Houston Business Journal
March 8, 1999

Nuclear Plants Contract with WCS
to Store Waste at West Texas Site

Agreement with STP, Texas Utilities awaits approval of Legislature

Ann De Rouffignac

The South Texas Project and Texas Utilities signed a contract last month with Waste Control Specialists of Pasadena to dispose of low level radioactive waste at a site in West Texas.

Waste Control's agreement with the STP and TU, which owns the Comanche Peak nuclear plant, offers a huge discount to the nuclear plants, which have been sending their waste to Barnwell in South Carolina, the only other facility that can accept it. Waste Control will sell disposal services to the nuclear plants for an all-inclusive price of $40 per cubic foot, says John Kyte, the company's attorney. The facility at Barnwell now charges about $350 to $400 a cubic foot for disposal, depending on the type of waste.

Before the contract is effective, the Texas Legislature must pass a bill clearing the way for Waste Control's dump.

Although Kyte says WCS can make a profit at the $40 price, others say the company must get more volume of waste from out-of-state to make a decent rate of return on the $50 million investment in the Andrews County site.

WCS is still trying to import Department of Energy radioactive waste for processing and disposal at the Andrews County site, and the potential profit in disposing of that waste is enormous. Industry sources value that agency's disposal costs in the billions of dollars.

So far, however, WCS has been unable to land any DOE contracts because the company did not have a disposal permit for low level radioactive waste from the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission. Under the State Health and Safety Code, radioactive waste in Texas can only be disposed of in the proposed state-owned site in Hudspeth County.

Now an effort in the Legislature would turn over the disposal of the waste to private enterprise. Sponsored by Rep. Pete Gallego of Alpine, the bill changes the code to allow a private company to dispose of the waste and removes Hudspeth County as the official site.

The bill also calls for the state to take title to the waste and the site. Opponents of the bill say that gives all the profits to a private company and leaves taxpayers responsible for any environmental or health problems down the line. Environmentalists also say the legislation would clear the way for Andrews County to become a national dumping ground for radioactive waste.

Kyte says WCS is solving a problem for the nuclear plants in Texas.

"It gets the job done and solves a problem. Barnwell is exorbitantly high-priced," he says.

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