Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
1/24/2014
Waste Control Specialists received approval from the Texas Commission of Environmental Quality this week to begin offering customers extended bulk disposal services for low-level Class A waste in its RCRA hazardous waste landfill. The new service comes after WCS aligned its license amendment for exempted waste from the TCEQ with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s exempted waste criteria last year, although administrative procedures with TCEQ needed to be worked out before WCS could move forward. “We have begun to notify customers immediately about WCS’s new service,” WCS spokesman Chuck McDonald said yesterday. “I think it’s something that people are going to be interested in for their disposal.”
From TCEQ’s perspective, the bulk disposal would not impact public health and safety. “TCEQ reviewed the request of the licensee, including an assessment of the radiological and non-radiological effects of the license changes on the public health and safety,” TCEQ spokesman Terry Clawson said. “The license changes were determined to be acceptable.”
The new bulk disposal enables WCS to offer less expensive options for disposing of the exempted waste, whereas before it had to be packaged at a higher cost before it was disposed. “This is good news for compact states because it protects our capacity in the low-level compact facility, but it also offers affordable disposal option for the exempt waste from around the country,” McDonald said last year. “If you are doing a big decommissioning project, you are going to have a lot of waste that qualifies as this exempt waste that can go in the RCRA facility.”
