By BETSY BLANEY, Associated Press
Updated 8:01 pm, Tuesday, April 16, 2013
The nuclear waste dump site, whose majority owner is billionaire
and GOP mega-donor Harold
Simmons, accepted its first low-level radioactive waste about a year ago,
ending an expensive and yearslong effort by the company to bury materials from
medical, research and industrial activities and from nuclear power plants. Also
buried there are PCB-tainted sludge dredged from the Hudson River in New York
and tons of Cold War-era radioactive waste from a former uranium-processing
plant in Ohio.
Environmental groups have
opposed the company's pressing for various types of waste to bury in the remote
scrub brush terrain about 375 miles west of Dallas.
"It's just always something more, and I have to wonder where this
will end," said Karen
Hadden, executive director of the Texas
SEED Coalition.
Originally the site was to
handle low-level waste from a couple states but last legislative session
lawmakers approved allowing waste from more than three dozen states to be buried
at the facility.
Seliger's bill also seeks to
promote sending low-level waste, known as Class A, out of Texas for burial and
ups the annual curie limit for the next two years from 220,000 to 300,000, so
that states outside the compact wanting to dispose of hotter waste, known as
Class B and C, can.
The company, Andrews County and
the state stand to make more money from the hotter waste. The county receives 5
percent and the state 25 percent of the company's revenues quarterly.
Sen. Robert
Duncan, R-Lubbock, said lawmakers should play an active role in regulating
any plans by the company to expand the site's capacity and any change in its
license, including the forms, types or streams of waste.
"The Legislature should impose
limits on volume and radioactivity in that site," he said. "If those need to be
changed later on those limits should be changed through the
legislative process."
The bill includes prohibiting public comment or hearings on minor
amendments to the license, which is regulated by the Texas
Commission on Environmental Quality. The bill defines minor as "a change in
the type, volume or concentration limits of wastes to be received to the extent
the change does not increase the total volume and curie capacities approved" in
the existing license.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/news/texas/article/Nuke-bill-raises-opposition-from-environmentalists-4439367.php#ixzz2RJcHTn7N
