Company Wants Nuclear Waste from 36 States to be Buried in Texas

[The Straight Story]

Company Wants Nuclear Waste from 36 States to be Buried in Texas

Waste Control Services is looking to make money off low-level radioactive waste from three dozen states by offering to store it in a remote area along the Texas and New Mexico border. But the proposed storage has upset activists in Texas and the governor of Vermont, who says his state has an exclusive deal for burying nuclear waste in the Lone Star state.

Sixteen years ago, officials from Vermont and Texas signed an agreement giving Vermont up to 20% of the space at any low-level nuclear waste dump built in Texas. That guarantee is now in jeopardy, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin says, if Waste Control Services is allowed to import waste from 36 states into a new dump site near Andrews, Texas.

Shumlin has threatened to immediately close down his state’s reactor, Vermont Yankee, for fear that if they wait too long, the available space in Texas will be gone by the time Vermont is ready to ship its contaminated leftovers.

Activists with Nuke Free Texas are fighting the proposed Andrews site, saying their state “is at risk of becoming the nation’s radioactive dumping ground.”

http://www.allgov.com/Controversies/ViewNews/Company_Wants_Nuclear_Waste_from_36_States_to_be_Buried_in_Texas_101206

[MineralMan]

1. I'm resisting the urge....

dumping ground...must fight the urge...

[NightWatcher]

2. a long, glowing river of waste along the border, Geniuses

no one would be willing to swim, jump, or cross the River of Radioactive Death

[Le Taz Hot]

3. As a Californian,

(long-standing rivalry between California and Texas) I must recuse myself from what coulda been some REALLY GREAT smart-ass come-backs to the Subject line.

[enlightenment]

4. Interesting.

Not that far from Deaf Smith county - one of the three places that were originally considered for a long-term storage facility (before Texas legislators rode roughshod over the process and forced the AEC to focus only on Nevada - the decision to choose Yucca Mountain was political, not scientific).

[laughingliberal]

11. It was always a more stable and suitable site. It was killed with the 'screw Nevada' bill. nt

[enlightenment]

15. Agree.

Putting politics ahead of safety . . . it was only Nevada, after all. Desert tortoises, casinos, and hookers . . .

Meh.

[w8liftinglady]

5. it'll happen...just like This has happened

http://downwindersatrisk.org/index.html

[Name removed]

6. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[w8liftinglady]

8. So can my kids.

http://www.txpeer.org/toxictour/txi.html

[JDPriestly]

14. Move to California. If you are a Democrat, you'll be welcome here.

[mbperrin]

7. More information here.

http://nukefreetexas.org/2010/11/take-action-stop-texas-from-becoming-the-nations-radioactive-waste-dump/

Not only is the state of Texas liable for any leakage, the city of Andrews actually took out a bond issue for the billionaire owner of this disaster-in-the-making.

[slackmaster]

9. I don't understand why New Jersey is out of the running so early in the discussion

The Fix must be in.

:sarcasm:

[gratuitous]

10. There's a place in Texas that's nicely cleared of brush

Maybe it could go there? Prairie Crap-hell or whatever Bush called his ersatz ranch?

[OregonBlue]

12. Sorry to hear this but I bet Nevandan's are quietly praying this goes through.

[enlightenment]

16. It really wouldn't solve much.

This site is being proposed for low-level waste; Yucca Mountain was approved for high-level waste.

Low-level waste includes items that have become contaminated with radioactive material or have become radioactive through exposure to neutron radiation. This waste typically consists of contaminated protective shoe covers and clothing, wiping rags, mops, filters, reactor water treatment residues, equipments and tools, luminous dials, medical tubes, swabs, injection needles, syringes, and laboratory animal carcasses and tissues. The radioactivity can range from just above background levels found in nature to very highly radioactive in certain cases such as parts from inside the reactor vessel in a nuclear power plant. Low-level waste is typically stored on-site by licensees, either until it has decayed away and can be disposed of as ordinary trash, or until amounts are large enough for shipment to a low-level waste disposal site in containers approved by the Department of Transportation.

For more detailed information on low-level waste, see our brochure Radioactive Waste: Production, Storage, Disposal (NUREG/BR-0216)

--------------------
High-level radioactive wastes are the highly radioactive materials produced as a byproduct of the reactions that occur inside nuclear reactors. High-level wastes take one of two forms:

* Spent (used) reactor fuel when it is accepted for disposal
* Waste materials remaining after spent fuel is reprocessed

Spent nuclear fuel is used fuel from a reactor that is no longer efficient in creating electricity, because its fission process has slowed. However, it is still thermally hot, highly radioactive, and potentially harmful. Until a permanent disposal repository for spent nuclear fuel is built, licensees must safely store this fuel at their reactors.

Reprocessing extracts isotopes from spent fuel that can be used again as reactor fuel. Commercial reprocessing is currently not practiced in the United States, although it has been allowed in the past. However, significant quantities of high-level radioactive waste are produced by the defense reprocessing programs at Department of Energy (DOE) exit icon facilities, such as Hanford, Washington, and Savannah River, South Carolina, and by commercial reprocessing operations at West Valley, New York. These wastes, which are generally managed by DOE, are not regulated by NRC. However they must be included in any high-level radioactive waste disposal plans, along with all high-level waste from spent reactor fuel.

Because of their highly radioactive fission products, high-level waste and spent fuel must be handled and stored with care. Since the only way radioactive waste finally becomes harmless is through decay, which for high-level wastes can take hundreds of thousands of years, the wastes must be stored and finally disposed of in a way that provides adequate protection of the public for a very long time.

http://www.nrc.gov/waste.html

[JDPriestly]

13. How about erecting a monument to Bush on top of the nuclear dump?

Seems appropriate to me. Better yet, why not move the Bush library to that spot?