Hudspeth County Herald and Dell Valley Review (Dell City, Tex.), Vol. 35, No. 4, Ed. 1 Friday, September 20, 1991 Page: 2 of 11
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Aesoclated Press
STRETCHING THE LIMIrS OF THE LL.RW SYSTEM
progressive approach in hand-
southeast of downtown El Paso,
(More Page 3, COMMENTS)
Hudspeth Koun’Eevald
‘2
, Texas 79837
(ATOMS & WASTE SEPTEMBER 16, 1991)
A
S. 1220 attempts to singlehandedly revive the nuclear power industry, through increased taxpayer suosimies
and "one-step" reactor licensing that effectively removes the public, and their state and local elected officials,
from meaningful participation in the reactor licensing process. Indeed, Bush, Sununu and Johnston admit
that their goal is to build 200-300 new reactors over the next 40 years! Sen. Johnston also would encourage
the construction of "temporary" Monitored Retrievable Storage facilities for high-level nuclear waste, and
would strip Nevada--and every other staic-of the ability to challenge the siting of high-level radioactive
waste dumps. If this scheme works, removing state authority over "low-level" waste dumps isn’t far behind.
Serving Dell City and Hudspeth County
290Trail West Park, P. O. Box 659, Dell City, Texas 79837
with an on-site, above-ground
facilities," she said.
constituents, which would classify all spent fuel as Mixed
Waste. Decommissioning MW in particular will bring
very strong pressures to deregulate either the radiological
or the chemical component of low-level MW in order to
get it out of one of the two waste categories.
PAGE 2, HUDSPETH COUNTY HERALD-Dell Valley Review, SEPT. 20, 1991
Town opposed to
nuclear dump plan
Hudspeth County becoming wase graveyard
A TRILLION-DOLLAR PROBLEM;
MIXED WASTE
Meeting at a conference on Mixed Waste in Baltimore at
the end of August, various speakers raised the dollar
estimates, for handling wastes that are hazardous both
chemically and radiologically, to astronomic levels. Jill
Lytle of DOE's Waste Operations office said all of her
agency's HLW is Mixed Waste, most of the transuranic
waste is Mixed, "and much of the LLRW is Mixed." This
year the Department is spending $350 million on MW
characterization, said Clyde Frank of the Technology
Development office. He added that DOE is getting
unbelievably high bids for MW lab work, and that the
public cost for the federal cleanup could reach a trillion
dollars. Texas, Illinois, and Nebraska continue to stand
out as states designated to receive commercial Mixed
LLRW, but Lytle and oilier speakers offered hints dial
spent fuel also contains possible RCRA-labeled
CHEM-NUCLEAR BARNWELL
CURIE SURCHARGES FOR SI fiELDED SHIPMENT
Editor Publisher
Assistant
CrowFlat Editor
.Sierra Blanca Editor
Ft. Hancock Editor
Courthouse News
Linda Lynch
Dell City resident
general manager, said he hopes
the drilling and probing of the
pressures coming from either generators or nuclear
opponents.
Medical and institutional generators in particular are
complaining bitterly about the typical $500 price for
shipping a drum of short-lived wastes, but institutional
administrators, as important decisionmakers in the
radwaste market, have very little knowledge about why the
prices they're paying are so extreme. Evironmental
advocates have been very convenient scapegoats for the
generators' associations like MICHRAD, CalRad Forum,
or NELRAD in New England, and tragically, it is the
institutional generators who should be restraining Chcm-
Nuclear’s stranglehold on die market by storing onsite for
decay. Ilie point for radwaste opponents is clear: we need
a serious dialogue with hospital administrators about why
they're paying cutthroat prices (DWUS-DC will be happy
to supply summaries of die NUREG and US Ecology and
Chem-Nuclear’s 1991 price schedules; please enclose $3
for copying and postage.)
2. Center Court: the Midwest
Chem-Nuclear would no doubt defend its price
schedules on grounds of having to operate in a relatively
rain-drenched environment at Barnwell. But the vast
expanse of bare-earth trenches at Barnwell shows at best a
bit of plastic sheeting to distinguish it from Beatty and
Hanford in the West. And Chem-Nuclear’s location in the
midst of the nation's heaviest concentration of reactors
gives it an unbeatable market edge against hs only
competitor (only ten of the nation's 112 operating reactors
are to be found west of the Rockies where USE operates).
