Austin American-Statesman
May 22, 1999

Senate Adds Restrictions To Nuclear Waste Bill

Amendments limiting location and source of waste will take conference to resolve

By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz
American-Statesman Staff

The Texas Senate approved radioactive waste legislation that was one part expectation, one part surprise and one part stealth Friday.

As expected, the senators revised the bill to allow the state's low-level radioactive waste agency, not just the private sector, to obtain a license for disposing of low-level radioactive waste. The surprise part came when they approved, despite objections from the Senate sponsor, an amendment that would limit storage and disposal to Andrews County in West Texas.

The stealth part, unnoticed by most senators, came when Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, a critic of the bill, slipped in an amendment adding just two words. The result: The bill would bar virtually any waste shipments from the federal government's nuclear-weapons complex. However, a legal opinion issued earlier in the week by the state attorney general's office concluded that such a prohibition would render the measure unconstitutional.

The Senate bill differs markedly from a version passed earlier by the House. A House-Senate conference committee is expected to be appointed in an effort to resolve the differences.

Rep. Warren Chisum, R-Pampa, who filed the original version of the bill, said the restriction to Andrews County -- which is northwest of Midland and along the border with New Mexico -- amounts to a serious flaw. Waste Control Specialists, a Pasadena-based company owned in part by Dallas businessman Harold Simmons, has been lobbying intensively to operate a disposal site on land it owns in Andrews County.

"There's no credible reason to single out one county," Chisum said. "That's the same mistake we've made before."

Current law allows a site for low-level waste, which is generated by nuclear power plants, research centers, industrial plants and hospitals, to be established only in Hudspeth County, also in West Texas. But a proposal for a site in that county was rejected by state regulators in October, which is why lawmakers are trying to craft a new plan.

Sen. Buster Brown, R-Lake Jackson, the Senate sponsor of the bill, also argued against the Andrews County amendment. But the amendment, offered by Sen. Robert Duncan, R-Lubbock, passed 17-11.

Shapleigh's amendment caught even Brown, a skilled Senate tactician, flat-footed.

It came in the midst of a long, droning discussion concerning a series of amendments by which Brown revised a version of the bill approved last week by the Senate Natural Resources Committee, which he chairs. The amendments were crafted as a result of criticism from many quarters, including the governor's office. Gov. George W. Bush said he was concerned that the bill could turn a Texas site into a national dumping ground.

One of Brown's amendments said the site could not accept "any discarded radioactive atomic weapon component or the radioactive waste resulting from the testing of any atomic weapon." Shapleigh, with Brown's consent, added the words "production or" before the word "testing." The result was that the bill would bar waste from the production or testing of atomic weapons.

The primary purpose of the U.S. Department of Energy's complex is the production of nuclear weapons. Numerous sites in the complex are involved in producing plutonium and uranium, the key ingredients of such weapons.

Brown's intent with the bill was to allow limited amounts of Energy Department waste to be dumped in Texas, not to prohibit it entirely. Just before debate on the bill ended, Brown and Sen. Teel Bivins, R-Amarillo, expressed concern about the Shapleigh amendment and declared that a total prohibition on Energy Department waste was not the intent of the bill.

After the measure was approved, Brown said in an interview that he would work to strike the Shapleigh amendment in the conference committee. For his part, Shapleigh cracked only a slight smile when asked about the two-word addition.

"We are barring waste generated in the production of atomic weapons in addition to waste from the testing of atomic weapons," he said.