May 21, 2008
LUBBOCK, Texas — State environmental regulators on Wednesday gave approval for a Dallas-based company to dispose of Cold War-era radioactive waste at a site in West Texas where it is now being stored.
Waste Control Specialists worked for four years to secure the license, which was approved by a 2-1 vote of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality in Austin.(...)
"As it stands right now the public may never know why former members of the TCEQ science team looking at the application considered it one of the worst in the agency's history and if the geology is as they believe, residents of Eunice, N.M., will face the consequences."
In April 2005, Waste Control won a $7.5 million contract from Fluor Fernald, the U.S. Department of Energy contractor cleaning up the site of a shuttered weapons plant in Ohio, to store the waste.
Two months earlier, state officials granted the company a license amendment that expanded the Andrews County site's storage capacity to 1.5 million cubic feet — nearly five times its current size. That expansion made the site eligible to accept the Ohio waste, which totals 750,000 cubic feet.
Waste Control has an application pending with the commission for a low-level radioactive disposal license.
Read the complete article here: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/5794756.html
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