Further, Chem-Nuclear, backed by the corporate might of
Waste Management Inc., is the unchallenged industry
leader in at-reactor radwaste treatment services, and its
Defense Waste Consolidation Facility, abutting directly
onto the Savannah River Site, makes the Pentagon
another captive customer.
Against this background, the licensing prospect in
Nebraska and Illinois is taking on the regional drama of a
center-court faceoff between the only two players in the
LLRW arena. Can Chem-Nuclear succeed in adding to its
exclusive customer list Chicago's Commonwealth Edison,
the nation's largest nuclear utility, while already serving
Duke Power, the nation's, second largest? Can US Ecology
survive demand for close scrutiny of its books by both
Gov. Nelson in Nebraska and Rep. George Miller (D-CA)
in the House Interior Committee? Many such questions
may be answered not in the light of public policy but in
the bare-knuckled competition brewing in the West.
Second class postage paid in Dell City,
Subsidiary MARY-MARY, INC.
Mary’Louise Lynch............................
Mary Gentry......................................
C Warren....-;....................................
Bernice M. Elder................................
Linda Polk.........................................
Sally Brown..............•.......................
•TEXAS: T he TexCor company is nearing
completion of the nation's second large NORM dump for
uranium wastes after Envirocare in Utah. Jeff Sibley of
Texas Energy Alliance feels that the uranium lobby had a
legislative field day in Austin this year. The state owns
an expanse of 250 milllion acres out west, and it could
follow Utah’s example in creating a renegade state-licensed
no-man's-land that could eventually be federalized. As for
the Faskin Ranch at Sierra Blanca, which is the substitute
LLRW site chosen east of El Paso, it is part of a huge
private land-holding owned by Statewide Capital of
Houston.
dumping ound fN equipment
Plant when it is decommis-
sioned.
Curie Content per Shipment
0-5
5 - 15
15 - 25
25 - 50
50 - 75
75 - 100
100 - 150
150 - 250
250 - 500
500 - 1000
>1000
1. Chem-Nuclear’s Money Machine
What are US Ecology and Chem-Nuclear charging to
bury a cubic foot of "low"-lcvel waste these days?
Standard sources refer to a $40-per-cubic-foot price, and
that's about what both companies charge in the case of
ordinary drums of Class A "low"-level waste. (As provided
for in the 1985 Act, increasingly stiff Compact surcharges
will also be added at the gate for unsited states through
1996, and these fees will go to finance new sites.)
Die real money, however, is in the dump operator's
own surcharge prices that apply once a truck is in the
gate, and a 1991 update on these fees is now available in
an NRC draft revision of its Report on Waste Burial
Charges (NUREG-1307, Rev. 2). In the West, US
Ecology's Radiation Surcharge schedule, which applies to
all containers shipped under shielding, is based on rads per
hour of external radioactivity. These rates begin at $210
for a container yielding one R/lir and go up to $1,943 for
containers in the 20-40 R/lir range. Prices like these no
doubt encourage careful packaging-and no doubt dilution
of contents.
Chem-Nuclear’s Barnwell SC facility, on the oilier
hand, bases its surcharges on curie content rather than
external activity, and as its price schedule shows, the
prices are indeed exorbitant. In addition, Chem-Nuclear
imposes a 2.4 percent business tax on all shipments on
behalf of Barnwell County, a cask-handling surcharge of
$1,560 and up per cask, and a crane surcharge for heavier
shipments that can run into six figures.
Pricing mechanisms of this kind, tabulated in about
20 pages of spreadsheet data appended to the NRC report,
add up to a whopping 250 percent annual escalation. in
revenues at Barnwell over the past five years, as compared
with a 120 percent annual increase at US Ecology's Beatty
NV and Richland WA sites. Chem-Nuclear, to put it
mildly, is operating a runaway money machine essentially
without competition, price regulation, or any disincentive
became the latest dump site by
default. Originally the state
planned to build a site in south ule urswiy avu ,_______---
Texas, but through some politi- site will be completed this year.
area, on the Faskin Ranch
owned by Statewide Capital, a
Houston-based land manage-
Surcharge
$3,615
$4,095
$5,420
$8,180
$9,965
$ 13,500
$16,200
$21,700
$27,200
$32,500
By Request
ment company. .
