Andrews County and the Ogallala Aquifer

Andrews County, Texas is scheduled to be the recipient of millions of tons of nuclear waste in future. The effort to import waste into West Texas has taken over fifteen years but during that time very little consideration was given to the environmental consequences of where this toxic waste would eventually land.

In 2003 the Texas legislature passed legislation that would for the first time allow a central disposal site for radioactive waste. It was sold to the public on the premise that generators of radioactive waste in Texas such as hospitals and biomedical industries would have to leave the state or shut down if they did not have a location in Texas to dispose of this waste. The legislature also made homeland security as part of the sales job in order to persuade Texans that a disposal site should be approved.

In order to arrive at this point much of the lobbying, grunt work and greasing of palms with campaign funds over the last two decades was conducted by Waste Control Specialists (WCS), a Dallas based company owned by Texas Billionaire Harold Simmons. WCS owns a dump in Andrews County, Texas which sits about three hundred miles east of Dallas on the New Mexico border. They have worked tirelessly in their pursuit for this permitting by distributing hundreds of thousands of dollars in political donations, navigating years of regulatory agencies, and doing the utmost to ensure that key gatekeepers in this protracted licensing process were favorable to their aspirations.

WCS cleared their final regulatory hurdle in January of this year when the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) granted them a license to expand their Andrews County dump to include nuclear waste. WCS would not stop there. They applied for a license to the federal EPA to allow non radioactive, toxic waste to be accepted. The license sits beyond the arm of Texas regulators and they have no jurisdiction as to what comes into Texas and is dumped in Andrews County.

Although WCS has a billionaire owner and the promise of tremendous revenues due to their monopoly as the only licensed recipient of nuclear waste in the state, they went with hat in hand to the voters of Andrews County this spring. WCS asked the people of Andrews County to lend them $75 million to build out the dump to accommodate the millions of tons of radioactive waste. Andrews County voters went to the polls in April to vote on a bond measure that would grant WCS the money for the construction. After a very aggressive campaign by WCS in a very small, rural, impoverished community, the measure passed by three votes.

The Problems Associated with a Dump in Andrews County

The WCS dump sits atop the Ogallala Aquifer. The aquifer is the main source of drinking water in West Texas. The aquifer also serves eight other states as a primary source of irrigation water for the crops grown in this Mid-American breadbasket. Although the TCEQ granted a permit for this dump it was not without contention within the group. Three people involved in the TCEQ regulatory procedure resigned in protest over the lack of rigorous examination of the long term effects of storing the waste over the aquifer.

The TCEQ acknowledges that the Ogallala Aquifer sits beneath the Andrews County dump, although WCS unbelievably refuses to acknowledge that one exists. By refuting the facts, WCS no doubt feels that they are covering their butts through plausible deniability.

The EPA permitting of other toxic waste for the Andrews County site is proving to be a threat to the aquifer. The citizens of Andrews County just found out that they are going to be recipients of millions of cubic yards of mud packed with highly toxic PCBs from New York's Hudson River. What started out seven years ago as a plea to the people of Texas to save the state's medical infrastructure has turned into a money driven dangerous gamble with the lives and the precious natural resources of Texans.

The permitting allows WCS to walk away from the dump after fifteen years or to renew the contract if they wish. If they walk away, who is left with the bill to maintain the dump or cover any liabilities into the future? The thousands of PCB barrels will eventually need to be replaced and the nuclear garbage will need to be monitored for hundreds of years.

The Process Can be Slowed Down

It's important that from a public policy, environmental, and health, perspective that the process slow down if not completely cease. It's established that the legislature's premise for establishing the permitting process for the dump was disingenuous now that the dump has been quickly advertised as place where America can throw its worst pollutants. Texans have begun to realize that WCS, the current owners of the dump and the permit holders, have no long term obligation to the people of Texas to be accountable for their safety and health. It's a fact that the main source of drinking water and irrigation for millions of people in eight states sits beneath the Andrews County dump.

The permit was issued by TCEQ with some standard conditions that must still be met. Texas regulatory code requires a permit holder to have title to all buildings, land and mineral rights on the permitted property. To date, WCS does not have title to everything required and has stated that they are not close to doing so.

Texas law also requires that no federal facility waste may be disposed at the dump until WCS provides a certification signed by the United States Secretary of Energy stating that the federal government will assume all right, title, and interest in the land and buildings for the disposal of federal facility waste. WCS has not received this letter, not does it expect to in the foreseeable future.

As more discussion is generated in the public square as to the danger of permitting the Andrews County dump, greater critical analysis will be had on the suitability of the location. This hopefully leads to responsible decision making on the part of political bodies and regulatory agencies as to the future of this project.