WCS continues projects

Despite recent setbacks, officials with an Andrews County radioactive waste disposal site say the facility is making progress.

Waste Control Specialists, located 30 miles west of Andrews near the Texas-New Mexico border, recently was cited by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality because cracks were found in a 10-acre concrete pad that, between 2005 and 2009, held canisters of uranium byproduct waste from an abandoned federal plant in Fernald, Ohio.

WCS maintains that it was able to use road-sealing techniques to seal the cracks in the pad, which is made of caliche and rock and covered with an asphalt surface.

"In July, we did get issued a (notice of violation)," WCS President Rod Baltzer said. "We’re now in the process of resolving that N.O.V."

Baltzer said the cracks were found in parts of the pad that the byproduct wasn’t stored in, which shows there was no danger to the canisters.

Cyrus Reed, conservation director for the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, said the violation is evidence of problems at the site.

"I’m glad the TCEQ is up there inspecting it," he said. "I think that what it points out is often WCS makes claims about the safety of its facility and says there’s no way safety issues could occur. But I think we’ve seen through the years there have been problems."

But even with the violation resolved, the Dallas-based company will still have a pile of issues to deal with, starting with getting construction started on its long-delayed $75 million low-level radioactive waste disposal facility. A bond issue that allowed Andrews County residents to loan WCS the money for construction passed by three votes in May 2009, but that vote has been met by legal challenges since.

The challenges from opponents of the election result have been turned away by state district and appellate courts, but an appeal has been taken to the Texas Supreme Court. Baltzer said a decision has been delayed because the Texas Supreme Court is "not very active in the summer."

"We’re very optimistic that after they return from summer break, they will decide not to take any action on it," he said.

Leading up to the election, one of the selling points of WCS getting municipal bonds was that construction could start by June 2009 if the bonds were approved. With credit markets dried up, the company claimed that not getting the bonds could cause an "indefinite delay" in the project, which could bring 120 construction jobs and 75 permanent jobs.

Baltzer acknowledged that it’s been disappointing that delays have come up despite the bond passing.

"With the economy and the credit markets, we have looked for other financing, but it appears the county bonds are the only financing," he said.

Still, he hopes to call for bids for the project’s construction on the Texas compact waste facility this month and start construction in September. Baltzer would like to have that project operating by August 2011.

A separate landfill that would accept federal waste from the Department of Energy would take longer to complete, possibly being ready for operations by February 2012, Baltzer said.

The Texas compact landfill will hold 2.31 million cubic feet of waste, while the federal facility holds up to 26 million cubic feet. The site is licensed to accept waste for 15 years, with 10-year intervals after that.

Meanwhile, WCS is still awaiting word from the Texas Low Level Radioactive Waste Compact Commission on whether it can import waste from outside the compact states of Texas and Vermont.

"That’s somewhat on hold at this point," Baltzer said.

The company claims that long fights to secure licenses have taken a financial toll, and it could lose millions of dollars this year.

Baltzer said that, even though the amount of waste accepted from outside the compact would be relatively small, it would allow WCS to charge more competitive rates, making the company more financially viable.

"Texas and Vermont don’t generate a lot of waste, and this is a very expensive facility," he said.

The facility, which stretches across 13,000 acres in Texas and 800 acres in Lea County, N.M., is also currently in the final stages of an environmental impact study related to its possible hosting of up to 10,000 metric tons of mercury. DOE selected WCS, the only privately owned site out of eight that were considered, as the best location to house the mercury for the next 40 years.

But Baltzer said WCS isn’t yet sure if it wants the mercury and hasn’t entered any firm agreements on it. The company will need more community input before going forward.

"We recognize we won’t get 100 percent acceptance all the time, but we don’t want to go off the reservation and do something the community doesn’t want us to do," he said.

WCS is also bidding on accepting 10,000 canisters of depleted uranium oxide from the Department of Energy for storage of up to five years. Baltzer said it could look at permanent disposal in the future.

The WCS site is located next door to Urenco USA uranium enrichment facility in Eunice, N.M. Baltzer said WCS could eventually dispose of depleted uranium from the Urenco site after it goes through a de-conversion at a location like the International Isotopes Inc. plant, which is also planned for Lea County.

Even if WCS doesn’t accept the Urenco uranium in the short term, the plant is still good for the disposal site, Baltzer said.

"We really think that helps benefit the community when you have good people with high-paying jobs," he said. "It’s a benefit to the community and volunteer organizations."

Baltzer said WCS has drilled more than 500 borings and believes the site is not over any drinking water source, including the Ogallala Aquifer. He said that horizontal groundwater at the site travels at four feet per 1,000 years.

But Reed said the long-term consequences of the plant aren’t known. That’s why the Sierra Club has fought and appealed WCS’s byproduct and low-level radioactive waste disposal licenses.

"The concern with radioactive waste is, it’s so long lived that folks with the best intentions could think it’s safe now, but problems could arise decades or hundreds of years into the future," he said.