Texas has “a strong leg to stand on” in opposing an interim storage facility planned there, according to an op-ed published over the weekend by the Texas state lawmaker who sponsored the state’s recently-enacted ban on high-level nuclear-waste storage.
With the passage of House Bill 7 in September, the Texas legislature “prevented radioactive waste of decommissioned nuclear reactors from all over the country from being stored in West Texas for 40 years,” state Rep. Brooks Landgraf (R) said in an op-ed published Sunday in The Odessa American.
The ban, signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott (R) on Sep. 13, banned storage of high-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel in Texas only a day before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensed an interim storage facility that Interim Storage Partners (ISP) wants to build in Andrews, Texas.
ISP, a joint venture between Dallas-based Waste Control Specialists (WCS) and Orano USA, is looking to build its interim storage site at WCS”s existing low-level waste disposal site in Andrews.
“Although the Biden Administration is now trying to break Texas law, House Bill 7 gives us a strong leg to stand on as we resist the federal government’s attempt to make the Permian Basin its dumping ground for high-level radioactive waste,” Landgraf said Sunday.
None of the current commissioners of the NRC, an independent federal agency, were appointed by the Joe Biden administration, though current chairman Christopher Hanson, who joined the commission in June 2020, was made head of the agency by Biden in January.
Landgraf said that “the voice of Andrews was heard loud and clear” in the passage of House Bill 7. He mentioned the Andrews County commissioners’ opposition to ISP’s proposed site — the body voted unanimously in July to stand against it after a community meeting.
“We beat them to the punch,” Landgraf said.
The nuke waste ban isn’t the only way Texas is holding NRC’s feet to the flame. State attorney general Ken Paxton is suing the agency in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals over the proposed ISP site, although NRC has asked the court to dismiss the case on the grounds that Texas didn’t exhaust all of its agency-level options for fighting interim storage. The court on Nov. 4 agreed to put proceedings in that case on hold while it reviewed NRC’s motion.
Meanwhile, another company is looking to build a similar site not far from Andrews in Eddy County, N.M. NRC has said that it should finish reviewing that application, submitted by Holtec International, by January.
