Yankee gets site for waste disposal
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By Susan Smallheer STAFF WRITER - Published: September 22, 2009
MONTPELIER – It's been 18 years in the making and planning, but it finally appears the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant will have a state-sanctioned facility for low-level radioactive waste.
Vermont and Texas signed a compact back in the early 1990s, but the first site selected in Sierra Blanca, a small town in west Texas that had a large minority population, was abandoned for political and environmental reasons.
The second site, owned by Waste Control Specialists LLC in Andrews County, in the southern edge of the Texas panhandle, right next to the New Mexico border, received its final Texas regulatory approval on Sept. 10.
"We are looking forward to the Texas facility being built and opening," said Robert Williams, spokesman for Entergy Nuclear, owner of Vermont Yankee. Williams said Entergy expected that disposal costs would decrease with the Texas facility.
Uldis Vanags, the state's nuclear engineer and a commissioner on the Texas-Vermont compact, said that Waste Control Specialists still have to submit final construction documents to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
"Once construction is approved, additional conditions must be met prior to commencement of disposal," he said. But the signed license, issued on Sept. 10, he said, was a "major accomplishment."
While dangerous, low-level radioactive waste is not to be confused with high-level radioactive waste, which is primarily the spent nuclear fuel from the reactor. Yankee's high-level waste is currently stored in both its spent fuel pool and a handful of steel and concrete jumbo canisters outside the plant.
Low-level waste includes everything from tools used in restricted areas of the nuclear plant, to booties and protective suits used by workers. More than 95 percent of Vermont's low-level radioactive waste comes from Vermont Yankee, with the remaining balance coming from hospitals and medical laboratories.
Williams said that over the years the company has gotten a lot better at reducing the amount of low-level radioactive waste it generates, with an emphasis on better planning.
"Right now we have a few tractor-trailer loads that will go to Clive," he said. He said Yankee produced "a few thousand cubic feet" of waste a year.
Vermont Yankee for years had shipped its low-level radioactive waste to Barnwell, S.C., but that facility closed to noncompact states last year. As a result, Yankee stores its waste at the Vernon reactor, and then ships tractor-trailer loads to a facility in Clive, Utah, Williams said.
Chuck McDonald, a spokesman for Waste Control Specialists, said the company already has a low-level storage facility in Andrews County on its 15,000-acre site in the middle of oil and gas country. But the final permit from Texas will allow it to build a disposal site on the same property.
McDonald said that Texas has two nuclear power plants, and that five new reactors are under consideration in Texas. While medical facilities and labs also produce low-level waste, more than 90 percent of the low-level waste comes from the nuclear plants.
McDonald said the city of Andrews, population of about 10,000, welcomed the new facility, unlike the Sierra Blanca site. The company already has multiple licenses to handle a variety of wastes, including storage of low-level radioactive waste.
Under an agreement with Texas, Vermont will pay $25 million to that state, and an additional $3 million to the host community. According to Larry Becker, the state geologist for the Agency of Natural Resources, the state has paid half of the negotiated payments.
The Texas-Vermont Low Level Waste Disposal Compact was approved by U.S. Congress in 1998. Earlier, Vermont had studied building its own facility in Vermont, next to Vermont Yankee, but abandoned that plan after studies.
McDonald said that the Texas facility, a 100-foot deep pit dug in the ground and lined with concrete and plastic, would take more than a year to construct.
He said the Andrews County location was perfect for waste disposal because the area has "no groundwater" and hardly any rainfall. "This is an arid part of the state," he said
Vanags said that Waste Control, while it did receive final approval on Sept. 10, after it acquired mineral rights acquisition on surrounding properties, still has to get approval for the final drawings for the disposal site.
"All indications are that WCS will be able to meet these last preconstruction and preoperational license requirements," said Vanags in an e-mail.
susan.smallheer@rutlandherald.com
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