Harold Simmons’ Texas-Sized Plan for Nuclear Waste

The late billionaire “King of Superfund Sites” wanted to open a giant radioactive dump in West Texas…what could go wrong?

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27450922@N07/4515541717/">CHUCKage</a>/Flickr

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Update: Harold Simmons is dead at 82. Read the New York Times obituary for more details.

The nuclear crisis in Japan has provided a vivid reminder that one of the biggest conundrums of atomic power is what do do with all of the resulting radioactive waste. Harold Simmons believes he’s found an answer. The Texas billionaire and corporate raider is opening a nuclear waste dump in West Texas, despite objections from environmentalists and the state’s own experts. One of the Lone Star State’s largest donors to Republican causes, Simmons expects his that privately-owned site will become the nation’s most sought after radioactive waste repository.

The reclusive, litigious 79-year-old made his personal fortune from garbage collection, drug stores, metals, and chemicals. His net worth is valued at $5.7 billion, making him the 55th richest American, according to Forbes. He’s shared his money—more than $10 million of it—with conservative politicians and causes, bankrolling attack ads against John Kerry and Barack Obama and giving Republican Texas Governor Rick Perry at least $1.2 million. He has been fined for violating campaign donation limits and outed by one of his daughters for paying her to let him make political contributions in her name. He’s been called the “King of Superfund Sites” for his work disposing of hazardous waste. Last year, D Magazine named him “Dallas’ most evil genius.”

Much of Simmons’ genius resides in how he’s leveraged his political investments. In 1995, he bought a hazardous waste disposal company, Waste Control Specialists, and set about converting an isolated spot in Andrews County into a nuclear waste dump. After six years of lobbying the state legislature, WCS convinced it to pass a law authorizing private companies to be licensed to handle radioactive waste. 

Two licenses sought by WCS would allow it to accept a total of 60 million cubic feet of low-level radioactive waste from federal and state sources, including nuclear reactors, weapons programs, and hospitals. (That’s roughly enough waste to fill half of Cowboys Stadium.) The licenses didn’t need detailed approval from federal nuclear regulators because the dump wouldn’t handle the highest grades of radioactive waste; unlike the proposed Yucca Mountain dump in Nevada, for example, the 1,338-acre WCS dump can’t accept spent nuclear fuel rods.

Concerned that radioactive material from the dump could contaminate groundwater, three staffers at the state environmental commission quit rather than approve its license.

State engineers and geologists strongly objected to licensing the the dump. Concerned that radioactive material could contaminate groundwater, three staffers at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality resigned rather than sign off on the licenses. In a 2007 memo, four TCEQ engineers and geologists concluded that the site’s proximity to the water table “makes groundwater intrusion into the disposal units highly likely” and suggested that it not be approved. One of the resigned staffers, an engineer named Encarnacion Serna, told the Texas Observer‘s Forrest Wilder that the site’s geology made it unfit for storing nuclear waste. Nevertheless, he explained, “I started getting the idea that these people are going to license this thing no matter what. I felt that in clear conscience I couldn’t grant a license with what was being proposed.” 

In 2008, TCEQ executive director Glenn Shankle quit the agency only to become a $150,000-a-year lobbyist for WCS. The company’s licenses to store radioactive waste were approved in May 2008 and September 2009. “Even the mafia was more circumspect than this,” Glenn Lewis, one of the TCEQ whistleblowers, told the Observer at the time. “It just shows that…big money and a lot of political power won once again.”

WCS has defended the science behind its plan. “The site is the ideal location for disposing of low-level radioactive waste—its arid climate and unique geologic formation make it perfectly qualified,” CEO William Lindquist wrote early last year in response to an investigative piece in D Magazine. Linidquist stated that the site is separated from the nearest aquifer by 400 feet of nearly impermeable clay. “Put simply, no contamination of this aquifer from the WCS site is possible.” (WCS did not return a call from Mother Jones.)

With his license to operate in hand, Simmons began an audacious campaign to expand the dump site from a mostly local operation into one that could eventually become the largest of its kind in the country. A huge market for radioactive waste disposal was just waiting to be tapped: 36 states lack a permanent place to store their radioactive cast-offs. This has long been an obstacle for building new nuclear power plants; some have had their permits held up over the issue. Only Vermont had a deal to dispose of its nuclear waste in Texas, so Simmons began lobbying to amend the nearly 20-year-old compact with the Green Mountain State to allow other states to also send their radioactive waste to the WCS site. 

The decision to alter the compact rested with the seven members of the obscure Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission, six of whom had been appointed by Gov. Perry, one of the largest recipients of Simmons’ campaign cash. A peculiar legal loophole in the Texas-Vermont compact allows the commission, by a majority vote, to allow radioactive waste imports from other states. Despite opposition to that idea from everyone from Bass Unlimited to the NAACP, in January the commission approved a process for accepting the out-of-state nuclear material. Any state can now petition the commission to have its radioactive waste buried in Texas.

There’s another big reason why this was a huge win for Simmons: The compact allows him to get paid for burying other states’ nuclear trash while outsourcing much of the risk to Texas taxpayers. Though the state will receive a cut of disposal fees and $36 million to cover “corrective action” and “post-closure” expenses, it will have to bear any other cleanup costs on its own. According to a report by the Texas Sunset Advisory Commission: “Potential future contamination [from the waste] could not only have a severe impact to the environment and human health, but to the State, which bears the ultimate financial responsibility for compact waste disposal facility site.”

The Sierra Club and other environmental groups have sued to overturn WCS’s nuclear disposal licenses. But the controversy that surrounds the deal hasn’t stopped the nuclear power industry from getting behind it. “This is a major milestone,” Ralph Andersen, the Nuclear Energy Institute’s senior director of radiation, safety, and environmental protection, told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s going to provide much needed space.”

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate