Andrews residents hold meeting to discuss possibility of high-level nuclear waste coming into county

ANDREWS, Texas (KOSA) - Andrews County Commissioners discuss the possibility of moving high-level nuclear waste into the county with residents in a special meeting on Tuesday.

Dozens of people attended the meeting in person and even more took part through Zoom.

While some attendees just joined to listen, several people shared comments to the Commissioners Court about the idea of high-level nuclear waste coming to Andrews County.

Waste Control Specialists operates a nuclear waste facility in the county that currently stores low-level waste, including hospital gowns and rubber gloves.

Earlier this year, State Representative Brooks Landgraf said that WCS had proposed a plan to bring in high-level waste.

Members of the community voiced their concerns over the safety of storage and transportation of the waste to both residents and the environment.

“This is a bad idea. It’s not about money. It should be about the community. It should be about the kids, not the money. If it’s about the money, we’re doing the wrong thing.”

A representative from WCS also spoke at the meeting.

“Before we proceeded we held a public meeting in Andrews. We ran full-page ads in the paper, multiple. We sent out mailers to every community member in Andrews saying please come to this meeting. That is what the ads said, “please come to this meeting.” We had a very large raffle trying to incentivize people to come to this meeting. Had a BBQ. People said to have food and we will come so that’s what we did. The former president of the company, Rod Baltzer, said, ‘Yes, we have said we’re not going to do high-level. However, this is the situation that we’re in now. The state needs a solution. The U.S. needs a solution. But we’re not going to proceed if you guys tell us not to proceed’. Overwhelmingly there was support and there were quite a few in attendance at that meeting. Aside from going door to door and pulling people out of their houses, I don’t know what else we could do. So yes, was there a statement in the Andrews news saying there was not going to be any low-level or high-level? I wasn’t around for that at that time. But I do know I was around whenever we said “we understand that we have said there was not going to be high-level but we need a solution but we will not proceed without your support.” So we proceeded because we didn’t have anybody saying absolutely don’t do this.”

The majority of people who spoke at the meeting said they were opposed to the notion of high-level nuclear waste in Andrews.