Waste Control Specialists LLC (WCS) is a treatment, storage, & disposal company dealing in radioactive, hazardous, and mixed wastes. Developed and controlled by Texas billionaire investor

Harold Simmons Harold Clark Simmons (May 13, 1931 – December 29, 2013) was an American businessman, investor, and philanthropist whose banking expertise helped him develop the acquisition concept known as the leveraged buyout (LBO) to acquire various corpora ...

until his death at the end of 2013, the company was founded in

Dallas, Texas Dallas () is the third largest city in Texas and the largest city in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, the fourth-largest metropolitan area in the United States at 7.5 million people. It is the largest city in and seat of Dallas County wi ...

in 1989 as a landfill operator, and awarded a unique license for disposal of low level radioactive waste in 2009. Its main operations are in Andrews County, Texas. J.F. Lehman & Company (JFLCO) acquired Waste Control Specialists LLC from Valhi, Inc. in January 2018. The acquisition represents JFLCO's fourth platform investment in the environmental and technical services sector. WCS also has a strategic partnership with J.F Lehman & Company portfolio company NorthStar Group Holdings, Inc., a leading provider of specialized environmental and technical services for commercial and government end markets, to support domestic electric utilities in safely decommissioning nuclear power generation sites. In partnership with

Orano Orano SA is a multinational nuclear fuel cycle company headquartered in Châtillon, Hauts-de-Seine, France. The company is engaged in uranium mining, conversion-enrichment, spent fuel recycling, nuclear logistics, dismantling, and nuclear cyc ...

the company pursued a license for a consolidated interim storage facility (CISF). The license was issued in September of 2021. The license was challenged in court by the State of Texas which contends the license is not legal and seeks to invalidate the licensing decision.

Overview

WCS is the only privately owned and operated facility in the United States that has been licensed to treat, store and dispose of Class A, B, C low level radioactive waste (LLRW), and to store Greater than Class C LLRW. WCS’ facility in western Andrews County is the only commercial facility in the United States licensed in more than 30 years to dispose of Class A, B and C low-level radioactive waste. It is also licensed for the treatment and storage of low-level radioactive waste, and has served as a temporary storage facility for U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) projects. The WCS facility also is the site of the disposal facility for the Texas Low Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact, and was the site of the storage and disposal of byproduct material from the DOE Fernald, Ohio cleanup site in 2009. In 2011 a vote was held by the Texas Low Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission that will allow WCS to import waste from 36 other states across the US. Disposal of low-level radioactive waste is in concrete containers buried 45 to 100 feet below the surface in concrete-lined cells in the red bed clay formations. Space between the containers is filled to help prevent shifting. As the cells are filled, they will be covered by more than 300 feet of liner material and red bed clay and the surface will be restored to its natural state. The plant is located 5 miles east of Eunice, New Mexico, and 35 miles west of Andrews. The surrounding area on both sides of the state border, "nuclear alley", also includes: * the National Enrichment Facility (owned and operated by the

Urenco Group The Urenco Group is a British-German-Dutch nuclear fuel consortium operating several uranium enrichment plants in Germany, the Netherlands, United States, and United Kingdom. It supplies nuclear power stations in about 15 countries, and stat ...

) in Eunice * the

deep geological repository A deep geological repository is a way of storing hazardous or radioactive waste within a stable geologic environment (typically 200–1000 m deep). It entails a combination of waste form, waste package, engineered seals and geology that is suite ...

Waste Isolation Pilot Plant The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, is the world's third deep geological repository (after Germany's Repository for radioactive waste Morsleben and the Schacht Asse II salt mine) licensed to store transuranic radioactive waste for 10,00 ...

(WIPP; managed by the

United States Department of Energy The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government that oversees U.S. national energy policy and manages the research and development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons in the United Stat ...

), and * the proposed first commercial uranium de-conversion facility in the United States, a project of International Isotopes, Inc.

References

{{coord, 32.44287, -103.05174, format=dms, display=title, type:landmark Companies based in Dallas Waste management companies of the United States