A rulemaking now underway at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality would reduce certain fees for disposal of radioactive waste at Waste Control Specialists’ site in West Texas in hopes of driving up the company’s business.
The agency in late 2017 initiated a rulemaking to amend a number of components 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 changed 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 a number of other states send their low-level radioactive waste to the designated disposal facility, which Waste Control Specialists operates at its waste complex in Andrews County.
The state charges waste volume and radioactivity fees for LLRW shipped to the WCS site, along with a number of surcharges: currently $10,000 for containers weighing 10,000 to 50,000 pounds, and $20,000 for containers weighing more than 50,000 pounds; $100 to $400 based on the container surface dose rate; a $75,000 per shipment irradiated hardware surcharge; and a $2,500 per cask surcharge.
The proposed amendments would include eliminating the $10,000 weight surcharge for containers weighing 10,000 to 50,000 pounds; the $350 biological waste (untreated) charge; and the $2,500 per-cask cask-handling charge; among others.
“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.
