Vermont radioactive waste generators on Friday found themselves defending language in the Texas-Vermont Compact’s proposed import rule that reserves 20 percent of Waste Control Specialists’ disposal capacity for their state. The language outlining reserved capacity for Vermont was pivotal in securing the votes of the Vermont representatives of the Compact to pass the import rule more than a year ago. However, at the Texas Compact’s public hearing on their import rule revisions Feb. 24, Richard Adams with Luminant, the owner and operator of Ft. Worth’s Comanche Peak nuclear plant, said he wanted the reservation language deleted from the rule. “Simply stated, we are not aware of any grant of power, express or implied, that authorizes the commission to reserve volumes in the facility for any entity,” Adams said. “The commission’s only authority concerning volumes of waste utilized by non-host party state is to ensure that between 1995 and 2045 shipments of waste from all non-host party states do not exceed the limits established [in the Compact]. We recommend deleting the language that proposes to reserve 20 percent of volume for Vermont in the existing or any later license.”
Derek Seal with Entergy’s Vermont Yankee nuclear plant defended the language reserving capacity for Vermont. “It’s apparent to Vermont Yankee that extended effort was made by those involved in the drafting of the Texas statute to ensure the Texas law provides the allocations that would serve Vermont’s needs, which was the basic deal that Texas and Vermont made when they entered into the compact,” Seal said. Vermont Commissioner Richard Saudek also defended the Compact Commission’s authority to relegate disposal volume. “I’m beginning to wonder what the commission is supposed to do if it doesn’t have legal authority over that sort of manner within the compact and to the extent applicable the Texas law,” Saudek said at the hearing. “The commission does have some authority to see that this volume is properly implemented. To be blunt, if the commission has to defer entirely on matters of rates and costs and specifications of waste and of the size of the shipments and so on it would seem to me the commission is irrelevant to the running of the compact site and to any of these things. I don’t know why the states are participating in the commission if we don’t have at least some authority over the management of the waste and the volumes that go in there.”
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