“When they gave up on Fort
Hancock it was called a great
victory," said Linda Lynch, who
was active in the Dell City
. , , . „ The authority is studying a
on what can be done about it, section located in the mandated
Bill Addington, opposition orga- — . . —
easily pick up and move."
EIla ab rmPa-wholivrsson of - ppposition. "But the victory was
the proposed site. ‘said. "No fane,
matter how new the technology
is that is going to be used in the
dump, I think if there were any
kind of guarantee ... they
wouldn’t be putting it out here.
They would put it in the middle
of Houston. They could put it in
Ann Richards'- backyard."
Addington is getting help
from dump opponents who
chased it out of Dell City, which
the state had picked as a prime
site in the early 1980s.
Sierra Blanca, about 90 miles
"In the process of resisting
this whole project, we also are
interested in develoning «
nizer, said at the meeting.
'farmers and ranchers feel
strongly opposed to this dump
qb Ihey are very close to the
land. They derive their liveli-
hbod from the land and cannot
Lynch is particularly con-
cerned about the state’s thought
of accepting out-of-state waste.
If waste is accepted from Maine,
Sierra Blanca would become the
The U.S. Senate may soon begin considering S. 1220, the National Energy Strategy bill. Developed by
President Bush and John Sununu, and sponsored by Sens. Bennet Johnston (D-La.) and Malcolm Wallop
(R-Wyo.), S. 1220 is a comprehensive energy policy bill that would move our nation in precisely the wrong
direction. It is a strategy that emphasizes production over energy efficiency, and turns over more of our
money--and our democratic rights-to the nuclear, coal and oil industries at the expense of the real energy
sources of the future: solar, wind, and other forms of renewable energy. S. 1220 represents an energy strategy
that Sen. AJ Gore (D-Tenn.) called "breathtakingly dumb," and that would be an environmental nightmare
for every American community.
3. West of the Rockies: the Standards
Unravel
No doubt, in the mind of the industry, US Ecology is
performing an indispensible service in holding down
standards to a shallow-trench minimum in the Ward
Valley ('A licensing. But that’s not how USE sees it.
Since Match and most intensively in July of this year, the
company’., attorneys have been arguing vociferously in
“When they gave up
on Fort Hancock it was
called a great victory.
But the victory was
false.”
ling of radioactive materials
cal maneuvering, state law was
changed to require that the
dump be located on state-owned
land.
The search moved to West
Texas and the choice was nar-
rowed to Dell City, about 75
miles northeast of downtown El
Paso, and Fort Hancock. Oppo-
sition in Dell City prompted the
authority to pick the Fort
Hancock site.
But El Paso and Hudspeth
counties sued to block the dump
and won. The state appealed the
ruling, but during this year’s
regular session, the Legislature
ordered the authority out of
Fort Hancock and told it to find
a site in a 400-square-mile area
near Sierra Blanca.
here, but many feel powerless
Rick Jacobi, the authority’s
SIERRA BLANCA, Texas -
Once again, state engineers are
probing the Texas earth and
drilling beneath it to find a
place to store radioactive
waste.
This ime, the search is
concentrated at a 16,000-acre
ranch near Sierra Blanca, the
third Hudspeth County commu-
nity that may become a neigh-
bor to the waste dump man- •
dated by the federal
government.
OpDosition has begun to stir
among some citizens who real-
ized that in addition to the state’s
radioactive waste, the dump
may house waste from Maine or
0 some other East Coast state,
at
T About 40 citizens attended
- Monday night’s meeting orga-
e nized by a group called Alert
3 Citizens for Environmental
c 5 Safety. Member of the group
23 explained their opposition to
2 dump and later answered
* questions from the public.
* “We believe the majority of
people in Hudspeth County are
against the siting of this dump
— Nuclear Action and Information Lobby 1424 16th Street. MN Suite 60 1 Washinaton.DC. 20036 (202)328-0002
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PUBLISHED ON FRIDAY OF EACH WEEK for Hudspeth County,
Texas, third largest county. Notices of church, entertainments where
a charge of admission is made, card of thanks, resolutions of respect,
and all matter not news, will be charged at the regular rates.
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For Hudspeth County, Texas
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Lynch, Mary Louise. Hudspeth County Herald and Dell Valley Review (Dell City, Tex.), Vol. 35, No. 4, Ed. 1 Friday, September 20, 1991, newspaper, September 20, 1991; Dell City, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1536035/m1/2/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; .