SRS Aiming to Dump More Reclassified High-Level Nuclear Waste at Texas Low-Level Nuclear Waste Dump? Article in Texas Tribune

“West Texas is on track to get even more nuclear waste — thanks to the federal government”

A hazardous waste disposal company in Andrews County wants to handle more dangerous levels of nuclear waste. Federal agencies are pondering new rules that could allow more of it to come to Texas.

The Texas Tribune, February 10, 2021

It’s little more than half a tank of gasoline in a midsize car, but the radioactive shipment from South Carolina to a West Texas company last fall marked one change that could lead to more nuclear waste traveling to Texas — waste that, until recently, was considered too dangerous to be disposed of.

Much of the public debate surrounding Waste Control Specialists’ hazardous waste facility in Andrews County, on the New Mexico border, has focused on the company’s plans, with a partner, to store the riskiest type of nuclear waste: the spent fuel rods from nuclear power plants, which can remain dangerously radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years.

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“They did this eight gallons as a sort of test,” said Tom Clements, the director of Savannah River Site Watch, an advocacy group that monitors the DOE’s site in South Carolina, a nuclear national security complex where materials for nuclear weapons were produced until 1991 at the end of the Cold War. “It is the foot in the door to taking more material to WCS.”

full article: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/10/nuclear-waste-government-rules/

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