Erin Rogers

Testimony on SB 824/HB 1567

March 25, 2003

I am speaking today on behalf of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, which represents approximately 24,000 members in Texas.

I think we can all agree that the State of Texas should take responsibility for ensuring that the low level radioactive waste generated in our state is isolated from the public and the environment for as long as it remains dangerous—which in some cases means thousands or millions of years. Texas has about 46 entities that produce low level radioactive waste. 96% of this waste comes from our two nuclear power plants. About 1.4% comes from medical institutions. We all agree that we need to find an environmentally and economically responsible way to manage this waste.

The question is, does this bill do that? Unfortunately, the answer is no. I want to explain how this bill is dangerous for Texas in three ways—financially, environmentally, and in regards to national security.

Do some people in Andrews County want a nuclear waste dump? Yes.

Will this bill allow the Andrews County Commissioners Court to build some public projects? Yes.

This bill, unfortunately, does not just affect Andrews County. This bill affects the entire state because waste will be transported through almost every major city in Texas and because the state’s taxpayers will be burdened with potentially enormous liability for future clean up.

The fund to pay for transportation accidents is capped at $500,000.

The financial security fund that MAY be created by the department to address and prevent unplanned events that may occur after closure of the site is no guarantee that the site will be cleaned up if it leaks in the future.

The bill states that the Health Department MAY require the license holder to have $20 million in financial security or insurance for post-closure clean-up needs. $20 million may not make a dent in the actual cost of clean up at a site that holds hundreds of millions of cubic feet of waste. Dale Klein, then Vice Chancellor at UT and later the chair of the Texas Radiation Advisory Board, presented the 76^th legislature with a1998 DOE report on the possible costs of remediation and clean-up cost after closure. This study estimated that for a radioactive waste dump handling just 1.5 million cubic feet of waste, the cost of cleaning up the dump would be $370 million. The dumps contemplated in this bill could handle as much as 350 million cubic feet of waste.

The Texas Department of Health does not have a good track record when it comes to ensuring that private companies have adequate financial security for clean up. For five years TDH failed to force Gulf Nuclear, a company that manufactured radioactive materials, to comply with a state law requiring it to have a plan and the financial ability to clean up any mess it made. Gulf Nuclear’s parent company filed for bankruptcy in 2000. State regulators grossly underestimated the extent of the contamination and what it would cost to clean up. Now, the federal government and taxpayers are paying nearly $10 million (half of what the bill requires for three huge dump sites spanning thousands of acres) to decontaminate and demolish one building.

There is absolutely NO need to turn Texas into a national nuclear waste dumping ground and expose the taxpayers to these kinds of risks in order to manage Texas’s low level radioactive waste. The license should be held by a public entity. The House Environmental Regulation Committee was correct when it stated in its interim report that "effective long-term management and monitoring of low level radioactive waste requires a stable entity, without the potential for bankruptcy or abandonment."

The bill allows the vast majority of the radioactive waste—Class A waste-- to be dumped in dirt trenches without first being placed in containers. This Class A waste is not "just" dirt.

Many people think that "Class A" low level radioactive waste is harmless and short-lived—containing elements that are radioactive for only a couple hundred years. However, TCEQ says that "this statement is based on certain very restrictive assumptions about low level waste characteristics and is not generally true. Class A waste frequently has long-lived radionuclide constituents as well as short-lived constituents co-mingled in the waste stream."

Class A waste, or the low activity "dirt" that will not be containerized according to the bill, contains plutonium, radioactive for 250,000 years, Iodine-129, radioactive for 160 million years, Niobium-94, radioactive for 200,000 years.

The actual definition of federal waste, as defined by 42 U.S.C 2021c (referenced in SB 824) is:

Low level waste is also made up of Class B and C 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. Approximately 20% of nuclear power plants waste is Class B and C.

Will this waste stay put or will it migrate? Remember that this dump could be built by any company, anywhere in roughly 35-county swath of West Texas. 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.

Some have argued that these massive dumps are needed for "national security." The theory is that someone may break into one of the 20 medical institutions in Texas that store radioactive waste on site (which is regulated by TDH), steal some, and make a dirty bomb out of it.

The Texas Department of Health regulates all radioactive waste stored on site. It does not make sense to claim that TDH is failing to ensure that this medical and academic waste is safe, and therefore the solution should be to entrust TDH with millions more cubic feet of waste, most of which is more hazardous and long-lasting. If we are worried about hospital waste being used in dirty bombs, why in the world would we want to put massive amounts of nuclear weapons waste on the roads and transport it through every major city in Texas?

This bill will create a dumpsite that will have to be thousands of square acres, run by a private company that has every incentive to keep costs as low as possible. There are no security requirements in the bill. The extent of the dump site’s security could be a chainlink fence. On March 6, the American Trucking Association sent out a warning to the nation’s truck drivers that federal agents say that Al Qaida terrorists were considering using big rigs with hazardous cargo as weapons. On March 21, all truck shipments with radioactive waste going to the WIPP site in New Mexico were halted for the same reason. Shouldn’t we minimize waste transportation and manage the waste we have in a more secure fashion rather than import up to 225% MORE waste?

96% of Texas’s low level radioactive waste comes from nuclear power plants. Three fourths of ALL compact waste over the next 35 years will come solely from decommissioning Texas’ and Vermont’s nuclear power plants. Instead of turning Texas into a national nuclear dumping ground, why can’t we manage our own waste in an environmentally and economically responsible manner at or near one or both of the nuclear power plants? The plants are heavily guarded, very secure, and already contain the vast majority of the waste that needs to be disposed of.

We agree with the findings of the House Environmental Regulation Committee Interim Report:

We encourage the committees to explore what it would take to use one or both of the nuclear power plants as above-ground, assured isolation facilities for Texas waste.