Nuclear waste may pass through Texas cities

A proposal to send high-level nuclear waste to West Texas may seem like something San Antonians shouldn’t worry about. But if approved, some of the state’s largest metro areas could be in the path of thousands of shipments of radioactive materials as they make their way from plants across the country.

Interim Storage Partners, formed by Orano USA and Waste Control Specialists, is applying for an initial 40-year license to eventually store 40,000 metric tons of used nuclear fuel in an existing facility in Andrews County.

Those in favor say it will save taxpayers money and provide a temporary solution to the decades-old impasse over finding a permanent storage solution for the country’s nuclear waste. But critics, made up of an unlikely coalition of environmentalists, ranchers and some in the oil industry, say the plan is not worth the risk of exposure en route to or at the storage site

So far, the plan appears to be moving forward.

A panel of administrative judges with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently ruled that several advocacy groups won’t be able to argue their case before commissioners weighing whether to approve the plan, saying they don’t have standing in the proceedings.

The commission is expected to finish its review of the application by May 2021, but environmentalists have vowed to keep fighting.

If the plan goes through, a University of Houston professor warns, the company should be prepared to remain involved for the long haul.

“When they design it, they better design it for very longtime storage because I don’t see this longterm storage being addressed any time soon,” said Ramanan Krishnamoorti, the university’s chief energy officer.

“If they are planning on just developing a storage site for 50 or 100 years, I think they are missing the mark,” he said. “They need to be planning for 500 to 1,000 years.”

Decades-old problem

The U.S. has been struggling to come up with a permanent solution to storing nuclear waste for decades.

As the country shifted from coal to nuclear power in the 1960s, the plan was for the federal government to handle the waste and have a final repository in place by the time the first plants were decommissioned.

In 1987, the government designated Yucca Mountain in Nevada for this purpose. But after decades of opposition, negotiations fell through. President Donald Trump wants to revive the Yucca plan.

High-level radioactive waste primarily is uranium fuel that has been used in a nuclear power reactor and is no longer efficient in producing electricity, according to the NRC. Used or spent nuclear fuel is a dry, solid ceramic pellet about the size of a large pencil eraser, Interim Storage Partners said.

The U.S. has more than 90,000 metric tons of nuclear waste stored at 80 sites in 35 states. This spent nuclear fuel, which can pose serious risks to humans and the environment, is enough to fill a football field about 65 feet deep, a government watchdog has said. And it’s expected to increase to about 140,000 metric tons over the next several decades.

Most of it is now stored close to nuclear reactors in states such as Pennsylvania, New York and Tennessee, but that’s not how it was supposed to work.

That’s where Texas and New Mexico, where another storage proposal is going through the approval process, come in.

“With an interim storage option,” Interim Storage Partners said, “the United States could finally begin the process of removing stranded used nuclear fuel from local communities and consolidating it at a single secure site while an ultimate long-term facility is debated.”

The move is backed by Energy Secretary Rick Perry, who as Texas governor encouraged storing high-level nuclear waste in his home state.

In West Texas, the Andrews County Commissioners Court passed a resolution backing the idea in 2015. For the county of 18,000 residents, it is another source of revenue and a way to diversify its economy.

“We currently live and die by oil,” County Judge Charlie Falcon said. “When it’s good, it’s good, when it’s bad, it’s really bad.”

The county gets 5 percent of the gross revenue from Dallas-based WCS’ storage of low-grade nuclear waste, netting the county on average $1.2 million a year, he said. That amount could jump to $10 million if the license for a different type of waste is approved, according to some estimates.

Revenue from WCS in the past has helped the county build a splash park, upgrade school buses, buy ambulances and build a food pantry — projects that improve the quality of life for the community, Falcon said.

Gov. Greg Abbott, whose office did not respond to a request for comment, has been against expanding the state’s storage of lowlevel nuclear waste.

“Some people want to make Texas the radioactive waste dumping ground of America. I won’t let that happen,” Abbott tweeted in June in response to an amendment in the Legislature related to the disposal of low-level radioactive waste.

Professor Krishnamoorti said he is less worried about the actual storage of the waste, confident that if no corners are cut, it can be done safely.

“To me,” he added, “it is the movement of that much waste to one place and the human interface there. That’s the part I worry about.”

Concerns about routes

While there has been more attention to the storage site, Amy Dinn, an attorney with Lone Star Legal Aid, worries that there’s less information regarding the communities that the waste could be transported through.

“If you had a nuclear disaster that could affect the fourth-largest city in the country, that’s an issue for the United States as a national economy, not just a few people,” she said, referring to Houston.

Her organization, together with partners from Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, submitted comments on behalf of communities and groups representing 11 counties along potential transportation routes.

Interim Storage Partners says the used nuclear fuel is securely contained and shielded to prevent any harm to the transport workers, the public and on-site workers. The pellets are stacked and sealed inside long metal-alloy rods, which are then securely bound into a rectangular bundle called a fuel assembly.

So far, the plan calls for the waste to be shipped to Andrews County, about 370 miles northwest of Austin, by rail. Through exactly where it would go is not known because that information was not part of the application for the license. That’s because the application doesn’t seek permission to transport used nuclear fuel, but only to temporarily store it, said Jeffery Isakson, the company’s CEO.

He said the application provided potential routes to assess environmental impacts, which “all were very small, regardless of the route selected by the shippers.”

Transportation of used nuclear fuel is regulated by the NRC and the Transportation Department. Each route and shipment has to be reviewed before transport, in coordination with state officials along the way, Isakson said.

The company notes that since 1965, there have been more than 2,700 shipments of used fuel transported nearly 2 million miles across the country without a single radiological release caused by an accident.

But Dinn counters, “How long was Chernobyl in operation before there was an issue? How long was the power plant in Tokyo in operation before it got hit by a tsunami?”

The legal groups say some of the waste would likely be shipped on Union Pacific lines that run along Interstates 10, 20 and 30 and down I-35 from Oklahoma.

Overall, more than two dozen U.S. atomic reactors lack direct rail access.

In a 2014 report, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality said transportation of the large number of spent nuclear fuel

casks would be a “complex logistical project that will require time and money.”

At the time, the agency noted that transporting all the country’s waste to a single site, an estimated 2,000 metric tons per year, had been previously estimated to take about 24 years, with one or two trains arriving weekly.

It would take up to a decade to determine the routes and establish safety and security procedures, TCEQ wrote in its assessment of the state’s options for high-level radioactive waste storage. That includes developing emergency response plans along expected transport routes and training first responders.

Spent fuel is also more vulnerable to sabotage or accidents during transportation, compared with storage, the TCEQ said.

Still, the likelihood of an accident happening during transport is minimal: one in 24 years if transport is done mostly by rail and one in 53 if shipments are predominantly by truck, the Energy Department concluded when analyzing transport of the waste to Yucca Mountain.

“The industry has been remarkably safe in being able to move fresh nuclear fuel,” Krishnamoorti said.

“That said,” he added, “all it takes is one accident, one miss or one near miss, that will essentially change our perspective in how we transport these materials.”

No guarantee

The issue of permanent storage will continue to be a tough conversation to have, Krishnamoorti said, in part because there can be no 100 percent guarantee that nothing will happen.

“That’s really the issue,” he said. “Do you want this in your neighborhood? There’s an accident that contaminates an area for the next 300 to 500 years, then what happens?”

The least risky path is leaving it close to where it is until a permanent repository is available, said Karen Hadden, executive director of the Texas-based Sustainable Energy and Economic Development Coalition.

The group is among several that oppose the interim storage proposal, citing lack of remediation plans if something were to happen, a vulnerability to terrorist attacks and concern that the canisters would not hold for hundreds of years in the terrain and climate of West Texas or during transport.

“It makes no sense to ship it to consolidated interim storage sites. Why transport for this purpose alone and then transport again to a permanent repository? There is also the risk of creating a dangerous de facto permanent site that should never happen because it could lead to disaster.”