Texas: Ground Zero for the Nation’s Nuclear Power and Nuclear Weapons Waste?

On May 26, 2003 the Texas Senate cast the final vote in an eight-year legislative battle to allow a private company to open a national radioactive waste dump in West Texas. The Senate, by a 23 to 8 margin, voted to turn Texas into ground zero for the most dangerous and concentrated forms of low level radioactive waste from nuclear power plants across the country as well as hundreds of contaminated nuclear weapons manufacturing plants—all to benefit one private company called Waste Control Specialists. Governor Perry, who has received at least $360,000 from Waste Control Specialists since 1997, is expected to ignore calls to veto the bill. If Gov. Perry allows the bill to become law, Texas will be well on its way to becoming the first state ever to open a compact dump site (23 years after congressional passage of the act encouraging states to form regional radioactive waste disposal compacts). The dumpsite could also ease the way for the Bush administration to push forward its plans to build new nuclear power plants and new nuclear weapons plants, generating tons of new waste across the country.

The following report describes some key aspects of the 50-page bill and summarizes how the Texas Legislature passed the bill despite widespread opposition. See the end of the report for a scorecard showing how all Texas legislators voted on the most important votes related to the bill’s passage.

Background: Beyond Nuclear Power Coalition Calls for Responsible Radioactive Waste Management in Texas

The Beyond Nuclear Power Network, a statewide coalition including the Sierra Club, Public Citizen, League of Women Voters, and several other groups and individuals met several times during the 18 months before the state legislative session started and began working with key legislators to convince them to vote against any bill that did not include the following principles:

1. A publicly accountable state agency, not a private company, should be licensed to a manage radioactive waste. The House Environmental Regulation Committee correctly stated in 2002 that "effective long-term management and monitoring low level radioactive waste requires a stable entity, without the potential for bankruptcy or abandonment."

2. The compact "loophole," allowing Governor-appointed Compact Commissioners to contract with any state, group of states, or company to import unlimited amounts of radioactive waste to be disposed of in Texas, must be closed. The use of compact sites for the disposal of nuclear weapons waste should be prohibited. The compact should be amended to require that Texas and Vermont permanently manage waste produced within their respective borders.

3. Below-ground disposal should be prohibited. Above-ground storage has the potential to avoid the health hazards of burial grounds prone to releasing radioactivity and avoid the high cost associated with remedial action that, inevitably, will be required.

4. Waste transport should be minimized. Radioactive waste should be kept as near the site of generation as possible, with sites of the largest generators (the nuclear power plants) used for management of waste from other locations. Since the power plants create the vast majority of the risk (in both volume and radioactivity of the waste), their sites should be used as permanent repositories.

5. All decisions on the management, siting, storage, and transportation of radioactive waste should be made with full and effective public participation so that decision-makers and the public have a full range of information on which to base decisions.

In addition, the Network called for Texas to adopt requirements to generate at least 20% of its electricity from renewable resources by 2040. Texas policymakers should aim to replace nuclear power with renewable energy sources by 2028 and 2033 when the nuclear plants reach the end of their licenses.

Legislative Action on Radioactive Waste Legislation

Bill Introduced

On March 3, Senator Teel Bivins (R-Amarillo) and Representative Buddy West (R-Odessa) filed identical bills—SB 824 and HB 1567. For months beforehand, Bivins and West, along with Sen. Duncan (R-Lubbock) and Rep. Chisum (R-Pampa) had been involved in secret meetings with the bills’ principle authors: lawyers for and owners of Waste Control Specialists (WCS).

In fact, WSC did much more than just hold secret meetings with the bills’ sponsors to ensure that its bill would pass. WCS’s owner, Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons, gave nearly a half million dollars in contributions to state officials during the campaign cycle preceding the legislative session, and paid 16 lobbyists nearly a million dollars to push the bill. Simmons realized that such an investment was worth it for the hundreds of millions to hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars in profit he could make from a private dump into which mountains of radioactive waste could be imported and dumped in cheap, dirt trenches.

Bill Content

HB 1567/SB 824, as filed, allowed virtually unlimited amounts of commercial and federal radioactive waste to be dumped at three separate sites in West Texas. The first site would accept low-level radioactive waste from contaminated federal nuclear weapons production sites around the country. The second site would accept nuclear power plant and other "compact" waste from around the country. (Texas and Vermont are in a compact agreement that allows Governor-appointed compact commissioners to accept unlimited amounts of waste from other states to be disposed of in Texas.) The third site would accept a stew of hazardous and low-level radioactive waste. In the final version of the bill, the amount of federal nuclear weapons waste is "capped" at 162 million cubic feet of waste—enough for WCS to make over one hundred billion dollars in profit.

