Nuclear Waste Threatens Nation's Largest Freshwater Aquifer

Just when you thought the disaster in Japan might help put the breaks on dangerous nuclear projects in the States, it turns out a little-known oversight panel has approved what one spokesperson has called “a major milestone” for the U.S. nuclear industry.

If a decision rendered in January by the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission is allowed to stand, 36 states could soon start transporting nuclear waste across the country to a permanent storage site in Andrews County, west Texas. Sources close to the case also report that waste could be shipped to the dump from overseas as well.

Though the site will be used to store only low-level radioactive wastes, groups including the Texas office of Public Citizen and the Sierra Club warn of a serious contamination threat to the Ogallala Aquifer – the largest freshwater aquifer in the country – which lies dangerously close to the site. In the wake of the decision, these community advocacy groups have launched a campaign to challenge the decision via an array of legislative, legal and administrative pathways.

It’s a fight they might never have had to pick were it not for the fact that the site’s owner, Texas billionaire Harold Simmons, has pumped millions in campaign and lobby dollars into the Texas political system. As reported in Mother Jones and the Wall Street Journal recently, Simmons donated $1.2 million to Governor Rick Perry’s election coffers and has spent many years and dollars lobbying the Texas legislature and state agencies to grant his company Waste Control Specialists special licensing rights to handle and store low level radio-active wastes at the Andrews county site.

When the legislature acceded to WCS’s pressure in 2007, several members of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality resigned rather than sign off on the licenses, expressing outrage that their warnings about contamination were going unheeded. Despite their protests the commission approved the licenses by 2009, leaving just one obstacle between Simmons and his nuclear-waste mongering dreams: a decades-old compact that permitted only Vermont to import radioactive waste to Texas.

Simmons wanted that compact changed to allow imports from other states and allow him to corner the national market on low-level nuclear waste disposal. Fortunately for Simmons that goal wasn’t a very difficult sell, considering that the body with authority over that matter – the aforementioned Low Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission – was stacked with the appointees of his multi-million dollar beneficiary Governor Rick Perry.

Thankfully, there are still avenues of appeal that Simmons’ dirty dollars haven’t tainted. This past week, Public Citizen filed a lawsuit alleging “irregularities” with the commission’s decision-making process, including a failure to adequately consider more than 6,000 public comments on the issue. Along with the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, the group has also lobbied the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to use its powers under the Atomic Energy Act to investigate TCEQs actions on the issue and determine whether to revoke its regulatory authority over low-level nuclear waste.

Though the NRC initially declined the request, Texas Public Citizen plans to persist in its campaign for federal intervention by appealing to the U.S. Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee to launch an investigation into the case.

With the issue now in the national spotlight there’s a good chance they could succeed. Please sign and share the petition today urging the federal government to keep nuclear waste out of the Ogallala Aquifer.

Follow Change.org's Environment page on Facebook,  Twitter or RSS. Have a story tip? E-mail us at environmenttips@change.org.

Photo Credit: kalebdf via Flickr