Sierra Blanca and Democracy by SHINYGOODGUY

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Sierra Blanca and Democracy

POSTED BY: SHINYGOODGUY
UPDATED: Thursday, July 14, 2016 04:57
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Thursday, July 14, 2016 4:57 AM

I was alerted to this by a friend on another social media site. She feels strongly
about it because she's Hispanic. Plus she's a die-hard Democrat, boy would I love to introduce her to this site, she would definitely raise some eyebrows.

Anywho. I thought that maybe she was a bit too fanatical about this topic and kind
of dismissed it as so much rhetoric and political fallout due to the nasty nature
of the Democratic primary. Then I decided to look into it.

Here's what I found. Now, mind you, this was the best and most complete article I came across regarding this matter:

http://bluenationreview.com/sanders-helped-do-bushs-dirty-work/

By Ben Armbruster
February 24, 2016

In September of 1995, the U.S. House of Representatives soundly defeated H.R. 558, the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Consent Act, which would have created a compact between Vermont, Maine, and Texas, whereby the former two states would ship their nuclear waste to a soon-to-be established site in Texas. The bill’s defeat represented a major victory for environmentalists, who fought hard against opening up Texas as one of the nation’s next nuclear waste repositories.

Yet just two short years later, with strong support from then-Vermont Rep. Bernie Sanders and others, Congress passed an identical bill establishing the compact and an agreement to send “low-level” radioactive waste from Vermont (Maine later opted out of the program) to a low-income Hispanic county in West Texas called Sierra Blanca, a community that many — including the late progressive champion Sen. Paul Wellstone — argued lacked resources and clout to put up much of a fight.

But how did an issue with such serious environmental, economic, and social justice consequences go from essentially a non-starter to nearly full Congressional support in just 24 months?

The answer, in large part, is George W. Bush.

Bush — who had close ties with the nuclear industry in Texas — assumed office as the Lone Star state’s governor in January 1995, and soon after H.R. 558 was defeated, his staff got to work lobbying the Texas Congressional delegation to reintroduce it.

Indeed, Texas utility and nuclear industry tycoons donated heavily to Bush and his allies. Namely, billionaire Harold Simmons, whose company was just starting to get into the radioactive waste business (Simmons poured millions into the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smear campaign against John Kerry in 2004) — gave generously to Bush.

“[S]ince 1995 perhaps no single entity among the many interested parties has lobbied as hard as the office of George W. Bush to get the Texas-Maine-Vermont compact bill,” local reporter Nate Blakesee wrote in the Austin Chronicle in 1998 (Blakesee is now with the Texas Monthly). “ringing the Texas dump on-line would be a major coup for the nuclear industry – and they’d have Bush to thank.”

The coup would be financial. According to the terms of the compact law, Maine and Vermont agreed to pay $25 million each to create the new nuclear waste dump in Texas and $5 million to Sierra Blanca, not to mention the hundreds of millions of dollars in disposal fees in the years to come.

“That is true that Bush wanted to make this be what the industry wanted,” Diane D’Arrigo of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service told BNR. “The nuclear industry makes a lot of waste … [and] Vermont and Maine were going to pay to build [the dump].

So the law not only authorized a new waste dump site for Texas nuclear utilities (there are four nuclear reactors in the state) where there wasn’t one before, at no cost to Texas business, but it also would essentially drive down disposal prices given the new space created for the waste.

“The reason why Texas wanted it so bad, it’s like corporate welfare for the nuclear generators, the big electric utilities,” local activist Bill Addington told BNR. Addington led a legal defense fund that fought against bringing the waste site to Sierra Blanca. “The more volume you get, the cheaper it is for disposal and that saves utilities money.”

By late 1997, with the compact officially established and Bush’s friends in the Texas nuclear industry set to reap the financial rewards, the Texas governor had another problem on his hands. With his eyes on the White House, Bush had to prove that he could appeal to Latinos. So just weeks before his reelection bid in 1998, the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission — the members of which Bush himself appointed — voted 3-0 to deny a permit to build the nuclear waste dump in Sierra Blanca.

“We know,” Addington said, “we can’t prove it of course, but we know that he ordered them to deny the license application.”

With Sierra Blanca out of the picture, Simmons, the billionaire Bush-backer who by then owned a large stake in a company called Waste Control Specialists (WCS), began a push to direct the radioactive waste to his site just to the north in Andrews County (Simmons passed away in 2013).

However, the problem for Simmons was that according to state law, only a state-owned facility could operate a radioactive waste dump.

“I basically told George that I was involved in the company as a major investor,” Simmons told the Dallas Morning News in 1998. “And wanted him to be aware of it in case the issue ever came up.”

Sure enough, Simmons greased enough hands in the Texas state legislature, and, according to Mother Jones, after six years of lobbying, “WCS convinced it to pass a law authorizing private companies to be licensed to handle radioactive waste.”

Today, the WCS site in Andrews County not only brings in nuclear waste from Vermont, but also from all over the country. But just like in Sierra Blanca, environmentalists and regulators are concerned that the dump will contaminate the local community’s air and water. According to local reporter Forrest Wilder, “Several state geologists and engineers quit the [Texas Commission on Environmental Quality] a few years ago when their warnings that the dump would likely leak radioactive waste into the groundwater went unheeded.”

Regardless, WCS wants to actually expand its dump and now “is seeking federal approval to temporarily store highly radioactive waste at its complex in Andrews County,” perhaps further increasing the environmental ramifications should the site begin to leak its toxins, which many argue is only a matter of time.

Meanwhile, the Texas Low Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission set up by Congress in 1997 still governs what kind of waste comes in and out of Texas, and it just so happens that Bernie Sanders’s wife Jane is an alternate commissioner.

Ben Armbruster is a senior content strategist for True Blue Media. He previously held senior editorial positions at Media Matters and ThinkProgress. He most recently was a Managing Director at ReThink Media.

SGG

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