The waste would be dumped at the WCS site in Andrews County—a site proponents claim is leak-proof because of clay-rich soil and lack of rainfall. However, all existing low level radioactive waste dumps have leaked, including those receiving much less rainfall than Andrews County. At a low level radioactive waste dump site in the desert at Beatty, Nevada (which receives 5 inches of rain per year), monitoring wells at the site have repeatedly shown radioactive contaminants in groundwater 357 feet below ground. All of the counties in the 35-county swath targeted by the bill receive between 14 and 20 inches of rain per year.

The area is also seismically active, with 18 seismic events counted within a 30 mile radius of the WCS site. Of these, the latest occurred June 2, 2001 with a 3.3 magnitude, and the largest occurred January 2, 1992 approximately 15 miles from the site with a 5.5 magnitude.

HB 1567/SB 824’s sorely inadequate financial security provisions will leave the state and taxpayers footing the bill for future clean-up of the site--a tab that could run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. While the profits from dumping the waste would go to WCS and its billionaire owner Harold Simmons, the legislation requires the State of Texas to take title to the compact waste as soon as it arrives at the dumpsite. The bill also requires the federal government to take title to the federal waste at the end of the 35-year facility license (the federal government’s dismal record of cleaning up its messes makes it very likely that Texas may also become financially responsible for the federal waste). HB 1567 only requires the dump license holder to set aside $20 million in financial security for post-closure clean-up needs. But $20 million isn't likely to even make a dent in the actual cost of cleaning up at a site that holds hundreds of millions of cubic feet of waste. A 1998 DOE report estimated that the clean-up cost for a radioactive waste dump handling just 1.5 million cubic feet of waste would be $370 million. WCS proposes taking up to 400 million cubic feet of waste.

Proponents of the radioactive waste dump argue that a disposal site is needed to provide for disposal of waste from Texas' two nuclear power plants, as well as a power plant in Vermont.

But decommissioning of Texas’ two nuclear reactors is not scheduled until 2030-2037, which would be 25 to 32 years after the site is established under HB 1567/SB 824. There is no requirement that WCS operate the dump for even a mere 15 years--the life of the permit. By 2030 the dump sites could be full of other states’ waste, WCS profits could be maximized, and the dump could be closed, leaving Texas the liability for the rest of the nation’s waste but still searching for a way to handle radioactive waste from its power plants. (Three fourths of all the waste from nuclear power plants comes from their decommissioning.)

Bill Heard in Committees

On March 25, the Senate Natural Resources Committee and the House Environmental Regulation Committee held back-to-back marathon hearings on the bills. Concerned citizens from across the state joined with representatives from the Sierra Club, Public Citizen, League of Women Voters, SEED Coalition and other groups to speak out against the bills. The bill was left pending in the Senate, and was eventually slightly modified and passed out of the Environmental Regulation Committee on March 31 at a special 8:00 AM Monday morning committee meeting held solely to quickly pass the bill.

House Passes Bill on Earth Day

On Earth Day, April 22, the Houston Chronicle editorialized that "International Earth Day is being celebrated today and, coincidentally, the Texas House of Representatives is preparing to plow ahead with a bill that could turn Texas into a national repository of nuclear waste and potentially leave Texas taxpayers holding a costly and environmentally questionable bag. It is legislation that should not be passed."

Unfortunately, the House of Representatives ignored the advice of the largest daily paper in the state and, after 6 hours of debate, 26 amendments (none favorable to the Sierra Club’s position passed), 4 points of order, and 10 record votes, HB 1567 passed by a margin of 107-34.

The Sierra Club very much appreciates Rep. Lon Burnam’s stamina and principled argument throughout the entire 6-hour debate. Representatives Burnam, Jesse Jones, Yvonne Davis, Pete Gallego, Dora Olivo, Eddie Rodriguez, Robert Talton, Gabi Canales, Garnett Coleman, and Mike Villarreal all offered good amendments and spirited debate on the House floor.

The next day, during the bill’s final House vote on third reading, Rep. Vicki Truitt (R-Tarrant County) offered an amendment written by the Sierra Club that would require the most concentrated forms of waste—the Class B and C waste—to be disposed of within above-ground vaults, instead of being dumped in below ground trenches. The amendment was accepted by the bill’s author, Rep. West, and passed. Later, Rep. Truitt explained that the reason she had offered the amendment was because she had been educated and lobbied over the last year by a Sierra Club member in her district.

