Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
4/18/2014
Waste Control Specialists has begun to reach out to the local community in Andrews, Texas, to help determine if there is local interest in potentially hosting an interim storage facility for high-level nuclear waste. With state officials having expressed an interest in potentially hosting such a site, WCS met with community leaders from the Andrews Industrial Foundation and broached the subject during a meeting held earlier this month. “There was the speaker’s interim charge that came out and the governor’s letter and the TCEQ [Texas Commission on Environmental Quality] report that came out, which got the dialogue going in the community, and everywhere else for that matter, about is this something we want to pursue,” WCS spokesman Chuck McDonald said. “We have started that dialogue with the community. All the feedback to this point has been positive.” McDonald added that community engagement has been the philosophy of WCS since its inception. “As I’ve said many times, that’s been our whole approach for the last 20 years, when all these things come up, we begin a conversation with community leadership,” McDonald said. “We do public meetings. We do the whole thing, and we have found over the years that information sharing is the key. So that is all we are trying to do here.”
The question of HLW storage in Texas has involved some important state government leadership. Speaker of the House Joe Straus (R) asked state lawmakers to begin considering the logistics and economic impact of potentially hosting a high-level radioactive waste disposal site or interim storage facility in his Interim Charge in January. More recently, Republican Governor Rick Perry expressed his support in late March for a closer examination at potentially hosting a facility while commissioning a report from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality that highlighted the history of spent fuel storage programs as well as important advice to heed if Texas were to move forward.
Community ‘Not Opposed’ to Looking
The feedback from the community, especially from members of the Andrews Industrial Foundation and Andrews Economic Development Corporation, appears to mostly support the idea of taking a deeper look at the idea. Andrews Economic Development Corporation Director Wesley Burnett said that if the right criteria were met, he would see no problem with HLW storage. “Andrews has always supported Waste Control Specialists in the past and I do not see that support waning in any way,” Burnett told RW Monitor. “This project would be an economic benefit to our community in diversification and job creation. There would be public hearings I am sure and I believe if the proper science was used and with proper regulatory oversight we could support this project as a community. Obviously we will wait for the State of Texas to give direction and our county to consider all of the options before responding to an RFP on this project.”
Much of the support for the idea seems to stem from the community’s comfort level with radioactive waste, a relationship that evolved with WCS over time. According to Andrews Industrial Foundation President Lloyd Eisenrich, there has not been an adverse reaction to the news of WCS’ interest. “There have been now two articles published in the local paper,” Eisenrich told RW Monitor. “Not one letter to the editor, not one phone call, not one comment in that community that I’ve heard or been able to track down from anybody else hearing anything negative about it. When the first article about it came out a few months ago, I was expecting a flood of letters to the editor, but I think that’s a factor of two things: a busy community due to the energy boom and a more well-educated community due to 15 years of living with this.”
Not everyone in Texas is as excited about the idea, though. Cyrus Reed, the director of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, cautioned that there should not be such a rush to embrace this idea of HLW storage. “I don’t know what the rush is,” Reed told RW Monitor. “There really should be no rush to create an interim solution where you are taking rods and storing them for a while until you have a disposal site. It just doesn’t seem to make much sense, and it potentially, like in the low-level radioactive waste site, where you create a thing and say well, it’s only for our waste and Vermont’s waste, and suddenly, it’s for everybody’s waste. The same thing could happen if you do an interim storage solution for our nuke plants.”
