The Tiny Texas Town That Became the Center of America’s Nuclear Waste Problem

Andrews, Texas has a population of about 13,000 people. It sits in the far western corner of the state, roughly 350 miles from Dallas, in the middle of the Permian Basin oil fields. There is not much there. Like…. really. There is an oil industry, some cattle, a lot of flat scrubby land, and a sky that goes on forever.

There is also a nuclear waste site that the New York Times once called “America’s most valuable hole in the ground.” And as of June 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 to clear the way for Andrews County to potentially receive up to 40,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from power plants across the country. To understand how a small oil town in West Texas ended up at the center of one of the most contentious environmental fights in America, you have to understand why the country ran out of better options.

America’s Nuclear Waste Problem Has No Solution

Every nuclear power plant in the United States produces spent fuel rods. These are highly radioactive, remain dangerous for tens of thousands of years, and have nowhere permanent to go.

For decades, the federal government’s plan was Yucca Mountain, a proposed underground repository in the Nevada desert where engineers spent nearly 30 years and over $15 billion developing a facility to store nuclear waste deep in the earth. Nevada fought it ferociously. Politicians from both parties lined up against it. The Obama administration effectively killed the project around 2010, though federal law technically still lists Yucca Mountain as the only legally approved permanent storage site.

So spent fuel sits where it was created. Nuclear power plants across the country store it in pools and concrete casks on their own grounds, waiting for a permanent home that the federal government has consistently failed to provide. As plants retire and close, their waste stays on-site because there is nowhere else for it to go. Right now, roughly 90,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel sit at over 70 sites across 35 states. That number grows every year.

How Andrews Got Into This

A Dallas-based company called Waste Control Specialists, known as WCS, saw an opportunity in a problem nobody else wanted to touch.

The company identified a 14,000-acre property on the Texas-New Mexico border near Andrews as a potential waste storage site. The geology looked favorable: dry, remote, sitting over a layer of red clay that separates the surface from the Ogallala Aquifer below. In 2009, Texas approved WCS to operate a low-level nuclear waste facility there, accepting materials like protective clothing, tools, and medical equipment exposed to radiation.

That vote was not exactly a ringing endorsement. Andrews County residents voted to approve the bond that subsidized construction of the facility by 642 to 639. Three votes. The original 2012 review by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality flagged serious concerns about whether WCS could cover potential liabilities. A later version of that report stripped out most of the criticism.

The facility opened in 2011. By the end of fiscal year 2019, it had paid Andrews County over $13 million in surcharges. The county used the money to build parks, a first responders memorial, baseball fields. In an oil town that already knew what it meant to live alongside industrial risk, the waste site became just another employer in a landscape of them.

The Push for High-Level Waste

WCS partnered with a company called Orano USA to pursue something much bigger: a license to store spent nuclear fuel rods, the high-level stuff, from power plants across the country. They called the joint venture Interim Storage Partners, and in 2016 they filed an application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The NRC approved the license in 2021. If built, the facility would store up to 40,000 metric tons of spent fuel in concrete casks above ground. This is more than exists at any single site in the country right now. But only while the federal government figured out a permanent solution.

The word “temporary” in that sentence is doing enormous work. The license requested 40 years of storage. Critics pointed out that “temporary” had been the official status of spent fuel sitting at closed reactors for decades already. Nobody believed a 40-year interim facility in West Texas would ever stop being used once it started.

Everyone Against It

The opposition to the high-level waste proposal crossed every political line imaginable.

Governor Greg Abbott wrote a letter to President Trump in 2019 opposing the project. The Texas Legislature passed a resolution in 2021 against storing high-level nuclear waste outside of working power plants in the state. Cities including Dallas passed resolutions against transporting high-level nuclear waste through their counties on the way to Andrews. Bexar County commissioners voted unanimously against it. Local oil companies sued the NRC, arguing that concentrating that much radioactive material near the world’s largest producing oilfield created unacceptable risk.

The Sierra Club had fought the original low-level facility over concerns about proximity to groundwater. Environmental groups escalated those concerns significantly when high-level waste entered the conversation. A permanent underground repository requires engineering standards designed to contain material for over 100,000 years. A concrete cask facility above ground in West Texas does not meet that bar.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Texas in 2023, effectively canceling the facility’s license. The NRC appealed to the Supreme Court.

What the Supreme Court Did

In June 2025, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 to reverse the Fifth Circuit decision.

The majority opinion, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, focused on a procedural technicality: because Texas and the oil company plaintiff had not formally participated in the NRC’s licensing process, they lacked legal standing to challenge the license in court. The court did not rule on whether the NRC actually had the authority to issue the license. That question remains open.

The three dissenting justices, Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch, argued the NRC’s decision was unlawful. Gorsuch wrote that federal law only permits storing spent fuel at nuclear reactors or federally owned facilities, not at privately owned off-site storage.

Texas and local officials responded with fury. State Representative Brooks Landgraf called the ruling “incorrect.” Andrews County Judge Sam Jones reaffirmed the county’s opposition. The legal counsel for the Permian Basin Coalition called it “profoundly wrong.”

Interim Storage Partners, the company behind the facility, issued a statement after the ruling saying it would not move forward without the consent of the State of Texas. Governor Abbott’s office stated he would not allow the project to proceed. As of now, no construction has begun.