Energy Department Ready To Approve Nuclear Waste Dumping
Texas Facility Is Operated by a Major Donor to Sec. Rick Perry’s Political Campaigns
Energy Secretary Rick Perry could ship treated nuclear waste from our nation’s most polluted nuclear weapons production site to a Texas nuclear dump opened by one of his largest campaign contributors, a dump near an aquifer that supplies water from northern Texas to South Dakota.
The Texas Compact Waste Facility (CWF) is operated by Waste Control Specialists. It’s near the town of Andrews on the New Mexico border.
The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, signed by former President Ronald Reagan, was written to prevent potential disasters such as this and mandates that the Department of Energy must send high-level waste to a network of underground tunnels and rooms where it can safely decay over millions of years.
Republicans and Trump’s new assistant secretary for environmental management, Anne Marie White, who did consulting work for the company that operates the dump, want to rewrite federal regulations to say that some high-level nuclear waste isn’t really high-level nuclear waste so it can be stored elsewhere.
“It certainly raises questions about potential conflicts of interest,” said Tom Carpenter, the executive director of Hanford Challenge, a Seattle watchdog group.
https://www.dcreport.org/2018/10/18/energy-department-ready-to-approve-nuclear-waste-dumping/
