© 2008 The Associated Press
May 19, 2008
LUBBOCK, Texas — Rose Gardner lives just a few miles from a West Texas site that could soon be a permanent dumping ground for radioactive waste. The prospect worries her.
But, the 50-year-old Eunice, N.M., resident and flower shop owner said, it's not just her future that concerns her.
"If we bury this stuff we're all going to be in trouble," Gardner said Monday, a day before she and others rally in Austin against a license that would allow Dallas-based Waste Control Specialists to dispose of radioactive byproduct wastes. "We could all be victims of this contamination. I think it will happen."
(...)
The site, about 30 miles from the town of Andrews, is not well suited geologically because of a nearby aquifer, she said.
"There is water there in that clay and water is going to move that waste around," Bobeck said. "It's going to cause problems and there's no way around that."
In 1997, the company's radioactive waste treatment and storage plant opened. There is also a hazardous waste landfill on the acreage.
Eunice, N.M., is the closest town to the site and there is a uranium enrichment plant being built nearby.
(...)If commissioners grant Waste Control its license, the company still has about nine months of construction before it can begin burying the Cold War era radioactive material trucked to West Texas from a shuttered weapons processing plant in Ohio a couple of years ago, Andrea Morrow, an agency spokeswoman said.
Commission personnel would monitor the additional construction before the waste could be buried, she said.
Opponents could appeal commissioners' decision to grant the license.
Waste Control also is seeking a disposal license for low-level nuclear waste, which would dwarf the byproduct's radioactivity.
In March, the company agreed to pay the state $151,000 in penalties for self-reported violations in 2005 — for radioactive materials, including Plutonium-239 and Americium-241, that got into an administration and laboratory septic system; and in 2006 — for elevated amounts of metal contamination in the railcar unloading area.
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