Bill Moves to Senate

On April 29, the Senate Natural Resource Committee introduced and passed a re-written bill, with several important changes from the bill approved by the House. Sen. Bivins, who re-wrote the bill, placed a 10 million cubic yard (or 270 million cubic foot) cap on the amount of federal waste that could be dumped in Texas. He also removed the Truitt amendment requiring Class B and C waste to be disposed of in above-ground vaults.

On May 7, the full Senate voted to bring HB 1567 up for debate. The Sierra Club and others had hoped to convince 11 Senators to vote against consideration of the bill, thus blocking it from ever coming to the floor. Sadly, Senators Van de Putte and West, who had previously expressed strong opposition to the bill, joined 21 other Senators in voting to bring the bill to the floor.

Senators Shapleigh, Madla, Barrientos, Hinojosa, and Ellis offered good amendments, which were uniformly voted down. They included an amendment requiring Class B and C waste to be disposed of in above-ground vaults (Barrientos), an amendment increasing the post-closure financial security to at least $100 million, from $20 million (Shapleigh), an amendment to ensure that local fire departments and other first responders to transport accidents were adequately trained and equipped to handle radioactive waste accidents (Madla), and an amendment prohibiting any federal waste from being dumped in Texas (Shapleigh).

Senator Duncan succeeded in passing two good amendments: one requiring the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to be the licensing agency instead of the Texas Department of Health, and another one which placed a more meaningful cap on the amount of federal waste that could be dumped in Texas. The Duncan cap allowed a total of 1.3 million cubic yards of federal waste (or 36 million cubic feet) to be dumped. This cap included a 5,000 cubic yard cap on Class B and C waste and a 10,000 cubic yard cap on the most concentrated Class A waste. The amendment would have allowed WCS to make $1.04 billion dollars in the first five years. Apparently, this was not enough money. Senator Bivins told the other Senators that no company would bid on a dump that was this limited. Minutes later, WCS supporters re-grouped on the Senate floor and voted to reconsider the Duncan amendment. Senator Wentworth offered an amendment to lift the Duncan cap to a whopping 126 million cubic feet (or 6 million cubic yards). This would allow WCS to make over $100 billion. The Wentworth amendment passed 18 to 12.

The Senate then voted to approve the whole bill 23-7.

Conference Committee

Because the House and Senate versions of the bill were different from each other, a conference committee consisting of five Representatives and five Senators was assigned to come up with a compromise. Instead of meeting and negotiating with the conference committee, Sen. Bivins re-wrote the bill in secret.

The Bivins conference report deleted the Senate’s previous limits on the Class B and C waste and instead implemented a brand new limit, increasing the allowable volumes of this type of waste by 120 times. It increased the B and C cap from 5,000 cubic yards to 600,000 cubic yards, or 16 million cubic feet of the hottest, most dangerous radioactive waste. (Class C waste is permitted to contain up to 4,600 curies of cesium-137 per cubic meter of waste—enough radiation to kill someone standing 3 feet away in 20 minutes without intervening shielding.)

Sixteen million cubic feet of Class B and C waste amounts to 8 times more than ALL of the commercial waste (including Class A waste) that Texas is currently obligated to manage according to the Texas-Vermont compact (2 million cubic feet ) and 40 times more than the B and C waste that Texas is currently obligated to manage under the Texas-Vermont compact (400,000 cubic feet).

Since Class B and C radioactive waste is too dangerous to be allowed to be dumped at the low level radioactive waste disposal site in Utah (the only national radioactive waste site open to the country after 2008), Texas will be poised to become the nation’s dumping ground for the nation’s MOST radioactive low level waste.

On May 23 the House voted to accept the conference report. On May 26 the Senate voted to accept the conference report, over the objections of Senator Duncan. "I can tell you that we’ll be back," he said. "This will be a campaign issue for some statewide office—it will be a major issue in this state in the future."

We couldn’t agree more.

As George W. Bush pushes forward with plans for building a new generation of nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants, thus generating tons of new nuclear waste, Texas will become a focal point for the nuclear industry and the nuclear weapons complex. Grassroots activism has prevented national nuclear dumps from being built in Texas for over twenty years. Continued grassroots activism to stop the WCS dump will not only protect Texans and the Texas environment from ever-lasting radioactive contamination, but will also contribute to larger efforts to phase out nuclear power nation-wide and to force the U.S. to adhere to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and cease plans to generate new "mini-nukes" and bunker busters. These weapons would be used in "rogue nations" and on "terrorists," but the mountains of radioactive waste that come with the weapons generation would come to Texas.