be designed to hold up to 40,000 metric tons of spent fuel from U.S. nuclear power reactors until the Energy Department builds a permanent repository for the waste. More than 75,000 metric tons of used reactor fuel is now stored on-site at facilities around the country.
